A Place Called Winter — Judith Kelly Quaempts

Three a.m. Carol Ingram stands at the window in her dark apartment. A full moon throws the landscape into bright relief and reveals no lurking shadows. The street is quiet. A moment later, she locks the door, carries a suitcase to her car, and starts the engine. She doesn't turn on the headlights until she's a block away. Running from an ex-lover's savage attack that leaves her physically and emotionally scarred, Carol travels a thousand miles to hide in Winter, an isolated community in Oregon's Blue Mountain foothills. Amid the remote canyon's natural beauty where she once spent childhood summers, a new journey begins, one with friends, a job she enjoys, and a growing sense that Winter is where she belongs. But chance events threaten to shatter her fragile hold on the future: the ex-lover finds her, a woman vanishes, an elderly neighbor commits suicide, and then a second woman disappears. Carol realizes no place is safe, no one entirely innocent. She must confront her past and fight for what she believes in or forever pay the price.