Book excerpt: The First World War has claimed the life of Colbert Cobb Whittier s brother and the sanity of his friends. He returns home at the beginning of the 1920s, a decade that will mark America s passage into the modern age. Against the tumultuous backdrop of a small town that is both clinging to its past and stretching toward its future, he must hold what is left of his family together. When two mysterious sisters seem to contact his dead brother through a s