Second Glance: A Novel

In a small Vermont town, an old man puts a piece of land up for sale, igniting a firestorm of protest from the local Abenaki Indians, who insist it is an ancient burial ground. To appease them the developer looking to buy the property hires a ghost hunter, Ross Wakeman. Ross is a suicidal drifter desperate to cross paths again with his fiancee, who died in a car crash eight years earlier. But after several late nights all Ross can lay claim to discovering is Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Picoult's enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate and a crime of passion. SECOND GLANCE, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history, Vermont's eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s, to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us - literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?