A mysterious young woman called Jane appears in a small New England town. She claims a fragmentary memory of growing up in this place, yet she has never been here before in her life. Searching for an explanation, she arrives at the unthinkable: that she is somehow connected to a beautiful girl who disappeared from the town in 1853. Is she recalling a past life? Jane becomes convinced of it. As she presses onward to find out what happened in this town over 150 years ago, strange and alarming things begin happening to some of the town's inhabitants. A thunderhead of karmic justice gathers over the village as Jane's memories reawaken piece by piece. They carry her back in time to a long-buried secret, while the townspeople hurtle forward to a horrific event when past and present fatally collide.

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"An eerie story that not only kept me guessing but kept me up at night. Sarah Kernochan delivers a quirky tale with the perfect amount of creepiness, intrigue, and small town New England politics. A perfect choice for book clubs."

Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader and Map of True Places

"Sarah Kernochan's profoundly modern story of the vengeful reincarnation of a young 19th century New England woman is sly, terrifying, witty, perverse, seductive and thoroughly satisfying."  

Rafael Yglesias, author of A Happy Marriage

"In Jane Was Here Sarah Kernochan demonstrates she knows how to cast a spell in prose that is haunting, elegant and seductive."

Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars

"Sarah Kernochan's ghost thriller holds you tight in the grip of one question all the way to the final, chilling answer. Jane Was Here is not a Whodunit but the first Whoisit?"

Joan Juliet Buck, author of Daughter of the Swan

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"The hippest, raunchiest (book) I've read in a long time...a riotous caper. Kernochan has captured her characters' language and psyches with a fierce fidelity...unhackneyed integrity...incorrigible chutzpah. A gem of a novel!"
- MS Magazine.

"Lorelei Lee would blush. The once upon a time girl whose 'heart-belongs-to-daddy' would faint. Moving into the sexual arena already inhabited by Rosalyn Drexler, Gael Greene and Erica Jong, this first novelist serves up some of the raunchiest, most explicit sex scenes yet...Ferociously funny, the tall tales our anti-heroines spin put Paul Bunyan to shame. Kernochan is someone to watch."
- Barbara Bannon, Publishers Weekly

Synopsis: An older con woman initiates a younger into the art of the "dry hustle," the science of extracting money from men for sexual favors which are never delivered. Like a road movie, the novel traces the two bunco artists as they "dry-hustle" their way across America. Kernochan based the two main characters on a pair of actual women she discovered working their scam out of a dance hall in New York's Times Square area.