The Orchard at Sutter's Bluff: A Stonebrook Novel

She inherited a hundred and forty acres, three years of unpaid taxes, and nineteen days to decide.Grace Wingate audits companies for a living. She is very good at telling people the truth about their numbers, and the numbers on her grandmother's orchard are bad: a crop that has to come off the trees before the frost, a compressor about to fail, and a tax claim the county has already docketed.Then a buyer offers two point four million dollars.Denise Griffin is not a villain. Her offer is fair, her terms are in writing, and she has built in protections for every worker on the property. Grace has spent eleven years advising clients in exactly this position, and she knows what she would tell them.Sell. It is the responsible thing.But her grandmother left more than a failing farm. In a shoebox in the packhouse desk there are fourteen letters, written one a year across fourteen years, every one addressed to the man who has been quietly paying the orchard's bills out of his own pocket - and who has never once said so.Set among the ridges and back roads of the Pennsylvania Wilds, The Orchard at Sutter's Bluff is a novel about inherited debt and inherited silence - about a town that closes around you whether you asked it to or not, and what it costs a careful woman to finally want something out loud.First in the Stonebrook series. Contains no explicit content.