As a child in Midland City, Ohio, Rudolph Waltz fired off an errant round from his father's rifle, accidentally killing a pregnant woman. As a result his family is ruined, and he is jailed and beaten. Given the cruel nickname "Deadeye Dick," he is doomed to a life of shame, guilt, and repentance. After a failed attempt at being a playwright, he moves to Haiti and opens a restaurant. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, a neutron bomb blows Midland City off the map, killing everyone. Kurt Vonnegut's perennial themes of absurdity, randomness, and tragedy are vividly presented, though the rambling plot does not always support them as satisfactorily as it does in his other efforts.

When an athletic young man is found drowned in the choppy waters near Nantuckett, Detective Merry Folger suspects foul play. As she follows up one dead-end lead after another, she begins to realize that many of the answers may lie with her father, the island's police chief. But how deeply will Merry's love for her father interfere with her usually sound, straightforward judgement? When a second body washes up, she sees her choices quickly dwindle.

Why Rusty Mason came back to Nantucket Island after 10 years is as much a mystery as how he ended up facedown in his brother Peter's flooded cranberry bog. With her father, the island's police chief, looking over her shoulder, young police detective Merry Folger follows a tortured trail. There she uncovers the scandalous secrets of a powerful Nantucket family, a heartbreaking tale of love, betrayal, and blackmail that has driven one brother into a life of secrecy and sent the other to an early grave.

The author of the critically acclaimed "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" takes readers on an engaging and high-spirited romp through Victorian England to expose the very human side of Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, and other great literary figures of the time.