Behind the golden stone walls of a village in southwest France, American Merle Bennett finds solace from her grief while renovating her late husband's ancestral home. But things don't go as planned. Soon any calm she feels in her French summer is overshadowed by secrets from the past. A crumbling house, a deranged squatter, unfriendly and violent villagers, a surprise in the garden house -- it makes a girl almost wish for the sleepy suburbs. But Merle can't go home until all is resolved, one way or another.In Blackbird Fly, her first suspense novel, Lise McClendon reveals her love of both the French countryside and the intimacies and drama of family, in a book novelist Jenny Siler calls "heartbreakingly beautiful."