Army widow Dulcie McDaniel's life has been the consequence of one bad choice after another: each one supposedly leading to a better life, in a better place then where she was floundering. She was a consummate lost soul and now the only place to go was backwards -- home to Locust. Locust was a dead end place to grow up in but she was doomed to return to a place that would ultimately condemn her to a life bereft of any chance of a true family life and happiness: home to a ramshackle house, drunken father, and townsmen who would certainly regard her with disrespect.

Shortly after returning to her father's house with her young daughter Madeline in tow her already shaky world is once again closing in on her. Her father is suspected of murdering the town's most respected citizen and the locals take justice into their own hands in the form of a town lynching. Dulcie is sure her father was innocent but her story falls on deaf ears. Once again she is powerless, moneyless and treated as a piranha. But she has no where to go, she has to work this farm for herself and her daughter. The question is how. The answer seems to arrive out of nowhere in the form of a drifter, Rye Forrester, who is on the surface looking for a place to work for room and board. Desperate for help in working the farm Dulcie disregards her suspicions and gives Rye a chance. Both Dulcie and Rye work diligently keeping a safe distance. They both have scandalous secrets from their past and although a mutual attraction develops it seems they are destined to remain apart.

In A REASON TO BELIEVE, McKade stays true to the historical time of her story when small towns lived and died depending on the infusion of money from wealthy merchants. The families of these wealthy merchants oftentimes became the royalty of the town and if these families were destroyed then the future of the town was in peril. Small towns and small minds is the miscreant in this story. The good guys in the story are quite flawed and seem almost bent on their own destruction. But you have to keep rooting for the good guys even if not really sure who they are. McKade keeps you believing that good will triumph.