The Dearly Departed

With her trademark humor and warmth, the beloved author of Ms. Demeanor and Every Tom, Dick & Harry explores what it means to return home and find light in the dark corners of one's inhospitable past in a dazzling novel about golf, love, and DNA.

Everyone in King George, New Hampshire, loved Margaret Batten, part-time amateur actress, full-time wallflower, and single mother to a now-distant daughter, Sunny.

But accidents happen. The death of Margaret, side by side with her putative fiancé, brings Sunny back to the scene of the unhappy adolescence she thought she'd left behind.

Reentry is to be dreaded; there's no hiding in a town with one diner, one doctor, one stop sign, one motel.

Yet allies surface; even high school tormentors have grown up in unforeseen and gratifying ways.

Just possibly, Sunny begins to think, she wasn't as beleaguered as she felt she was.

And maybe her mother's life was richer than anyone suspected.

Add to the mix a chief of police whose interest in Sunny exceeds his civic duty, and you have the makings of an irresistibly beguiling tale.