The Summer of Lost and Found (February 2026)
The Summer of Lost and Found
For a woman at a turning point, a small Kentucky town offers a summer of healing, unexpected romance, and rediscovery.
Recovering from cancer, Cincinnati news anchor Jessica Fox has no choice but to take a summer leave. Her boss’s proposal: for Jessica to take it easy and recharge at his late grandmother Mabel’s cottage in the Kentucky mountains.
The town of Lost and Found lives up to its name. Resistant at first, Jessica grows to appreciate the slower pace, the spectacular sunsets, the affable locals, and even Matt Cordray, the laid-back, too-friendly police chief next door. Most engaging of all is Mabel, who left behind a treasure map that leads Jessica to a collection of lost items—mementos and love letters—people have mailed to the town over the years. Jessica needs something to help pass the time, and she finds it in reuniting these precious things with the distant strangers who lost them.
Lost and in flux herself, Jessica has no idea just how connected to life this town will make her feel again or, by summer’s end, how transformative a season it will be.
book preview
A Note from Toni
In 2016, I went through treatment for breast cancer. One spring day, when a friend who happens to work in the book industry was “babysitting” me after chemo, I was feeling very weak and useless, and I bemoaned, “I guess this will just be the great lost summer of my life.”
She instantly replied, “Lost Summer. That’s a book title.”
I agreed, and decided I would write it, just based on that little nugget of inspiration, once cancer was behind me. And in the months that followed, a story began to form in my head. I wanted to explore ageism and beautyism in our society and, of course, on a deeper level, healing.
As you’ve already figured out, the book title changed during production, something that’s pretty common in the publishing industry—but without that initial conversation, and the words “lost summer,” this story never would have come into being.
It took a lot longer than I expected to get around to writing the book—partly due to other projects and professional obligations, and partly due to learning, like this book’s heroine, Jessica, that healing in the soul sometimes takes longer than in the body. But just letting this story percolate inside me during that time was, in itself, an act of healing. Writing books is what I do, and putting a new story together, even just in my mind, helped me begin to feel like myself again. And so, for obvious reasons, this book is very near and dear to my heart, perhaps more than any I’ve ever written.