Shannon McGregor is a widowed mother of four children, living just outside of Tucson, Arizona and has the life others only dream of having. She is a best-selling author and can make a great living doing what she loves most- writing novels. Every area in her life is close to perfect, her writing career could not be better, she enjoys a closeness with her family and lots of friends who adore her. However, her life hasn't always been rosy. Shannon is an adult survivor of vicious and relentless school bullying. How had she risen above it? By moving over a thousand miles away to Arizona to start a new life. When her grandmother back in Thomasville, Tennessee dies suddenly and Shannon inherits her estate, she must return with her children to the home of her youth and make the necessary renovations to the house and sell the property before returning to Arizona. However, upon returning to the tiny town, she learns that the very people who run the town are the same people whom had tormented her in school.

During the summer of 1987, then sixteen-year-old Grace Bradshaw, her younger brother Max, and neighborhood friends befriend Randy Spence, a twenty-one-year-old mentally disabled man with the IQ of a child. Mocked by many in the corrupt small town, Randy is taken under wing and protected by his younger friends while learning hard lessons about the way most people treat those who are different. Along the way, Grace, her brother and younger neighborhood friends also learn shocking lessons about good and evil." A first-person narrative told by a now middle-aged and widowed Grace Bradshaw McGuire to her adult children, "Kids Under the Latch Key" is a heart-touching story of the summer which prompted her to question God and challenged her initial belief that all humans are inherently good.