The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around—fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson—a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward—the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major

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Moving to rural Georgia, a failed academic plans to write a history of his family's old plantation and the horrors that occurred there but instead discovers a sense of unspoken dread among the townspeople and a long-standing debt of blood.

Southern housewife Linwood Breedlove Scott was happily content in her comfortable, complacent thirty-year marriage, but when her husband cleans out their bank accounts and runs off with a stripper, her life takes a hilarious, yet touching, right turn into reality. With no place to go but home, she's forced back to her insular hometown and the "eccentric" family she escaped by marrying at nineteen: her senile father, her loving-yet-controlling mother,...

There's no police training stronger than a cop's instinct.

Faith Mitchell's mother isn't answering her phone. Her front door is open. There's a bloodstain above the knob. Everything Faith learned in the academy goes out the window when she charges into her mother's house, gun drawn. She sees a man dead in the laundry room, a hostage situation in the bedroom. What she doesn't see is her mother. When the hostage situation turns deadly, Faith

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Saturday night dates at the skating rink have been a tradition in the small southern town of Heartsdale for as long as anyone can remember, but when a teenage quarrel explodes into a deadly shoot-out, Sara Linton-the town's pediatrician and medical examiner-finds herself entangled in a terrible tragedy. What seemed at first to be a horrific but individual catastrophe proves to have wider implications. The autopsy reveals evidence of long-term abuse,...

The mutilation murder of a young college professor paralyzes a tiny Georgian community. This hideous crime is the worst thing small-town pediatrician and coroner Sara Linton has ever seen--but only when the autopsy is complete is the intricate, terrible genius of a profoundly twisted psychopath truly revealed. As Sara's ex-husband--Heartsdale police chief Jeffrey Tolliver--pursues an elusive fiend, the victim's sister and the county's only detective,...

Two armed men enter the police station in tiny Heartsdale, Georgia, and open fire. When the shooting stops, an officer is dead, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver is seriously wounded, and the survivors-including a class of grade-school children and medical examiner Sara Linton-are held hostage. In a tense standoff that could erupt at any moment into more bloodletting-with her ex-husband on the threshold of death-Sara must search for answers and an escape...

Single mom Shandi Pierce's life takes a turn when an enigmatic geneticist saves her and her 3-year-old genius son from an armed robber. "At twenty-one, Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Natty, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Catholic mother and Jewish father. She's got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station...

For years twelve-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille, a woman trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. When Camille is killed by a truck, CeeCee's previously unknown great-aunt, Tootie Caldwell, whisks CeeCee away to Savannah, a world seemingly run entirely by women. These exotic women keep CeeCee enthralled for an entire summer.