When her mother, Eve, tells Liza that she must leave their home, she is terrified. Although she is 17, she has never played with a child of her own age and has almost no knowledge of a world described by her mother as evil. But their enclosed life together is over because Eve has killed a man.

This is the story of Ella Dinsmore and Will Parker. Ella, widowed at 26 and with two small children, advertises for a husband, through which she meets Will, a drifter. They fall in love, but find this threatened by a sudden, brutal murder.

Young Andi Oliver is an amnesiac and drifter who awoke in a Santa Fe bed and breakfast with a man's belongings tossed about the room. Adopting a name from the initials on her backpack, Andi moves from one waitress job to the next, from Idaho to North Dakota, until she takes a job at Klavan's, a massive pigfarming facility that specializes in the dark art of modern livestock management. As Andi begins to uncover the truth about Klavan's and a slaughterhouse...

Carlisle McMillan, a traveler and master carpenter seeking a place of quiet amid the grinding roar of progress. Near Wolf Butte, a strange and apparently haunted monolith, he finds his quiet, or so he believes, and begins rebuilding a decrepit house as a tribute to the gruff old man who taught him a carpenter's skills, rebuilding his life at the same time. He finds two very different, independent women: Gally Deveraux, who works at a diner in Salamander...

In a small Vermont town, an old man puts a piece of land up for sale, igniting a firestorm of protest from the local Abenaki Indians, who insist it is an ancient burial ground. To appease them the developer looking to buy the property hires a ghost hunter, Ross Wakeman. Ross is a suicidal drifter desperate to cross paths again with his fiancee, who died in a car crash eight years earlier. But after several late nights all Ross can lay claim to discovering...