Hospitalized with the dreaded atom bomb disease, leukemia, a child in Hiroshima races against time to fold one thousand paper cranes to verify the legend that by doing so a sick person will become healthy.
After her sister Laura is murdered in South Africa, Berry and her estranged father travel there to participate in the dedication of a memorial in her name.
Living in a small beach community with her mother, fifteen-year-old Claire, an accomplished swimmer, discovers that, like her long-dead but, still very much present, grandmother, she has the ability to inhabit other people's bodies while asleep.
When their mother dies, two very different brothers become even more distant, but when their father's alcoholism sends him into liver failure, the two boys must come face-to-face with their demons--and each other--if they are going to survive an uncertain future.
Bailey Ruth Raeburn, always great at solving mysteries, is thrilled to discover in death that she can play an even bigger role in lending a helping hand--especially when she sees that there is a dead man on the porch of Kathleen, a pastor's wife, and that the pastor is sure to become a suspect.
Jane Hudson returns to the placid, isolated shores of the lake side school she left twenty years earlier after a terrible tragedy in the hopes of making a fresh start with her young daughter, but when she begins to receive ominous messages from the past, Jane realizes she must first come to terms with the events she has kept buried for so many years.
Ana Ross, who was Emma Trees in her past life, realizes after a chance encounter that as Emma she may have been involved in an accident that killed a child, and she unearths a decades-old secret while trying to uncover the truth.
