Desire Lines

Kathryn Campbell and her four closest friends gather around a bonfire the night they finish high school. Jennifer, the beautiful and unpredictable one among them, stands up, tells them she will be fine, and heads into the dark woods. She does not return.

A decade later, Kathryn has abandoned graduate school and is stuck in a joyless writing job and an unhappy marriage in Virginia. She has few close friends, since people have stopped relying on her. When she leaves her husband, she sends her belongings to her mother's home in Bangor, Maine, because she has no other place to go.

Back in her hometown, Kathryn finds her old classmates planning their ten-year reunion, and the questions about that night resurface. Jennifer, who once demanded loyalty and sacrifice from Kathryn, seems to take over her thoughts again. Kathryn resolves to follow her friend's lead one final time and sets out to learn what happened.

Rejoining the rhythms of small-town life, she reconnects with former friends and teachers and applies her journalist's habits to piece together the years she and Jennifer shared. She has to weigh what she truly knew about Jennifer against what she never understood, and decide how much she is prepared to risk in pursuit of the truth. The novel asks what happened to Jennifer Pelletier.