Dahlia's Gone

Sand Williams reluctantly agrees to look in on her fundamentalist neighbor Norah Everston's two teenage children while Norah and her husband are on vacation. Worried after a terrible rainstorm, Sand checks the house to find Timothy, a sweet but slow sixteen-year-old, asleep, while his sister lies dead, brutally stabbed. Deputy Patti Callahan is first on the scene of a case that will alter her life.

Alternately, guilt, rage and desperation consume the lives of all three women. For as Sand struggles with the hidden secrets of her childhood home, she offers unwanted comfort to Norah, who is barely able to cope with the terrible fear destroying her world -- especially as Patti's professional and personal feelings become blurred. But justice is a unifying force, especially for the murdered girl -- a force that will gravitate toward the most tragic truth.