Rural Fiction

Running to Summerpoint to avoid my failed love life may have seemed drastic, but I'd just inherited a house from a distant relative. The timing was perfect, almost like magic. But the cottage is in need of repairs, the place is in the middle of a forest, and I'm not used to small towns. Then I meet my new contractors. Sexy doesn't begin to describe them. The flirting flows easily, and while they're a well-established couple, it seems they may have room for more. Even better, these guys are quickly getting to be a lot more than just friends.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes.

Trevor Benson never intended to move back to New Bern, North Carolina. But when a mortar blast outside the hospital where he worked sent him home from Afghanistan with devastating injuries, the dilapidated cabin he'd inherited from his grandfather seemed as good a place to regroup as any. Tending to his grandfather's beloved beehives, Trevor isn't prepared to fall in love with a local...yet, from their very first encounter, Trevor feels a connection with deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson that he can't ignore.

Joe Winston has a routine with women: He exists; they swoon; roll credits. With his smoldering looks, macho style, and irrepressible charm, Joe can have any woman - except the one he really wants. Secretly, Luna Clark may lust after Joe, but she's made it clear that she's too smart to fall for him. He can just keep holding his breath, thank you very much. But now, Luna's inherited two kids who need more than she alone can give in a small town that seems hell-bent on driving them away. She needs someone to help out...someone who can't be intimidated...someone just like Joe.

Ellen is putting the finishing touches on her granddaughter June's wedding quilt - made from scraps of old dresses, both remembered and forgotten - when June breaks off her engagement and seeks sanctuary at her grandparents' ranch. June's fiance is set to go off to fight in Korea as soon as they're married, but the young bride doesn't think she can go through with it.

Sullivan Bradshaw is in way over his head. A car crash killed his brother, Matthias, and critically injured his sister-in-law. It's Sullivan's turn to care for the couple's six children and the ancestral farm, but the die-hard bachelor and art professor is hardly family-man material. What he needs is the perfect nanny/miracle worker/saint. What he gets is pretty Rumer Truehart, a free spirit who will change everything he ever thought he wanted....

Lorraine Kindred's most cherished memories are of the Surf Ballroom, the place where youth lost themselves to the brassy sounds and magnetic energy of the big band swing, where boys spent their last nights before shipping off to war-and where Lorraine herself was swept away by a star-crossed romance. Returning to the ballroom for the first time in decades, Lorraine enters a dazzling world she thought long vanished.

When Connor Larkin boards a late-night bus in downtown LA, he's not sure where he's going or what he's looking for. Putting his acting career - and his fiancée - on hold, he's searching for something he can't define, a part of himself he lost on the road to success. Once he dreamed of being a singer in the classic style of Sinatra and Bennett. But his lean good looks soon landed him in movies as the sexy bad guy - and in the arms of a famous young heiress. Now, with his wedding day approaching, Connor finds himself stepping into the sleepy seaside town of Miramar Bay.

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary.

Dorothea Benton Frank is a treasure of American letters with numerous New York Times best-sellers to her credit and a portfolio full of critical acclaim. “Mixing high drama and high jinks” ( Booklist), her third Lowcountry novel follows the fortunes of the dysfunctional Abbot family. Looking to set her life aright, Anna Lutz Abbot returns to her South Carolina lowcountry hometown. And as she attempts to right past wrongs, Anna receives help and support from a quirky cast of lovable locals sure to endear themselves to listeners.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.

City girl Calla Fletcher attempts to reconnect with her estranged father, and unwittingly finds herself torn between her desire to return to the bustle of Toronto and a budding relationship with a rugged Alaskan pilot in this masterful new romance from acclaimed author K.A. Tucker.

Attorney Deborah Knott is North Carolina's answer to V.I. Warshawski, a legal sleuth with a knack for sniffing out the most baffling crimes. Deborah has just done the unthinkable: entered the heated race for judge of old-boy-ruled Colleton County. The only female candidate, she's busy reeling in voters and giving campaign speeches. There couldn't be a worse time for Gayle Whitehead to beg Deborah to investigate the 18-year-old unsolved murder of Gayle's mother, Janie.

The time: the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium. The place: an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all - a town where everyone knows everyone else - where dark secrets run through its veins like blood. Everyone knows that 16-year old Mikey Childress is "different." A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he's not like the other boys in Auburn - the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls.

The last place city girl Cecily Kennedy expected to end up was a cattle ranch. But she needs a job—and refuge from her abusive soon-to-be ex-husband. If only her new boss, Austin Wells, would make it clear whether he hates her or wants her. His gaze makes her feel things she hasn't in years. However, getting over her ex by getting under her grumpy boss isn't worth the potential fallout.

In a small Southern town where loyalty to family and to "your people" carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition. After 15 years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored.

A small community tucked deep in the forest, Beartown is home to tough, hardworking people who don’t expect life to be easy or fair. But they’ve always been able to take pride in their local ice hockey team. So it’s a cruel blow when they hear that Beartown ice hockey might soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in the neighboring town of Hed, take in that fact. As the tension mounts between the two adversaries, a newcomer arrives who gives Beartown hockey a surprising new coach and a chance at a comeback.

In the quiet, sunrise-side town of Hampstead, Michigan, Rachel Roberts descends the stairs in her beach house, ready to sit on the back deck, have a glass of wine, and feel the Huron breezes come in from the water as the stars start to glow in the night sky above. But everything changes when she sees headlights coming down her driveway. As the vehicle approaches, she becomes both excited and puzzled. Excited, because the vehicle belongs to her friend, retired Hampstead P.I. Obadiah Ben-David. Puzzled, because she has no idea why he is paying her an evening visit.

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys. Equal parts beauty and terror, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.

Leland Gaunt opens a new shop in Castle Rock called Needful Things. Anyone who enters his store finds the object of his or her lifelong dreams and desires: a prized baseball card, a healing amulet. In addition to a token payment, Gaunt requests that each person perform a little "deed", usually a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from town. These practical jokes cascade out of control, and soon the entire town is doing battle with itself. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn suspects that Gaunt is behind the population's increasingly violent behavior.