When Sandy Holston is on dry land, she’s nothing special: a nurse who wears her hair in a ponytail and prefers a fishing lure as an earring. But once she dons waders, picks up a fly rod, and steps into a river, she becomes a remarkable, elegant fisherwoman who’s at peace with the world.

After surviving her marriage to Vernon - her violent, incarcerated ex-husband - peace is just what Sandy needs. So she moves to Damascus, a small town on the Ripshin River, where she plans to enjoy the fishing and the solitude. Finally she is on the brink of a life she desires in a place she loves. But as the Ripshin’s trout mysteriously die off, and as Sandy grows closer to a reclusive neighbor who has a propensity for fishing naked, her plans are put in jeopardy. Will Sandy be able to find peace - in the river or out - once Vernon is released from prison and fulfills his promise to hunt her down?

In her day job as a nurse, Sandy Holston cares for the elderly and the sick, even as she is haunted by her own questionable past and the deaths that marked it. Her true self resides among the mountain trout streams of her Appalachian home, where she wields her fly rod with uncanny accuracy as her life plays out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. But then the Ripshin River threatens to flood. Sandy can no longer deny that dementia has taken hold in James Keefe, her older sometimes-lover. An elusive eastern mountain lion appears. And when a predatory survivalist keeping a solitary camp by the headwaters arrives, he poses the biggest threat of all. His merciless pursuit of the lion brings him ever closer to Sandy, triggering her final, tragic attempt to preserve her connections with Keefe, the headwaters, and all that she has, at last, come to love. In Yellow Stonefly—a rare fly fishing novel with a female protagonist—Tim Poland weaves suspense and introspection into an unforgettable read, at once mournful and bracing.