October 1, 2021
Looking for a fresh start, Nora Best tows her Airstream trailer from Wyoming back to her hometown of Chateau, Maryland. Nearly there, Nora is almost cut off by a bright green Kia. Further on, she sees the Kia pulled over by a local cop. Hoping to find healing peace in her childhood home, she instead discovers that her mother, Penelope, recovering from a fall, needs assistance. In town the next morning, Nora learns that the driver of the Kia, Robert, a young Black man, the nephew of Penelope's former housekeeper, has been shot and killed by the white officer, who was Nora's high-school boyfriend. As a witness, however fleeting, Nora is drawn into the investigation, following offhand comments by a quartet of local busybodies. Deftly weaving Nora's efforts to reestablish relationships into her realization that she must face unhappy truths about her past and her former friends, Florio, a former journalist, uses storytelling to explore the persistence of racism and the far-reaching damage it inflicts.
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July 1, 2021
Racial tensions divide a town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. When Nora Best returns home to Chateau from Colorado, she thinks she's done running. She's left her cheating husband, escaped a murder charge, and headed cross-country in her Airstream trailer to the town she left years ago, swearing she'd never come back. When at last she arrives at Quail House, the stately house where she grew up, she thinks she may finally be home. Her mother, Penelope, has grown old and frail, and there's no one left to help her but equally elderly Miss Grace, who crossed Commerce Street years ago from Chateau's Black neighborhood to work for the town's White police chief. When a teenager killed by police on the Bay Bridge turns out to be Miss Grace's young nephew, however, relations among Chateau's residents fray. This latest death is a chilling reminder of the murder of Bobby Evans, Grace's brother, during civil rights protests leading to violence that tore the town apart in the 1960s. Nora, crossing the Bay Bridge in her Airstream, witnesses this latest killing, and local cop Alden Tydings, who was the love of her teenage life, begs her to tell him what she knows. But even Nora isn't sure what she knows now that she's in a place that should be utterly comfortable and familiar at a time that's anything but. Secrets but no surprises in a hypercontemporary look at long-standing social justice issues.
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