a novel

When Jeanne, a recently widowed young mother, moves halfway across the United States to Lawrence, Kansas, she hopes to escape a troubled past and start a new life with her two-year-old daughter. Instead she finds she has traded one set of troubles for another. Bereaved and lonely, she plunges headlong into an affair with a married man, Kevin, and tries to befriend Kevin's troubled friend Hal. But Kevin's passion for her and Hal's jealousy create a volatile mix.

Kathleen Maher is a fiction writer based in New York City. A regular contributor to The View From Here, she notes that the term "death knell" interests her because it has two distinct meanings: It may be the sound of a bell tolling after a death, or it can be an omen presaging a death.