"Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is--complicated. So when her real dad--a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago--suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could...

Living in a cozy Iowa farmhouse with her kindly grandmother, 24-year-old Julia Desmit struggles to support her five-year-old son and 10-year-old halfbrother. Though her boyfriend is away at medical school, Julia harbors hope for a better life. And then the man who abandoned her six years ago rocks her happy world with one question: "Do I have a son?"

In an alleyway in Los Angeles an old man, clutching faded newspaper clippings and gasping his last words to a cop, lies dying of a gunshot wound. The victim claims to be P.I. Elvis Cole's long-lost father--a stranger who has always haunted his son. As a teenager, Cole searched desperately for his father. As a man, he faces the frightening possibility that this murder victim was himself a killer. Caught in limbo between a broken love affair and way...