Amidst the rural beauty of a tidal peninsula, a dog uncovers a cache of bones in the woods. Quietly, a priest refuses a starving man a ride to a free dinner. A woman finds a decomposed body floating the marsh by her farmhouse. Through it all, an old woman with no heirs makes unreasonable demands of the young attorney who writes her will.

But the proof of evil is a boy, imprisoned in a cellar, toiling for his bitter father and learning a lesson that leaves a legacy. As a homeless adult he inhabits a ruined grist mill on the banks of a silted creek.

Claire McIntosh Solomon and her husband Booker discover what links these cascading events during the old woman's lifetime and in doing so, they risk everything that is valuable to them—their family, their home, and one another.

The Grist Mill Bone weaves two timelines from historical events in coastal Maryland with imagined events on the Delaware shore. Colloquialisms are sprinkled throughout small town life as joy and sorrow give the reader heart in a place, time, and people they know on the Eastern Shore.

B.B. Shamp won the first place award from the National Federation of Press Women and the Delaware Press Association for her debut novel, Third Haven, the prequel to The Grist Mill Bone. The last book of the trilogy, The Oxford Settlement, will be available in fall of 2020.