Middle-aged college professor Joy Harkness gives up her position at Columbia in New York City and moves to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she buys a crumbling Victorian house and experiences such changes in her life she begins to wonder if she is having a breakdown.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sydney, once divorced and recently widowed, takes a tutoring job at the summer cottage of the Edwards family on the New Hampshire coast where she is supposed to prepare daughter Julie for the SAT exam, but what she anticipated as a relaxing idyll becomes complicated when she discovers Julie is a "slow" learner, she clashes with Mrs. Edwards, and the two grown Edwards sons become rivals for Sydney's affections.

Assistant District Attorney Alexa Hamilton reluctantly sends her seventeen-year-old daughter Savannah, to live with her ex-husband and his family in Charleston after she received death threats against Savannah's life for prosecuting serial killer Luke Quentin.

Ed Eagle, the six-feet-six, take-no-prisoners Santa Fe attorney, has recovered from his encounters with Mexican organized crime and--more treacherously--his ex-wife, Barbara. Now a mysterious new client has come his way, one who may shed light into some dark corners of Ed's past ... and put him in danger once more.