SHARK REEF

It was one of those steamy July days in Minnesota when hair expands to twice its normal size and clothes get damp and sticky right after you put them on. My dad’s stomach cancer surgery had been two months earlier. Now I was driving my folks to see the oncologist in Dad’s prized red Ford pick-up. During the eight short blocks to the clinic, he sat as unmoving as a stone. But his pain

My favorite book when I was eight was the Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. Into my teen years, the memory of that tale conjured up long stretches of sand whiter than I’d ever seen and enormous, deep blue waves that curled up and over and heaved themselves down onto the shore and out again. I lived in a small town in central Minnesota. There were lakes

My husband and I moved to Lopez full time in July, 1994. Two months later, we stood under a warm, September sun, staining endless boards of pale cedar a rusty red-brown.

Death dogs are all around us. They bark, they bite and gnash their teeth, they howl in the night for your soul. They lurk in the shadows but they’re there, too, in a day like this, so pure and blue and faultless, it makes your heart ache.

A beautiful young woman, Lily Grimaldi, is delivering her first baby on the kitchen floor of her grandmother’s old farmhouse in the country. Helping her is hunky first love and former husband (and uncle) Holden Snyder. Damien Grimaldi, her current and third hunky husband — and the father of the baby — is enormously jealous of Holden.