Island Secrets

Elsie Brown has been keeping secrets for decades, and one of them is about to unravel. On November 22, 2006, two days before Thanksgiving, David Winslow's comfortable life is catapulted into a period of intense grief and confusion when his fifty-nine year old mother, Claire, is killed in the violent single car crash of her classic Jaguar. Making matters worse, the car was being driven, inexplicably, by Doug Brown, a forty-five year old carpenter, now in a coma, recently brought down from an island in Maine to work at the Winslow's seaside home on the South Coast of Massachusetts. Plagued by recurring nightmares about his mother's last moments, David struggles to understand how this man - a perfect stranger to him - was in a position to kill his mother. When David stumbles upon evidence suggesting that his mother had some secret business in Maine, he is drawn deeper into the mystery.A. Gardner Strong, a life-long resident of New England, is a free-lance writer and novelist, blessed to live with and for her husband, their children, and their wonderful canine companions, and has a home on a small island off the coast of Maine, where the Aurora Borealis did, indeed, command the water and sky on the evening of July 14, 1960. The cover image of the Aurora Borealis by Michael Leonard was taken in Cumberland, Maine, around the peak of the last solar cycle in November, 2003. Mike's photography has been published in local newspapers, magazines, books, textbooks, websites and on television. Among his favorite subjects to shoot is nighttime, including lightning and aurora, and lighthouses. Mike provides instruction in Photography and in Photoshop to Camera Clubs, Art organizations and is available to speak to non-profit clubs around New England.