In this mesmerizing first novel, a young American graduate student abandons her research deep in the Australian rain forest to investigate her professor's mysterious disappearance. Annabel Mendelssohn has an unusual but oddly satisfying life - studying spectacled fruit bats in the rain forest of Australia. She spends her free time discovering waterfalls and e-mailing her sister, Alice, who has settled for the more domesticated science of grant administration....

When seventeen-year-old Linsey Hart disappears, her entire neighborhood confronts long-buried secrets and prejudices as her social outcast mother goes door-to-door in search of her missing daughter.