Twenty years after breaking her engagement to a prominent Southern blueblood in the wake of her mother's suspicious death, Betts Barrett returns to her home on Bulls Island to fight local developers and faces unexpected and dangerous challenges.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the planes black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only...

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

"New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a hilarious and terrifying new novel that explores the way your past--and your family--can haunt you like nothing else.... Louise's parents have passed away, and she's returning to the small Southern town where she grew up to get their house ready to sell. It means she'll have to spend time with her younger brother-and their old grudges make that a terrifying prospect....

The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.

Set in contemporary small town America, this is the story of Verbena Martin Eckert McHale ("Bena," for short), an indomitable woman who is damned-but not doomed-by the bad behavior and bad luck of her two husbands. When Bena's first husband, Bobby Eckert, dies in a car wreck, she's left with their five children, a little mortgaged house, a little bit of insurance, and a big empty place in her heart. Not to mention that the hole Bobby left is jagged...

"Somewhere in the American South, there is a town where something is very, very wrong. A place where malicious men may die, but malice...never. When Carsten Stroud's previous novel, Niceville, was published, Elmore Leonard wrote: "I hope Mr. Stroud, having had so much fun writing Niceville, listening to his people give him terrific dialogue, is writing a sequel or another one like it." We give you The Homecoming. Kate and Nick Kavanaugh (lawyer and...

Norton critical edition. Includes authoritative text, backgrounds, contexts, and criticism. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons.

The train taking nineteen-year-old teacher Christy Huddleston from her home in Asheville, North Carolina, might as well be transporting her to another world. The Smoky Mountain community of Cutter Gap feels suspended in time, trapped by poverty, superstitions, and century-old traditions. But as Christy struggles to find acceptance in her new home, some see her — and her one-room school — as a threat to their way of life. Her faith is

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Eighteen-year-old Sawyer accepts her estranged grandmother's bribe to live with her for a year, participate in the debutante season and ball, and possibly meet the father she has never known.