This book finds both Hannah Norcroft and Colleen Pinser struggling to deal with elderly parents affected by dementia and alcoholism. Hannah's mother has been found wandering confused along the beach near her home, and Colleen can no longer quietly clean up after her father's alcoholic binges. The two women bump into each other at The Lodge, the town's only old age home, where they have reluctantly come to settle their respective parents. While they haven't seen each other for decades, Colleen and Hannah are linked by the events of one summer forty years before. It was during the summer of 1955, when they were naïve fifteen-year-olds working at Franklin's Britannia Hotel, that they witnessed the murder of the hotel's gentle caretaker, Charlie. Neither of them has ever spoken of what happened. When a local reporter begins to chronicle the Britannia's history, Charlie's mysterious unsolved death once again comes to light. For Hannah and Colleen, the mistakes of the past forty years can't be truly forgiven, but they can make a kind of peace with the past. In That Summer in Franklin, Hutsell-Manning captures the grief in caring for an elderly parent, and the regrets of middle-age and past mistakes. But her characters also find hope as they rediscover joy in relationships they'd come to take for granted, and that new beginnings can happen at any time of life.