The Stevens think that they've won an all-expenses-paid trip to an island that's halfway around the world. When their house is destroyed, their food stolen, and their bacon eaten, the Stevens family breaks apart in front of all their friends on live national television, while the island itself is only a short distance away from Sacramento!
A fateful night in 1959, four people die when the bus they are riding crashes. They continue as ghosts; their souls become eternally entwined to the life of a child born at the moment of their deaths as his guardians. Baby Thomas grows up to be a businessman who has memories of his playmates, but assumes they are products of his youthful imagination. When the ghosts realize they need Thomas' help to move on to the afterlife, they decide to make an appearance once more.
Joan Girardi has begun acting a little strange since her family moved to the city of Arcadia. No one knows that various people keep introducing themselves as God, and then giving the teenager specific directions to do things. Unsure of what God wants, and if she's even sane, Joan tentatively begins to follow God's cryptic directives, all the while trying to retain a "normal" teen-aged existence.
The Philadelphia homicide squad's lone female detective finds her calling when she is assigned cases that have never been solved. Detective Lilly Rush combines her natural instincts with the updated technology available today to bring about justice for all the victims she can.
The story of Bill Henrickson and his life in suburban Salt Lake City, balancing the needs of his three wives -- Barb, Nicki and Margene-- their seven kids, three new houses and the opening of his newest hardware store. When disturbing news arrives about Bill's father, he is forced to reconnect with his polygamist parents who live on a fundamentalist compound in rural Utah.
