It didn't take the sound of the distant train to make him feel lonely. He felt her absence long before the whistle blew. The opening lines of On The Water's Edge set the tone for a story of loss and recovery. When Rand Logan retires from a thirty-year career in the law, his goal is to travel around the country seeking a new place to settle. But at his first stop in St. Michaels, Maryland, a small village on the Eastern Seaboard, Rand unwittingly embarks on a journey that challenges him to discover the worth of small town life and his place in it. Two years since the sudden death of his lover, Rand needs to find a way to start over again. In this small village on the water's edge, Rand is quickly drawn by a local shopkeeper into the lives of the residents. Faced with the specter of a megastore to be built on the outskirts of town, with the likelihood that many old local businesses will be crushed by the behemoth, Rand is enlisted by the community to fight for their town, and ultimately to become a part of it. Although reluctant at first to be drawn into the fray, when Rand is challenged by an old legal adversary, he assembles a team of first-rate lawyers from Baltimore and takes up the cause. In the course of his stay in St. Michaels, Rand finds not only a sense of peace which had been eluding him, but a woman who convinces him that he can fall in love again.