St. Augustus Chronicles

A middle-aged secretary finds unlikely common ground with the death row inmate who may, or may not, have murdered her daughter. Superhero comics help a gay bar mitzvah boy cope with his discovery of his father's adulterous double life. A suburban businesswoman, learns how to grieve a long-ago bereavement through her strange attraction to the birthmother of the child she wants to adopt. An elderly Russian professor crashes a stranger's wedding to prove that he is not losing his memory, inadvertently healing a decades-long rift between friends. In these and other stories, Reiter explores the fraught relationships among queer and straight family members, the search for a post-traumatic spirituality, and the fine line between soulmates and intimate enemies.

Psychiatrist Rand Morrissey is, faced with a quandary, when he is, consulted on the baffling case of five-year-old Sienna, who has been suffering from unexplained fainting spells. Then he discovers that Sienna has a half-sister, Chelsa, who has been in a coma, since a car accident six years earlier, something the girls' manipulative mother Melanie Cantrell has kept secret. When she is, questioned under hypnosis, Sienna reveals things only Chelsa could have known. Rand begins to suspect that Melanie is machinating Sienna's problems. Or, is she? Now Rand must overcome his own childhood demons and find a way to save the lives of two half-sisters, inextricably tethered between life and death.