The Littlest Shadow

A children's book illustrator and novelist moves into the old fixer farmhouse she and her husband fell in love with just before his death. Maggie, too young to be a widow, hires a local handyman, and he and his family become her first friends in town. For her it's all the usual transitional experience-a little personal inventory, trying to fill in empty spaces, occupying her time with banal tasks. And waiting for the right time to break a long-held secret to her son when he comes home from college. Summer unfolds and a series of unusual events pulls Maggie out of her limbo. She starts to think her friends' foster-daughter's violent origin is a connection, and works to discover whether the child is somehow the culprit, or if she's just as endangered as those who suffer around her.