How would you know that the family you see almost every day could be so hidden, so complex-and then, in a flash, be broken and gone? It's the 1960s in a rural community in the Pacific Northwest. While precocious twelve-year-old Daniel Caine tutors his younger sister and the kid across the road about the dark, disturbing secrets that Nature holds, he finds some hidden letters on his father's commercial fishing boat.

He discovers that his family, too, holds deep, troubling secrets. Danny's focus wavers, and he moves toward an unthinkable resolution, foreseen by the mysterious old lady down the road who provides Danny's tarot card: Judgement.

From the novel's narrator: "Danny ran toward the car-shouting, running, stumbling, getting up, running again. I had never seen him run before.

When you plan everything, when you seem to know all things, you don't have to run. But now he was shouting, running, stumbling.

The sound of that dreadful crack and the picture of the sudden, rising, yellow flame on that hot summer day doesn't go away. Now and then it thumps away through uneasy dreams, and sometimes it's triggered by chance associations that might otherwise have been innocent enough.

And, with each trigger, more comes back. I was, it seems, ready for Danny, though I had no idea-no one had any idea-what Danny was ready for.

" The Fisherman's Secret is the prequel to The Watchers' Club, also published by Sunstone Press. .