A former prison guard and talented fiddler returns to his Montana hometown to bury his wife and confront the inmate who, twenty years ago, held him hostage during a prison riot.

Natalie Price, who first appeared in Elise Title's acclaimed Killing Time, runs Horizon House, a halfway house for about-to-be-released convicts in the Massachusetts prison system. A young woman in a man's world, Nat is constantly under the gun, sometimes literally, to keep things running safely for inmates and employees. The latest inmate to enter Horizon House is Lynn Ingram, a transsexual who was convicted of manslaughter but, always claimed self-defense....

After 15-year-old Leland commits a chilling crime, he is sent to juvenile hall where he meets Pearl, a teacher and aspiring writer who dreams of making Leland's story into a book. As Pearl digs deeper into Leland's life and the people caught up in it - his mother, his famous writer-father, and his troubled girlfriend - he uncovers Leland's disturbing motive. The tables soon turn when the enigmatic teen forces Pearl to examine his own morally questionable...

Vince Rizzo is a lifelong resident of the tiny, tradition-steeped Bronx enclave of City Island. A family man who makes his living as a corrections officer, Vince longs to become an actor. Vince would rather let his wife believe his weekly poker games are a cover for an affair than admit he is secretly taking acting classes in Manhattan. When Vince is asked to reveal his biggest secret in class, he inadvertently sets off a chaotic chain of events that...