Sabine Callendar, having fled the limitations of life in Durham, New England, shocks her family and the community once again when she returns unbowed twenty years later to present her daughter to society.

When private investigator Spenser is hired by a woman to rescue her fifteen-year-old son from her ex-husband, Spenser ends up protecting the boy and investigating both parents

“[Robert B.] Parker's brilliance is in his simple dialogue, and in Spenser.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer A bitter divorce is only the beginning. First the father hires thugs to kidnap his son. Then the mother hires Spenser to get the boy back. But as soon as Spenser senses the lay of the land, he decides to do some kidnapping of his own. With a contract out on his life, he heads for the Maine woods, determined to give a puny 15 year old a crash course in survival and to beat his dangerous opponents at their own brutal game.

Raised in an orphanage, Joan Walker becomes a social outcast who discovers murder is a convenient solution and sweet revenge whenever anyone opposes her. When she learns Adam Sard, the man she loves is going to be married, Olga Johnson, a.k.a. Joan Walker, who has been sentenced to death by lethal injection for first degree murder, escapes from death row to prevent the marriage from taking place. Using aliases and disguises, she manages to elude the authorities. Jade Armstrong Otis is an investigative reporter for a Washington, D.C. newspaper. She is searching for the murderer of her grandmother whose death took place years ago in a Boston City hospital where Olga was employed. The trail leads her to the gambling Mecca of Las Vegas and Adam Sard.

Crisp air and gray skies beckon a little girl to thoroughly investigate the outside world: chipmunks, squirrels, insects, and fallen leaves all hint that a change of season is coming. Young readers can explore the signs of autumn along with the adventurous child narrator in this charming conclusion to Wong Herbert Yee's series on the seasons (Tracks in the Snow, Who Likes Rain? and Summer Days and Nights).

Clifford learns about autumn. Summer is over, and Clifford the small red puppy, is curious about the changes that are happening all around him.

The Pentlands are a very conservative, old money family in a small town near Boston, who claim ancestry going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the fall of an unspecified year in the 1920’s, their world is invaded by several “outsiders,” including Sybil, the patriarch’s granddaughter back from a Paris education, Sabine, a prodigal niece who has returned after being gone for twenty years, together with her daughter Thérèse, and O’Hare, an Irish Catholic politician who is at odds with the deeply ingrained Protestant background of the community. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear to Olivia, Sybil’s mother, that all is not well in the Pentlands’ world; beneath the apparent calm there are secrets bubbling to the surface that have been hidden for years. It also becomes clear that with the changes taking place in the world at large and in their world in particular, the future of the Pentland family could be in peril. Before Louis Bromfield became a well-known agriculturist, he was a writer of several successful novels. This family study, which is said to be based on his wife’s Puritan upbringing, won him a Pulitzer. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.