The Empty Lot

Cora and Alan were the perfect couple, undergoing the perfect divorce. Two smart, sensible university professors, determined to end their marriage amicably with full consideration for each other and their three children. "But that's what everyone always says, isn't it?" demands Haskell, Cora's formidable attorney father. "No one sets out to have a disaster."
Alan and Cora are principled people who would never let money stand in the way of decency. But no one had reckoned on the sudden fortune their huge old house and adjacent empty lot might bring in a Texas college town now ripe for development. No one had imagined the lengths to which Haskell would go to keep the house out of the hands of developers. Or the determination of Millie, Cora's stubborn, enigmatic mother, to keep her family together at any cost.
Mary Gray Hughes throws her brilliant light on a family poised between destruction and redemption. In compelling detail she illuminates the pull of love, ambition, sex, loyalty and greed on people who are trying desperately to maintain their ties to one another and their belief in their own good intentions.