New York (State) -- Adirondack Mountains

In Rochester, New York, T.S.W. Sheridan, a writer, probes the "accidental" death of a woman environmental leader in the Adirondacks. The suspects range from lumber barons to a laid-off miner who threatened her. When the miner is shot with the woman's missing weapon, Sheridan knows he's onto more than an accident.

It is the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a passionate young man from Paterson, New Jersey, leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds, on a cold and lonely night in the Adirondack Mountains, is a vision of life so different from his own that it changes his destiny, leading him from the side of a railroad track to a bizzare, amazing place called Loon Lake.

The story of Tink Puddah, an extraterrestrial orphaned on Earth when his parents die, is mistaken for a runaway slave. The novel deals with the lives he touches and the preacher who tries to save a soul that Tink may or may not possess.

Fourteen-year-old Leo's summer job with an elderly man and his family in the Adirondacks gives him self-confidence and a greater understanding of people.

While Kate pens an evocative historical novel based on family journals, her neighbor, Emily, flees a volatile relationship to an island in the Adirondacks where she, Kate, and Kate's mother, Birdie, face the consequences of their pasts.