Julie Williams is a successful small-town business woman [owns a local coffee shop], and has an idyllic life with a wonderful husband and two children; a college-age daughter and a military son.

After she buries her mother, Julie engages a local genealogist to search out any information he can find regarding the father she never knew. The idyllic life she now has is a far cry from the life she had with her self-centered, over-bearing single mother Margie Smith, who had been notorious for moving the family around the country so often, they had no opportunity to establish any roots in a given place.

Isn’t it amazing how after a person dies, secrets the deceased had start coming to the surface. Not only do secrets start coming to the surface, people, like the Stranger, from their past start appearing as well; and asking probing questions about the deceased and her family; questions which only someone rather close to the family would have been interested in knowing, questions which suggest who this Stranger might be.

The storyline keeps moving towards a semi-predictable conclusion with a decent balance between the dialogue and narrative, for which I’ve given this book 4 STARS. ( )