Seek the Living : A Novel

Since her mother's death, Joan Patee has kept the peace between her wayward brother, Denny, and her strong-willed father. Now confronted with her own troubles-a marriage strained by distance and the desire to have a child-Joan discovers that Denny is far worse off than she imagined. He's hatched a moneymaking scheme involving artifacts found in unmarked graves that may date to the Civil War. Pulled between the family she has and the one she would like to begin, Joan is drawn into a spiral of shady dealings and peculiar town secrets, some dangerously close to her heart.

Ashley Warlick is the author of The Summer After June and The Distance from the Heart of Things, for which she became the youngest ever recipient of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. She graduated from Dickinson College in 1994 and now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her family.