Southern Historical Mystery Fiction

By late 1936, the worst years of the Great Depression are over. Wealth has created new opportunities for Minnie: a beautiful home in California, a luxury car, the yearning desire by a handsome lieutenant, and the family’s summer retreat, which draws her like a magnet. Secrets abound. A hidden bohemian community of writers, poets, artists, and escapists is scattered across the shifting coastal dunes near the cottage.

Crime is a rarity in the small town of Wyattsville, so when one occurs it is headline news. Grocery store owner Sidney Klaussner, shot in the course of the robbery, is lying in the hospital unconscious. In the room across from him the young man assumed to be the shooter. Although no one knows the truth of what happened inside that store, Sidney's wife is determined to see the boy punished. The lad's only hope is his sister Jubilee. She knows whey he was there but is anyone going to believe a seven-year-old?

Sharyn McCrumb is the New York Times best-selling author of the Ballad novels, which celebrate the rich history of Appalachia. An elegant saga set against the American Revolution, King' s Mountain features John Sevier and his legendary Carolina Overmountain Men, who find themselves defending their families and farms against the troops of a haughty British major.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

Constantly moving, from South Africa to the Persian Gulf, to Rhodesia, to England, and ultimately to suburban New Jersey, the Laments are a quirky and lovable family who live by the motto "anywhere but here." The main character, Will Lament, whom the Laments take home from the hospital as a result of a bizarre mix-up, grows up feeling that he doesn't belong.