LEGAL GROUNDS

When a small-town's most attractive, ambitious and conservative girl graduate goes missing from her big city college campus, her Bible study girlfriends from high school back home step up to find their beloved friend and sister. Of course, the small-town folk are not at fault, are they They only want to help, right?

As Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman demonstrate in The Undoing Project (authored by Michael Lewis), impression and bias are flawed, and we don't see the monsters among us until it is too late.

Legal Grounds unpacks that dilemma in a small-town vs. urban interplay. #MeToo and #ChurchToo factor in. It's a challenge illustrated in a story, all too real in Average America.

Within the framework of the small-town story is the town coffeeshop book club - Bonfire Books - reading a powerful novella. Out from the Jaws of the Dragon exposes a hidden undercurrent of violation of the most vulnerable in their safest places with their most trusted human connections. The book club provides an avenue of discussion among the main characters as their small-town mystery unfolds.

Small communities and families and faith friends are relied upon as safe havens. Aren't they? Safe? The questions.

Ava Aaronson and friends came of age in a typically quaint little town. However, they observed that just beneath the goodness thriving, was a subtle and sinister hidden agenda. She writes of integrity against an underlying tide of vice. She sees stalwart men and noble women carve paths of integrity.