Shadow Ranch is Jo-Ann Mapson's richly evocative new novel about love, family, and trying to on when you've been through tragedy. Lainie Carpenter has lost her four-year-old son and is about to lose her marriage and sanity as well. The impact of young Spencer's death has strongly touched the lives of Bop, her grandfather, and her ambitionless guitar-strumming brother, Russell, whose own love relationship is rapidly coming undone.

      Pushing eighty, Bop is a fierce and crusty old man--a retired workaholic businessman, wealthy beyond imagining, a lover of horses and the Southern California landscape where he grew up--who falls in love with a retired stripper, Earlynn Sommers. Tender and earthy, this romance will change the lives of the Carpenter grandchildren in the most unexpected ways. Each of these beautifully drawn characters will have a different experience of love, and loss; each of their stories tugs at the heartstrings.

      Also a novel of California--a land once rich with lemon groves and hardworking people rooted in the country for generations--Shadow Ranch tells the story of the Carpenter family's struggle to reclaim some of that old spirit, and to repair family wounds and reunite its members in a common cause.