Northwater — Cecily Crowe

Althea North has come home to Northwater a very different person from the wild and beautiful girl who left the New England mansion eleven years before. She has lived through a disastrous marriage to an Italian Count, a harrowing bout with narcotics and several promiscuous love affairs. Now, Althea has returned to settle an account with her life -- and to die. Ill with an incurable disease, she knows that she has little time to find the peace she longs for or to help her younger sister, Kitty, who is tormented by the mysterious death of their domineering mother.

Althea sets to work to reopen Northwater and to become reacquainted with Kitty and her husband, Jack, the garage mechanic whom Kitty married in defiance of her mother's wishes. Plagued by her worsening illness and by terrible nightmares of her mother's ghost, Althea tries desperately yo uncover the horror of her family's life and death.

As her relationship with Kitty deepens, Althea slowly develops friends among the people of the town who at first view "the Countess Branzini" with suspicion. Then, as if by a miracle, she finds something even more wonderful, a never-before realized capacity to love.