Archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer has been around the world seeking the greatest treasures of antiquity. In Afghanistan and in Iraq she risked her life pursuing the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his daughter Hannaniah. She is a driven woman conflicted by loyalty to her faith and unrelenting passion for historic truth. But it is in Boston on a lonely harbor island that she will discover the secret that will unearth the greatest, deepest secrets of her own life.
In her early 30s, Molly is a highly educated, passionate explorer and teacher bearing up under the pressures of her recent finds in the Middle East. The president of the college where she teaches, a Catholic institution, questions her academic integrity. The press hounds her to reveal the identity of the bones she uncovered in the middle of the Iraqi war. Ghostly calls begin to come every night plunging her into a mystery that will involve her own family and her own dark past.
When Molly was a child, she was raised by a single mother, a brilliant sociologist and political activist. She never knew her father. When her mother dies in a fire on an island in Boston harbor inhabited only by a single dwelling, she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, a Boston police detective. She is unaware that her mother had been involved with underground activities providing illegal abortions to local girls. She is unaware that her mother was conducting an even more counter culture love affair with a woman known to Molly only as Aunt Tabby. She is unaware, now, that a killer is cleaning up old traces of what really happened on that island. Conducting an investigation of old Indian remains, Molly inadvertently stumbles upon the remains of her own past and the truth of what happened to her beloved mother thus putting herself in the path of a psychopathic killer.
The conflict of faith and intellect that haunts Molly began on a lonely island, in the dark, in a house on fire, lost in smoke, crying for her mother. Those TRACES OF A LIFE have never left her soul. They are now coming back in bits of bone, flashes of memory, and in the frightening calls that come to her in the middle of night. Surviving them will take all the faith and love that has survived with Molly all these years.
