Showing titles in Southern

On her wedding day 10 years ago, Lena Donohue experienced a betrayal so painful that she fled the small town of Watersend, South Carolina, and reinvented herself in New York City. Though now a freelance travel writer, the one place she rarely goes is home - until she learns of her dad's failing health. Returning to Watersend means seeing the sister she has avoided for a decade and the brother who runs their family's Irish pub - and who has borne the burden of his sisters' rift.

Even a year removed from living in the bayou, Ruby still wonders at the splendor of her family’s New Orleans mansion. She rejoices in the love of the father she had never known, even as true happiness remains as elusive as swamp mist. Her stepmother sneers at her backwater upbringing, and while discovering she has a twin sister should be a cause for joy, Gisselle has greeted Ruby with nothing but a bitter heart.

Lola Ellis has a picture-perfect life. Until she doesn't. On her way to Florida to open a new branch of the family business and meet her fiancé, she unexpectedly detours to visit her best friend in Durham, North Carolina. What was meant to be a week of rest and relaxation stretches into a permanent TBD. Will English is an uptight, arrogant bartender who keeps scaring away waitresses. When Lola takes a job at his bar to fill her time, he decides not to engage with the underqualified waitress. And yet there's something about her that keeps him from dismissing her.

It’s taken Chef Josie Babineaux six months to reconcile the debts left from her husband Brian’s gambling along with her broken heart. But now with a promising tourist season heating up and a travel magazine declaring her the spice queen of the bayou, she may be able to save her family’s historic Cajun restaurant. Repairing her relationship with her daughter, Minnow, while hiding the true reason she left her husband is a bigger issue.

Divorced and disillusioned about relationships, Theresa Osborne is jogging when she finds a bottle on the beach. Inside is a letter of love and longing to "Catherine", signed simply "Garrett". Challenged by the mystery and pulled by emotions she doesn't fully understand, Theresa begins a search for this man that will change her life. What happens to her is unexpected, perhaps miraculous - an encounter that embraces all our hopes for finding someone special, for having a love that is timeless and everlasting....

Award-winning author Wanda Morris returns with a powerful, haunting thriller following a lawyer who after the mysterious disappearance of a local landowner and the death of his sister just months before, uncovers a conspiracy that dates back to Reconstruction and persists in half the United States today.

In 2004, Rosemarie, Ada, Caroline, and Kasey are in their final days of high school and on the precipice of all the things teenagers look forward to when anything in life seems possible . . . from falling in love, to finding their dream jobs, to becoming who they were meant to be. In 2019, Kasey has returned to her small Southern hometown of Goldie for the first time since high school—and she still hasn’t told even her closest friends the truth of what really happened that summer after graduation, or what made her leave so abruptly without looking back.

Avery Keller arrives in Magnolia, North Carolina, with one aim: collect her inheritance and quickly put the quirky town in her rearview mirror. But the father who didn’t acknowledge her when he was alive has left Avery a mess to sort through - along with two half-sisters she’s never met and a gorgeous single dad living next door. Soon, her plan to keep this colorful, close-knit community at a distance gets complicated....

Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town.

Acclimating to a whole new world, Ellie meets a lonely but intriguing Cajun fisherman named Raphe who introduces her to the legendary white alligator that haunts these waters. Raphe and Ellie have barely found their way to each other when a huge bounty is offered for the elusive gator, bringing about a shocking turn of events that will test their love and their will to right a terrible wrong.

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

The Russell women have always lived in a house that is as special as they are—a century-old Victorian with a radio that tunes itself to the listener’s mood and a pantry that rearranges to provide just the right ingredients for any baking need. Lilith Russell was the exception. She left the family home in Ivy Ridge, Georgia, and has been flitting like a hummingbird from place to place with her daughter, Mattie, in the decades since, only returning each summer to drop Mattie off with Lilith’s sister, Penelope.

At thirty-two, Jillian Parrish finally finds the courage to put herself in the driver’s seat of her life. Pregnant and recently divorced, she and her seven-year-old daughter find refuge and solace on Pawleys Island, South Carolina—Jillian’s only source of happy childhood memories. Summers spent at her grandmother’s beach house had been Jillian’s sanctuary from indifferent parents—until her best friend Lauren Mills disappeared, never to be found.

At 38, garden shop owner Jessie McBride thinks her chances for romance are years behind her, and after her failed marriage, she’s fine with that. She lives contentedly with her fiery mother and her quiet, headstrong daughter. But the unexpected arrival of two men on Glory Road make her question if she’s really happy with the status quo. Handsome, wealthy Sumner Tate asks her to arrange flowers for his daughter’s wedding, and Jessie finds herself drawn to his continued attention. And Ben Bradley, her lingering what-could-have-been, moves back to the red dirt road.

Three long years after the world Fell, Wildcat Leander Calloway Toler, a deputized lawman—or what passes for one in this Fallen World—finds himself being pursued across the Appalachian wastes with the daughter of a wealthy businessman in tow. Trapped and outgunned, Leander learns that those who took his family and left him for dead in the chaotic days after the Fall have returned. Infuriated by the bureaucracy of a corrupt system, Leander decides to take matters into his own hands and recruits a team of loyal companions.

After starting fresh as a nurse in Brentwood, Tennessee, Nora Dawson forges a powerful and unlikely bond with an elderly resident of the nursing home where she works. And soon, he opens up about his experiences as a soldier in World War II — and the devastating twist of fate that changed everything.

Carter University: “The Harvard of the South.” Annie Stoddard was the smartest girl in her small public high school in Georgia, but now that she’s at Carter, it feels like she’s got “Scholarship Student” written on her forehead. Bea Powers put aside misgivings about attending college in the South as a biracial student to take part in Carter’s Justice Scholars program. Their lives - and barista Stayja York's - intersect unexpectedly when Annie accuses fourth-year student Tyler Brand of sexual assault, and Bea is assigned as Tyler’s student advocate.

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.

Callahan Garrity is the owner of House Mouse, a cleaning service that tidies up after Atlanta's elite. She's also a former cop and a part-time sleuth. She and her coterie of devoted helpers can ransack a house for clues faster than it takes a fingerprint to set. Some people might call Callahan Garrity nosy, but she prefers to think of her tendency toward snooping as a healthy interest in the truth. So when news reaches her of her cousin Patti's death during a carjacking, Callahan shakes off her House Mouse cleaning uniform to don her detective's cap.

Molly Bell Redwine was raised to believe that nothing is more important than "The Family". But everything Molly values is challenged when her domineering mother dies, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and her Atlanta family scatters to the four winds. She takes refuge by visiting friends in Martha's Vineyard, a very different world that hastens her changing identity.