Southern Fiction Mystery

Rumford, Kentucky has glowing fields of bluegrass, a fine selection of bourbons, and now a professional pastry chef. Broken-hearted Sophia Cummings has come home from New York City. She's not there a minute before she's charmed into making her high school friend Charlotte's wedding cake. The kitchen at the Rumford Country Club seems perfect until Chef Emile's body is discovered, sprawled near the stove, a cast iron skillet on the floor close by. With one look at the shiny, new pan, Sophia knows it's not Emile's. She offers her knowledge to Sheriff Carter and her talents to the manager.

Your next dose of pitch-black comedy, mystery, and mayhem has arrived as Hap and Leonard find themselves in a vicious and ridiculous situation—just as the best friends may finally be calling it quits. When Hap and Leonard are called in on a strange request (subduing a meth-hopped hog) by a...

A "prophetic, propulsive" tale of one mysterious, messianic child with untold powers who draws three desperate souls into acts of mercy and mayhem. (Scott Blackburn) An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a...

When Charity Penn receives a letter saying she won a trip to Camellia Beach, South Carolina, complete with free cooking lessons at the town's seaside chocolate shop, The Chocolate Box, she's immediately skeptical. She never entered any contest. Her former prep school friend offers to look into the phony prize - only to end up drowned in a vat of chocolate. Struck with guilt, Penn heads to the southern beach town to investigate why he was killed.

Vera Boyett is a master at cracking a case. After tragedy destroyed her career as deputy police chief, she felt lost. Moving back home near her sisters, she put her skills back to use as a crime analyst, and now her star is finally back on the rise. Vera’s work really begins to heat up after the local sheriff, Gray “Bent” Benton, calls to ask her for assistance with a pressing case. Pushing aside their complicated past, Vera agrees to help Bent search for a missing reporter.

When beloved mayor turned state senator Carlton Osborn is found dead on his boat, the prime suspect is the only other person on board: his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Amber Vega. Struggling to restore his self-confidence after a string of personal and professional losses, Spencer Dunn isn’t eager to defend a young woman who is almost certainly guilty yet refuses to follow his legal advice. But once Spencer starts digging, he realizes this case isn’t as simple as the police are making it out to be.

Scandal, scheming, and secrets abound in #1 bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Little White Lies, packed with “page-turning tension, witty humor” (Jennifer L. Armentrout), and “characters as devious as they are southern-belle glamorous" (E. Lockhart). "I'm not saying this is...

As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision. As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further.

Southern girl Verity Long is about as high society as her pet skunk. Which is why she’s surprised as anyone when the new head of the Sugarland social set invites her to join the "it" girls. But this is no social call. Verity’s new client needs her to go in undercover and investigate strange happenings at the group’s historic headquarters. But while spirits are whispering hints of murder, the socialites are more focused on Verity’s 1978, avocado-green Cadillac. And when Verity stumbles upon a fresh body, she's going to need the long-dead citizens of Sugarland to help her solve the crime.

With this critically acclaimed debut collection, Frank Bill announces himself as an author of fiercely defined vision. In these vivid tales, Bill’s southern Indiana proves a literary destination of immense nuance, even as his mostly working-class characters cry out in voices that cannot be denied.

James Henry, a kind-hearted professor of English literature, is forced to move back home to Quincy's Gap, a tiny town in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, to care for his aging father. Shortly after moving into a house that hasn't changed since his childhood, the overweight, divorced, book-loving cheese puff addict accepts a position as head librarian and joins a supper club for dieters who call themselves the "Flab Five". Avoiding carbs is almost impossible in this deep-fried, all-you-can-eat Southern town.

Andy Buckland has always dreamed of being a chef. But after a live studio audience is stricken with food poisoning during her debut cooking show, she finds herself blacklisted in the culinary community. The only job open to her is working in her family's Southern pasta shop, and her first assignment is serving baked ziti to her former lover and his spoiled bride-to-be at their engagement party! But that's the least of Andy's troubles when she discovers a dead body. Andy will prove that she has what it takes to not only cook the best dish in town but also catch a killer, too!

When Dr. Alala Diakos, a visiting professor of Greek literature, comes to teach at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, it doesn't take long for controversy to follow. With her fervent feminist ideals and revolutionary leanings, she quickly earns the admiration of many - and the ire of others. During a speech in the park, in which Alala tries to organize the women of Zinnia to demand equal pay, the crowd gets unruly, with men heckling the professor. And then PI Sarah Booth Delaney finds a sniper rifle and scope in the bushes....

When her husband dies unexpectedly, Maggie Royal is struck with sinister visions that foretell danger for her and for her five-year-old daughter. Her mother and grandmother were said to have “the sight,” but it was never like this. With no one alive to turn to, Maggie must move quickly to uncover the meaning of her visions before her candle is snuffed out.

In this new series by number one best-selling—and critically acclaimed—mystery and suspense author Kate Bold, Camille Grace, a rising star in the FBI’s BAU unit, is dispatched to the one place she vowed to never return: the deep South. When bodies turn up on steamboats on the Mississippi River, Camille realizes she is up against a diabolical serial killer—one who will not stop until she finds him.

Max and Sandra Porter have encountered many frightening things in North Carolina, encounters that left them broke and broken. Now, just as Max and Sandra are getting their lives back together, they meet a pregnant woman convinced her house is trying to possess her baby. But this is no ordinary haunted house. Every avenue they investigate leads Max to the same daunting conclusion - there is no ghost doing the haunting. Yet something supernatural clearly is involved.

It's the week before Christmas, and antiques dealer Weezie Foley is in a frenzy to deck out her shop for the Savannah historical district decorating contest, which she intends to win. Weezie is ready to shoot herself with her glue gun by the time she's done, but the results are stunning. She's certainly one-upped the owners of the trendy shop around the corner, but suddenly things start to go missing from her display and there seems to be an uninvited midnight visitor to her shop.

One hot, sticky summer in Bledsoe, Georgia, twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker stumbles across a stilt house in a neighboring marsh and upon Andy Webber, a boy about her age. He and his father have recently moved back to Georgia from California, and rumors of the suspicious drowning death of Andy’s mother years earlier have chased them there and back. Kay is fascinated and enamored with Andy, and she doesn’t listen when her father tells her to stay away from the Webbers.

After a hurricane attacks the Crystal Coast, Ruby Mae Jewell, along with her friends and family, will have to deal with more than just the wreckage of harsh weather. When history of the notorious pirate Captain "Bonny" Ann Bonnet catches up to the present, murder and mystery soon follow. Rue discovers that the storm and the discovery of her ship right off the shores of her home area are no coincidence, and she must race to claim the cursed treasure before anyone else gets hurt. Sounds like a good time to call in her friend Charli Goodwin from Honeysuckle Hollow.

Emma Lee Raines, proprietor of a small-town Kentucky funeral home, Eternal Slumber, is a "Betweener". She helps ghosts stuck between here and the ever-after-only murdered ghosts. After Emma Lee solves who murdered them, only then can they cross over to the Great Beyond, Big Guy in the Sky. Emma Lee is up against a cold case that happened before she'd even gotten her "Betweener" gift.