Texas Toast

Lizzie Evans has always been an enigma to her daughter Sunny, gone for years at a time between visits, sending postcards from all over the world, but with no real connection between them. On her last visit she left Sunny an envelope containing $50,000 in cash and a note saying that she was going back to Berkshire Michigan, the town she grew up in, to "settle some things." A month later she is found dead, murdered in a particularly ugly fashion. Looking for answers Sunny goes to her mother's home town, but no one will talk to her and the local Sheriff Duncan Rimes seems more interested in getting her to leave town than investigating her mother's murder.

Assaulted by the police she needs help and needs it badly. The only person she can turn to is Jess Hanniford, her first love that shattered her heart at seventeen when she found him naked in Chander's Creek with someone else.

As Sunny and Jess delve into her mothers life they uncover a myriad of disturbing facts about the "Golden Girl," none of them flattering. Was Lizzie Evans just the local whore or was she something else? Finding her mother's diary generates more questions than answers and as Sunny and Jess trace back what happened years before, the attraction they both felt ten years earlier returns. The sparks fly between them but Sunny can't let herself forgive or forget the past.

Who hated Lizzie Evans enough to kill her? The mystery all revolves around what happened on her mother's high school graduation night, when Lizzie Evans was doing tequila shots in the back of a pickup truck with the boys baseball team. Everyone in town thinks there was an orgy that night but what really happened? Was one of the boys involved her mother's killer? Was one of them the father that Sunny never knew? Or both? It's dangerous to ask questions in Berkshire Michigan but the real question is can Sunny and Jess stay alive long enough to get the answers they are looking for, or will Sunny suffer the same fate