A stranger in the creek. A letter hidden in the roots of a tree. A rescuer who vanished into the winter woods.
Seven-year-old Anna Ghere has waited all year for the edge of summer — Aunt Lo’s name for the fleeting weeks when the cicadas sing, and the white mist rises off Prairie Creek at dawn. But August of 1931 finds Jeffries, Indiana, pulled tight by hard times. Since the crash, her father works Saturdays to keep the family’s dairy business afloat, and every household in town is making do with a little less.
Then, from the South Street bridge, Anna looks down into the water and sees a man. He wears a fine brown suit and two-toned saddle shoes, and no one in Jeffries has ever laid eyes on him. The newspaper calls him the Corpse in the Creek. The town whispers murder. The sheriff believes he simply fell.
Anna can’t let it rest. Somewhere, a daughter may be waiting for a father who isn’t coming home. With her sister Gem writing every clue in her diary and Bernard, the Boy with the Bible, at her side, Anna follows Sheriff Boggs from the Blue and White Café to the Interurban line — and finds what the grown-ups missed: an envelope tucked into the roots of a black walnut tree, asking, “Do you still love me?”
Through it all, Anna carries a secret of her own: the stranger who pulled her from the icy creek last winter, called her by name, and disappeared into the trees. She’s certain he was an angel. Her father isn’t so sure.
Where the series begins. Edge of Summer is the first of the Anna Ghere Mysteries, told by Anna herself as she looks back across eight decades — the memories of a seven-year-old now inseparable from those of an old woman who promised to set her stories free before she goes. It opens a series set in a small Indiana railroad town that no longer exists quite the way she knew it: Mother’s garden, pie at the Blue and White Café, the rattle of the Interurban, and a family holding on to each other through hard times.
Reading it with your book club? There’s a free discussion guide — questions grouped by section, themes to explore, and recipes drawn straight from the book. [Get the Book Club Guide →]