Southern Fiction Thrillers

A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not just a murder case: it's a powder keg. Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later, the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander's case?

Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.

Aspiring author Graye Templeton will do anything to escape the horrific childhood crime that haunts her. After a life lived in shadows, she’s accepted a new job as protégé to Laura West, influential book blogger and wife of an acclaimed novelist. Laura’s connections could make Graye’s publishing dreams a reality. But there’s more to Laura than meets the eye. Behind the veneer of a charmed life, Laura’s marriage is collapsing. Her once-lauded husband is descending into alcoholism and ruin and bringing Laura nearer to the edge.

Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist... until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.

Southern belle Verity Long is back in business - as a ghost hunter. Now all she has to do is visit the town's creepiest mansion and exorcise a family of vengeful spirits. Piece of cake. After all, ghosts love her and need her...that is until she meets the ghosts of Rock Fall mansion. They'll do anything to keep their murderous secrets hidden within the cliffside fortress - even if that means getting rid of one meddling ghost hunter.

Retired school teacher Patricia Anne has a knack for landing right in the middle of murder investigations, but this time she is fighting to clear the accused. Patricia Anne has been good friends with her neighbor Mitzi for 40 years. She’s surprised when she sees Mitzi’s husband Arthur having lunch at the Hunan Hut with an attractive woman. She’s positively shocked when that same woman drops dead moments later. Then Arthur is accused of murder, their home catches fire, and he gets shot in the butt.

Tis the season...for ghosts. Verity Long has come to terms with the fact that she can see spirits, and talk to them, and...she's actually making cookies for one of them. But she's drawing the line at any more ghost hunting or mystery solving. Until a dear friend needs help locating a missing antique at the party of the year. Not one to leave a friend in need, Verity straps on her sparkly heels and sneaks in to see what she can find - only to uncover a startling secret that will change everything.

Mae West is getting settled into the RV lifestyle as the owner of a Happy Trails Campground in Normal, Kentucky. Betts Hager is desperate for help with her cleaning business, and Mae offers her services. Heiress Tammy Jo Bentley's mansion is the first one on her schedule, and Mae makes sure Tammy Jo's house is spotless because the Kentucky Kennel Association's annual meeting is going to be held at the mansion. Fifi, Tammy Jo's high pedigree, insured poodle, is going to be on display, but before the annual meeting, Camille Braun, Fifi's nanny, is stabbed to death.

Key West is paradise - unless you're the dead woman in the Toucan Suite. The Hemingway cats, Megs and Bartholomew, who wander the grounds of the B&B, think Liberty Anderson was a spy. But spying on whom? And why? Trouble, the black cat detective, must decipher their cryptic communications and piece together a motive for murder.

When it comes to solving cold cases, nothing is ever cut and dried…. Quilter Beatrice Coleman is enjoying the sleepy peace of a tranquil afternoon…until it’s interrupted by her friend, Miss Sissy. The elderly lady is making wild claims about narrowly escaping an intruder. And intruders are unusual in tiny Dappled Hills.

Trapped in a dead-end town, Justin Warren has had his life defined by the suspicious deaths of his grandparents. The unsolved crime happened long before Justin was born, but the ripple effects are still felt after thirty-eight years. Justin always knew he wouldn’t have much of a future. He just never imagined that his life might take him backward.

It's Labor Day weekend in Normal, KY, and if you know anything about camping and RVing, you know it's one of the busiest times of the year. Unfortunately, Daniel Boone National Park is in danger of being closed due to a drought and local businesses are scrambling for ideas to survive a possible shutdown. Happy Trails Campground is at the center of a murder in which campers as well as locals are suspects.

Maggie Crozat, proprietor of a historic Cajun Country B&B, prefers to let the good times roll. But hard times rock her hostelry when a new cell phone app makes it easy for locals to rent their spare rooms to tourists. With October-and Halloween-approaching, she conjures up a witch-crafty marketing scheme to draw visitors to Pelican, Louisiana.

After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southside Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this remote land of tobacco plantations, razed forests, and boarded up homes seems stuck in the past in a state that is trying to forget its complex history and move on.

When a quilting event falls to pieces, Beatrice works to patch things up. Dappled Hills quilters are eagerly anticipating new events at the Patchwork Cottage quilt shop. The shop’s owner, Posy, has announced "Sew and Tell" socials and a mystery quilt group project. But one day, instead of emailed quilt instructions, the quilters receive a disturbing message about a fellow quilter. When that quilter mysteriously meets her maker, Beatrice decides to use her sleuthing skills to find the killer before more lives are cut short.

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. When Callahan Garrity gets caught in a liquor store holdup on the way home from a St. Paddy’s Day party, one of her best friends is shot.

Marine biologist Doc Ford has been known to help his friends out of jams occasionally, but he's never faced a situation like this. His old pal Carl Fitzpatrick has been chasing sunken wrecks most of his life, but now he's run afoul of the Florida Division of Historical Resources. Its director, Leonard Nickelby, despises amateur archaeologists, which is bad enough, but now he and his young "assistant" have disappeared - along with Fitzpatrick's impounded cache of rare Spanish coins and the list of uncharted wreck sites Fitz spent decades putting together.

The sleepy little farm that Laurel Early grew up on has awakened. The woods are shifting, the soil is dead under her hands, and her bone pile just stood up and walked away. After dropping out of college, all she wanted was to resume her life as a tobacco hand and taxidermist and try not to think about the boy she can’t help but love. Instead, a devil from her past has returned to court her, as he did her late mother years earlier. Now, Laurel must unravel her mother’s legacy and tap into her own innate magic before her future and the fate of everyone she loves is doomed.

Crime analyst and newly disgraced deputy police chief Vera Boyett doesn’t visit home often, and she certainly doesn’t venture back into the cave on her family land. But when the remains of her long-missing stepmother are discovered, Vera will have to face a past that threatens all she is. She and her sister Eve had a fairy-tale childhood: good until it was tragic, with a stepmother they never found a bond with. At least they had each other, a baby half-sister, and a mutual devotion that would have them do the unthinkable.

They're out there, under the salt: the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors' images. Years later, Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia sheriff's office, finds himself and his family at serious risk, stalked for his knowledge of a watery burial ground by a mysterious man.