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 the questions she asks no one wants to answer. The local Sheriff Duncan Rimes, is movie star handsome but seems to be more interested in getting her to leave town than solving her mother's murder
Attacked in an alley and told to get out of town or "end up like your mother," Sunny needs help and needs it badly. The only person she can turn to is Jess Hanniford, her first love, who shattered her heart when she was seventeen. Sparks fly between them when Jess arrives but can they let the the past remain buried?
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? As Sunny and Jess trace back what happened years before, the attraction they both felt as teenagers returns. Jess's kisses are unbelievably hot but all Sunny can see is him naked in Chander's Creek with somebody else.
About to be arrested by the Berkshire police and with Jess missing, Sunny turns to her ex-fiance Dan Halliday, an FBI agent that Sunny had almost married the year before. Dan comes to the rescue but is his interest in Sunny professional or more personal?
The only person in town Sunny might call a friend is one of her mother's
ex-lovers from high school Josh Ringold. He seems like a nice enough guy but is he? After all Sunny's mother had laughed at his marriage proposal and dumped him graduation night to go do shots with Duncan Rimes and the boys from the baseball team.
Sunny's grandfather that she had never met still lives in Berkshire but with dementia how much information can he give her? Finding her mother's diary at his house generates more questions than answers and revels secrets that nobody in town knows except maybe Stella Rimes, Sunny's mothers best friend from high school and now the Sheriff's wife .
With Sunny 's mothers diary as guide, more and more dark secrets are reveled about Berkshire Michigan and Lizzie's friends and enemies. The investigation turns deadly when Sunny and Jess's motel room is blown up and a dead body found inside. When a suspect is arrested both Sunny and Jess suspect a set up even though the FBI and the local police declare the case closed. But is it?
Lizzie Evans had left town pregnant and broke after graduation without telling anybody and waited twenty-seven years to return... But why? Was she blackmailing somebody from her past or was she in Berkshire to settle an old score? What secrets last that long in a town like Berkshire and who was so threatened twenty-seven years later that they resorted to murder?
The mystery of her mother's death all revolves around what happened on graduation night twenty-seven years earlier, when Sunny's mother 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 as her mother?
