Sharon L Dean

Leaving Freedom took Connie Lewis from her home in Freedom, Massachusetts, to Florida with her aging mother, and then to Ashland, Oregon, where she found success as a writer and a place to call home. Now, forty years later, Connie is eighty years old and has exchanged the Volkswagen she called The Yellow Sub for a Honda Fit she's nicknamed Last Chance. She's ready for one last adventure. Finding Freedom follows her on a road trip back to the Freedom she left behind so many years ago. When she arrives, she faces the decision about where to spend her last years of living. Will it be the Massachusetts where she was born, the Oregon she has learned to call home, or somewhere she hasn't expected?

Freedom, Massachusetts: by 1973, thirty-year-old Connie Lewis sees only irony in the name. She's ready to leave her hometown and move with her recently widowed mother to Florida, freed of financial worry to write the novel that's been languishing in her imagination. The novel's title--Secrets--turns out to be as ironic as the name of her hometown. Her mother, her sister, and the man she befriends in Florida all keep secrets. In a nine-year journey that will take her from Massachusetts to Florida to Oregon, Connie discovers ways to make peace with what she has learned and to decide what place she should call home.

Six old women living on an isolated island in Lake Winnipesaukee; teenagers vacationing on Newfound lake in 1959; paragliders and skiers on Cannon Mountain; an old woman in a house covered in gypsy moths; a man living off the grid in a shack he built himself... The characters in these stories all keep secrets. They are as tough and rugged as New Hampshire's iconic Old Man in the Mountain. And like the Old Man, who fell in 2003, their pasts survive only in memory. Sometimes, that's a good thing.

When Deborah Strong accepts an invitation for a reunion with high school friends who will all be turning fifty, she anticipates a lovely Fourth of July weekend in Maine. Her friend Brenda's summer house is rustic and beautiful, but from the moment Deborah arrives, something seems wrong. Old rivalries flare between Brenda and Rachel, and Krista plays the role of peacekeeper the way she did thirty years earlier. Soon, a murder disturbs the quiet of the summer homes that dot the isolated cove. Deborah's suspicions follow her like the Maine landscape-plenty of sunshine, plenty of fog, and plenty of evening mosquitoes that, like the questions now plaguing their reunion, arrive like the sparks of fireworks. Where is Brenda's husband? Where have her caretaker and cook gone? Who is the thin young man who keeps appearing? Is one of them a murderer? Or could it be the old woman who lives across the street; her son, who runs an oyster farm in the face of global warming; or the poet-tenant who lives in her apartment? Deborah even suspects each of the friends she grew up with. Her idyllic summer retreat has turned as deadly as contaminated shellfish. Will she find the answers before it's time to leave Calderwood Cove?

When Deborah Strong accepts an invitation for a reunion with high school friends who will all be turning fifty, she anticipates a lovely Fourth of July weekend in Maine. Her friend Brenda's summer house is rustic and beautiful, but from the moment Deborah arrives, something seems wrong. Old rivalries flare between Brenda and Rachel, and Krista plays the role of peacekeeper the way she did thirty years earlier. Soon, a murder disturbs the quiet of the summer homes that dot the isolated cove. Deborah's suspicions follow her like the Maine landscape-plenty of sunshine, plenty of fog, and plenty of evening mosquitoes that, like the questions now plaguing their reunion, arrive like the sparks of fireworks. Where is Brenda's husband? Where have her caretaker and cook gone? Who is the thin young man who keeps appearing? Is one of them a murderer? Or could it be the old woman who lives across the street; her son, who runs an oyster farm in the face of global warming; or the poet-tenant who lives in her apartment? Deborah even suspects each of the friends she grew up with. Her idyllic summer retreat has turned as deadly as contaminated shellfish. Will she find the answers before it's time to leave Calderwood Cove?

After a winter when she solved the cold case of a high school friend found dead in The Barn, Deborah Strong needs a distraction. She joins a conference entitled "Libraries: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?" that will be useful for her work as a librarian in the small town of Shelby. The setting at a picturesque college in New Hampshire should also be healing. Deborah's project for the week plunges her into a mystery that would delight most researchers. What are the connections between a Bible dubbed "The Wicked Bible," a woman called "The Wickedest Woman in New York," a book written by Abigail Brewster, and a letter penned to this nineteenth-century author? As she slowly unravels the connections, Deborah confronts an event from her own past and anticipates a future that could be as brilliant as New Hampshire's September foliage.The second in the Deborah Strong series cleverly connects to the research Deborah's friend Susan Warner discovered about Abigail Brewster in Dean's Death of the Keynote Speaker.

After a winter when she solved the cold case of a high school friend found dead in The Barn, Deborah Strong needs a distraction. She joins a conference entitled "Libraries: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?" that will be useful for her work as a librarian in the small town of Shelby. The setting at a picturesque college in New Hampshire should also be healing. Deborah's project for the week plunges her into a mystery that would delight most researchers. What are the connections between a Bible dubbed "The Wicked Bible," a woman called "The Wickedest Woman in New York," a book written by Abigail Brewster, and a letter penned to this nineteenth-century author? As she slowly unravels the connections, Deborah confronts an event from her own past and anticipates a future that could be as brilliant as New Hampshire's September foliage.The second in the Deborah Strong series cleverly connects to the research Deborah's friend Susan Warner discovered about Abigail Brewster in Dean's Death of the Keynote Speaker.

A barn with a wooden cow's head peeking out of the loft... Two girls bicycling on a September day in 1990... The friend they find dead in the barn... For the next thirty years, the case of Joseph Wheeler's murder lies as cold as a New Hampshire winter. Deborah Strong has settled in the town she grew up in, learning to heal after her friend's murder, and later, the deaths of her husband and child in an automobile accident. When her former best friend Rachel Cummings returns home for the funeral of Joseph's mother, the precarious peace Deborah has found as the town's librarian is threatened. Against the backdrop of the beautiful but cold New Hampshire landscape in January, Deborah and Rachel reopen the cold case of their murdered friend, and uncover secrets about their neighbors that have festered for thirty years, as they often do in small towns. The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, of secrets buried and revealed, and of the power in forgiving others... and ourselves.