Charity Book

Haunted by a secret sorrow, Augusta ("Gustie") Roemer comes to Charity, South Dakota, to escape the constraints of turn-of-the-century Philadelphia society. A school teacher, she gains only a tenuous acceptance as a newcomer. Her one friend in Charity, Lena Kaiser, is beset by problems of her own, not the least of which are a family murder and a hard-drinking husband who is accused of the crime. Unknown to even Lena is Gustie's friendship with two Indian women, Dorcas, a Dakotah medicine woman, and Jordis, the product of a white man's education and abuse. Gustie deepens her relationship with Jordis but remains an outsider on the reservation, uneasy in a world she can never fully comprehend. As Gustie and then Jordis become more entangled in Lena's quest for a killer, the ties that bind the three of them are tested to the limits of their endurance as they discover the horrors that lie just below the surface of this quiet, second-generation immigrant community, where past wounds threaten to erupt into fresh tragedy.