Abandoning a life she herself terms "thrown away," Ana Masaryk, a Purple Heart Army vet of the Iraq war, begins anew in a small northern New England town, where she finds refuge with the gay illustrator of children's books in an abandoned church he has transformed. A necessary job covering local social functions and writing obits for The Chronicle, the town's newspaper, leads Ana into an impassioned whole new life of consuming work as the paper's publisher and editor, and to her defiant defense of it, at the risk of losing everything, when the paper's independence is threatened by a big-city news chain owned by a politically ambitious billionaire, who always gets whatever he wants through lies, distortions, and sowing dissension.