Tampa Bay joins Miami in representing the (alleged) Sunshine State in the Noir Series arena.

Karen Brown's most hypnotic novel to date is Gothic-inflected psychological suspense that unmasks the secret desires of a young woman with a mystical gift. On the family homestead where she grew up, Martha Mary saw ghosts. As a young woman, she hopes to distance herself from those spirits by escaping to an inland college town. There she is absorbed by a budding romance, relieved by separation from an unstable sister, and disinterested in the flyers seeking information about a young woman who has disappeared - until one Indian summer afternoon when the missing woman appears beneath Martha's apartment window, wearing a winter coat, her hair coated with ice.

The dark side of a seemingly perfect Connecticut suburb comes to light when one woman's long-buried secrets refuse to stay in the past, in this engrossing debut novel of psychological suspense. It's an idyllic New England summer, and Sadie is a precocious only child on the edge of adolescence. It seems like July and August will pass lazily by, just as they have every year before. But one day, Sadie and her best friend play a seemingly harmless prank on a neighborhood girl. Soon after, that same little girl disappears from a backyard barbecue - and she is never seen again. Twenty years pass, and Sadie is still living in the same quiet suburb. She's married to a good man, has two beautiful...