On one side of the river are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. On the other is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river--and the whites. But the river is dying, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah's grandfather and her brother, their world is thrown into chaos.
As Augusta Olsen waits for news about the surgery of her beloved son-in-law, she reflects on a harsh, sometimes magical, life. Bereft after her mother's death, she marries Karl, her first suitor. Her marriage is difficult and she battles with Karl's father, but when they move to a farm of their own, she begins to find her independence. She is soon at work on her mother's old beekeeping equipment.
Living on her family's farm in British Columbia in the 1940s, 15-year-old Beth Weeks escapes her abusive father and her troubled mother in a friendship with Nora, a young Native woman. Beth struggles to cope, even as she feels haunted by the fear that something is following her. Nora's grandmother believes it is the murderous Coyote spirit, responsible for mysterious deaths in the community.
Job Sunstrom is a religious man who loves the church. When his brother's family moves back into the family farmhouse where Job lives, they bring along an evangelist. Job's brother urges him to become one of the evangelist's religious foot soldiers. But this leaves him wondering if he will ever find love of a more earthly kind.
Kat has returned with her disabled husband and young son to her family's homestead in Turtle Valley, to help her frail parents pack their belongings before forest fires destroy everything. Kat's mother, Beth, (from "The Cure for Death by Lightning") is weighed down by her ailing husband, and also by a secret she has guarded all her life. Kat is determined to get to its source before fire eats up all that is left of the family's memories.
