Showing results by narrator "Debra Monk" in All Categories

Crippled by lupus at 25, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend....

For the first time, critically acclaimed, New York Times best-selling suspense master J.A. Jance brings together her two most beloved creations: Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady and Seattle investigator J.P. Beaumont.

Juggling a family and a career is never easy - and it's becoming a real challenge for Sheriff Joanna Brady. Coping with the impending delivery of her second child as well as a staff shortage, the last things Joanna needs are two serious crimes. First, the body of an unidentified man is found in the desert, all of his fingers savagely severed. Following the scant clues, Joanna learns that the victim was an ex-con who had served 20 years in prison after confessing to the murder of his pregnant wife. During his last days, he was seen following and photographing a young woman.

In a suburban Atlanta neighborhood where divorce is as rampant as kudzu, Mary Bliss McGowan doesn't notice that her own marriage is in trouble until the summer night she finds a note from her husband, telling her he's gone. Stunned and humiliated, a desperate Mary Bliss, left behind with 17-year-old daughter Erin and a mountain of debt, decides to salvage what's left of her life by telling one little bitty lie.

For Sheriff Joanna Brady and her 12-year-old daughter Jenny, an innocent Girl Scout campout turns into a lethal game when Jenny and her tentmate, Dora Matthews, discover a murdered Phoenix woman.

Major Holly Barker, the army brat daughter of a master sergeant, has been forced into early retirement at the age of 37 as the result of a scandalous sexual harassment case. With the help of her dad, she makes the move to civilian life, becoming deputy chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida. But below the surface of this sleepy, well-to-do coastal island town lies a web of evil and deceit that escalates when a colleague and another associate are brutally gunned down.

Virginia native Lee Smith has won two O. Henry Awards, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for her engaging works. A collection of 14 tales - both new stories and previously published favorites - Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger is sure to delight listeners with its warm humor and unforgettable characters.

Sheriff Joanna Brady seeks an elusive and chillingly brutal killer whose crimes run deep into the past in the next New York Times best seller from the author of Partner in Crime.

It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill - a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine - where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God.

It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen brings her two children to Vinegar Hill, the home of her in-laws. It's a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine. Calculated cruelty is a way of life there, preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God.

Pay It Forward is a wondrous and moving story about Trevor McKinney, a 12-year-old boy in a small California town who accepts the challenge that his teacher gives his class, a chance to earn extra credit by coming up with a plan to change the world for the better - and to put that plan into action.

In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots.

Caroline "Caro" Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a rich husband. So what if she drinks a little too much and has a less-than-perfect marriage? She's doing what she was born to do: be the chatelaine of a magnificent home and hostess to her husband's wealthy friends and clients.

At 12, Peyton McKenzie isn't ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone Nora, her redheaded, cigarette-smoking cousin who just rolled into town behind the wheel of a pink Thunderbird. But her father seems to like Nora, and she does make for good conversation with her friends at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which means she can't be all bad. In fact, maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

A best-selling author of books for adults and children, Mark Childress pens his most outrageous work yet with Georgia Bottoms. The titular heroine is the epitome of the church-going Southern belle, except for one teeny-tiny aspect of her life. Georgia’s family inheritance has long since evaporated, and to maintain her genteel lifestyle, Miss Bottoms has taken six affluent lovers—the fly in the ointment being that one is a married preacher who’s about to reveal their infidelity to the whole congregation.

In The Long Journey Home, their mother, Margaret Robison, finally gets to tell her side of the story, which is more nuanced and poignant than one would ever imagine. Beginning with her childhood in southern Georgia, with its façade of 1950s propriety masking all sorts of recognizable demons (alcoholism, sexual repression, misogyny, suicide, and disease) up until her mental breakdown and, in recent years, her recovery from her massive stroke, The Long Journey Home is Robison's attempt to make sense of a complicated, often tortured, and complex American life.

The fiction of Rick Bass has been honored with O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nashville Chrome presents Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown, a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959’s country music charts. The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.