The Onion Ring Lovers (Guide to Vermont): A Novel

Many children wish that every day could be Christmas. For one year, Jim Sutton and his family found themselves living that dream. As dreams go, however, it turned out to be more of a nightmare.

The Suttons were not caught up in some kind of “Groundhog Day” scenario. Far from it. While each day was distinct and separate, some days seemed to echo the one before, like a rerun nobody asked to relive. From 1977 through early 1978, the Sutton clan lived as permanent residents in a year-round Christmas attraction named, appropriately enough, Christmas Town.

The chain of events leading to how precisely they came to settle on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, Vermont is found in two words: Bob Sutton (or as he was more colloquially called: Dad). Bob Sutton pried his brood from their comfortable lives in Boston, Massachusetts to relocate to the Green Mountain State. He bought a snack stand concession in Christmas Town, where he believed they would make their fortunes in a forever Winter Wonderland. None of the Suttons expected that this outwardly idyllic setting would lead to familial betrayal and tragedy.

Twenty-two years later, a grown Jim Sutton ventures out to write his novel. His muse: onion rings. The setting: the state he once swore he would never visit again. In a rusted-out beater of a car, Jim navigates his way through the countryside, sampling onion rings for his book, The Onion Ring Lover's Guide to Vermont. When an accident strands him in the sleepy town of Strawberry Falls, little does Jim know that another dark family secret hides beneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic little New England town, a secret that some of the town residents would kill forto keep from coming to light.