Kara Fitzgerald is a thirty-ish, unmarried young woman faced with a dilemma. As her beloved father, a widower, sinks deeper every day into dementia, she has no choice but to find an assisted living facility for him. It breaks her heart to put her Pa in a "home." She must also sell her family home to afford Pa's care, leaving her without a place to live.

Kara is penniless and without a job. She gave up her once successful career as a journalist on a local daily newspaper to care for her father full-time and, before that, to nurse her dying mother. Kara desperately needs an income and turns to a former high school classmate, the current editor of the Beacon, the paper where she used to work.

Jack Logan, the editor, has no full-time positions to offer Kara. In fact, his own position is tenuous as advertising revenue has been sparse. Kara feels the pressure closing in. The countdown to when Kara must close on her family home, and hand over the proceeds to Twin Oaks to pay for Pa's "lifetime of care," plus find a cheap place for herself to live, is looming.

But no sooner has Kara settled her wary father into Twin Oaks does she encounter a bank of reporters at the assisted living center's doors. A once high-profile resident, Nancy Harding, has died under suspicious causes. Her death is front page news around the globe because Harding was once a glamorous and very sexy Hollywood star. She appeared, along with her buff leading man, in a string of "beach blanket" movies. But after three marriages and thirty pounds, Nancy checked herself into Twin Oaks to hide from the world. That was two decades ago.

In a conversation with Kara, the distraught director of Twin Oaks, Mrs. Warren, leaks the terrible news that Nancy Harding was poisoned. She fears that the families of those in her care will pull their loved ones out of Twin Oaks and needs to get the word out that Nancy's death was a "one-off." Mrs. Warren is convinced that Nancy was poisoned by her nephew, the former child actor and now drug addicted adult, Ricky Wexner. Wexner suddenly showed up at Twin Oaks, had words with his aunt, and then Nancy suddenly died.

As none of the other media outlets has the "poisoning" story, Kara sees an opportunity and pitches an idea to her former editor. She wants to help the police find out who poisoned Nancy Harding. She thinks it will be one of those stories that can run in installments on the front page of the Beacon and draw in new readers.

Kara's former editor says she can go ahead and do the series of stories as a freelancer. If circulation numbers at the paper go up, he can then ask his publisher to put Kara back on staff full-time.

As Kara inserts herself into the murder investigation of the once sexy and beautiful Nancy Harding, she is knocked down almost immediately when she learns that a young man she harbored a secret crush on in high school, who became a priest, was brutally murdered on a hiking trail at a posh resort. And that some of the people she knew from high school were there with him and now considered "persons of interest."

It's a race against the clock for Kara as she looks for a new place to live with practically no money, helps the police in their investigation of the Nancy Harding case and tries to honor her old high school friend by finding out who could have taken such a saintly priest's life.

As she dives into trying to solve both Nancy Harding's and Father Mullins' murders, Kara discovers secrets about her own background that shock her to the core and cause her to question her own identity. Suddenly her own life is in danger. But as she unpeels the layers of deception, greed and jealousy surrounding her, Kara grows into a woman far more confident and courageous than she ever dreamed she could be, and in the process, finds true love.