Shades of Simon Gray

For more than two hun­dred years the town of Belle­haven has har­bored a sin­is­ter secret. Then one night Simon Gray crash­es his Hon­da into an ancient oak — a tree the kids at school call the Hang­ing Tree — and strange events begin to plague the town. Sud­den­ly the lives of Simon and his friends, who have been hid­ing their own dark secret, begin to unravel.

Trapped in a coma, Simon is unaware that the police are inves­ti­gat­ing a pos­si­ble com­put­er hack­ing inci­dent at the high school. No one believes that Simon Gray could be involved. He is every par­en­t’s ide­al teenag­er — smart, reli­able, hard­work­ing, trust­wor­thy. Or is he? Mean­while, in his comatose state, Simon seems to be mak­ing a few dis­cov­er­ies of his own through con­ver­sa­tions with a man who was hanged for mur­der two hun­dred years ago, from the same tree Simon smashed into. Could there be a connection?

The choic­es we make can have far-reach­ing con­se­quences for us and for the peo­ple we love. And some­times we can’t tell inno­cence from guilt, acci­dent from design. Set in a small town gone slight­ly hay­wire, Joyce McDon­ald’s eerie, sus­pense­ful tale of hid­den crimes, secret pas­sions, and self­ish lies — both in the dis­tant past and the present — explores with sub­tle­ty and uncan­ny insight that most intri­cate of land­scapes: the human soul.