The Honey Thief  is a contemporary novel about a woman and child who find that they can’t move ahead with the future until they can look clearly at the past.  The summer that eleven-year-old Eva is picked up on her fourth shoplifting charge, her mother, Miriam, decides that the only solution is to move from Manhattan to a quiet town in upstate New York.  There, she tells Eva, they can have a “normal” life.  But what Miriam doesn’t tell her daughter, or anyone else, is that Eva’s stealing scares her for a different reason, one related to a past she has been trying to ignore.  As tensions mount between mother and daughter, it is, oddly enough, Eva’s secret friendship with Burl--a reclusive beekeeper who lives down the road--that ultimately helps the two find their way back to each other.  The Honey Thief  is a pyschological novel about the shadow the past casts on the present, the workings of memory and desire, and the healing powers of unexpected friendship.