Frankie Rowley has come home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered after working in East Africa for 15 years. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father's slow failing and her mother's desperation, another house burns, and then another, always the homes of summer people.