Rural Small Town Fiction

The Jock. The Gamer. The Outsider. The Goth. The Overachiever. They don't get along at all. They'll have to set aside their differences to make the movie for their class's final project, or risk failing. But there's more to these kids than their stereotypes. Jay, the gamer, is working with his former science teacher on a very troubling scientific device. Brittany, the overachiever, hides a dark and deadly secret. And Cassandra, the goth, has a little sister with paranormal abilities.

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.

Dakota Jones is the second youngest of four children who had a difficult upbringing living with parents who struggle with mental illness. He escaped his family as soon as he could by joining the military. Now, after several tours of duty he has been discharged. He has nowhere to go and no solid plans for the future. Refusing to return home to his parents he arrives in Sullivan's Crossing where his brother Cal and sister Sierra have each experienced the healing power of the place and its people. Nestled at the crossroads of the Colorado and Continental Divide Trails, the area attracts those looking for answers or direction or a new lease on life. Dakota will come to terms with his less-than-perfect family and will plant the roots he's never had.

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.

An all-expenses-paid autumn break in the mountains at a luxury art retreat? As a broke single mom, I can't believe my luck. Until my boss's whirlwind son crashes my private cabin. Charlie is my work problem, the rockstar Creative Director with a Kickstarter addiction and a charmed life. The man I can't stand… or stop thinking about. For two years, I've hidden my feelings. But as we explore the experimental art classes, small-town magic, and the wilderness, truths are exposed. Heat turns up and fake dating turns real.

Wanted: Midwife/nurse practitioner in Virgin River, population 600. Make a difference against a backdrop of towering California redwoods and crystal clear rivers. Rent-free cabin included. When the recently widowed Melinda Monroe sees this ad, she quickly decides that the remote mountain town of Virgin River might be the perfect place to escape her heartache and to reenergize the nursing career she loves. But her high hopes are dashed within an hour of arriving - the cabin is a dump, the roads are treacherous, and the local doctor wants nothing to do with her.

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano.

Welcome to Travers Corners, a dusty Montana town, where nothing much has happened since Herbert Hoover stopped for gas. Travers Corners, like most small towns, has no newspaper, no radio station; but here, large trout - no better than large trout, fictitious trout - await the angler. And apart from spreading gossip outside the McCraken’s General Store, the residents of Travers Corners love nothing more than fly fishing. Scott Waldie’s delightful cast of characters breathes life into this tiny, out-of-the-way town.

I thought I knew who I was, until I accidentally discovered my adoring parents' biggest secret on my twenty-fifth birthday. I am adopted. Part of me is missing, and I set out to find it. Trying to figure out the past piece by piece, I bought a little fixer-upper in the small town I was given up in. Old lies will come out. Secrets that everyone is trying to keep buried. Who am I really?

It is 1939, with the world on the brink of global war, when Constable Hotchkiss confronts the spoiled, narcissistic man-child Ernie Sickert about a rash of disturbing pranks in their small prairie town. Outraged and cornered, Ernie commits an act of unspeakable violence, setting in motion a course of events that will change forever the lives of all in his wake.

In a North Carolina mountain town filled with moonshine and rotten husbands, Sadie Blue is only the latest girl to face a dead-end future at the mercy of a dangerous drunk. She's been married to Roy Tupkin for 15 days, and she knows now that she should have listened to the folks who said he was trouble. But when a stranger sweeps in and knocks the world off-kilter for everyone in town, Sadie begins to think there might be more to life than being Roy's wife.

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.

The Nomination is a fast-paced action and suspense thriller that brings events from the final days of the Vietnam War into direct conflict with contemporary American politics. Vietnam War hero and Massachusetts Judge Thomas Larrigan is hand-picked by his friend the president to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court. Larrigan seems like the perfect candidate: a family man with an uncontroversial judicial record. The president's credibility needs a sure bet. Larrigan will do anything to win the nomination, but he has some old skeletons rattling around in his closet. He calls his old Marine buddy, now a hit man, to sweep the closet clean.

My father is back from the dead. He won't leave town without me, and no one can figure out why. Is it because of what I am? Does he want to use me as part of his religious cult? My mates are furious, and I can't help but feel like I have brought this trouble on them. The supernatural community is upset by the light I've brought on them with the rightful murder of my mother and Jed. My classmates have been swayed by the cruel rumors that my bully has put out. Worst of all? The boys keep saying I can shift, but I've had no luck. And what is this about a possible mating heat?

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

I should've married my childhood best friend, but I chose another man. Now I'm a single mom, back in my hometown, trying to make ends meet, and my ex-bestie is my new boss. The moment our eyes meet, I know I'm the last woman on earth Nash McCreedy wants to see. Now we're forced to work together and face old memories I've avoided for years. Everywhere I look, he's there, and it doesn't help that he's the only man I've ever loved. I ignore him and the bubbling feelings for as long as I can, but fail.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the lush countryside, this novel's intriguing protagonists—a reclusive wildlife biologist, a young farmer's wife marooned far from home, and a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors—face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.

Laid off from her department store job, Carmen has perilously little cash and few options. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia, in Sofia’s perfect house with her perfect children and her perfectly ordered yuppie life, does not appeal. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there, either. But Sofia has yet another baby on the way, a mother desperate to see her daughters get along, and a client who needs help revitalizing his shabby old bookshop. So Carmen moves in and takes the job.

Montgavin Township will never be the same when one night changes the lives of six people. The course of their lives and the trajectory of the town sets them on a collision course for disaster.

At Cold Mountain Penitentiary, the convicted killers on E Block await their turn to walk the Green Mile and keep a date with the electric chair. Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working as a guard on the Mile, but he's never met anyone like John Coffey.