In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida. Florida's like nothing Turtle's ever seen before, though. It's full of ragtag boy cousins, family secrets to unravel . . . and even a little bit of fun. Before she knows what's happened, Turtle finds herself coming out of her shell. And as she does, her world...

When the body of a divorced Florida heiress washes ashore in Massachusetts, police chief Jesse Stone learns of the woman's past appearances in an erotic video and finds it suspicious that the victim's family seems unaffected by her death.

Sixth-grader Theo leaves everything behind to live with his Uncle Chester, a Vietnam War veteran and loner, in Destiny, Florida, but he is drawn to play the piano in Miss Sister's dance school and soon makes friends with the feisty Anabel, a baseball fanatic who invites Theo to help solve a mystery.

It's 1939 and a town in Florida which hasn't seen rain in months, places its hope in a 67-year-old rainmaker from Mississippi who claims she can coax rain from the sky.