Small States

When Jerry returned to his hometown of Perfect, he was upset to learn that the local bowling alley, where his father had worked and where he spent time as a child, was gone. Asking friends what had happened, Jerry discovered that in a town like Perfect, everyone has a story to tell, even if they are all different.

Buck, government name Michael Fineday, Ojibwe name Miskwa’ doden (Red Deer), is on the brink of suicide. He has just been served divorce papers by his wife, Naomi, who is fed up with his savior complex and the danger it often attracts to their door. Living on the border of Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community reservation, Buck makes a living as a boatbuilder and carpenter. He spends his days alone, trying to win the trust of a feral cat … until a semi-feral girl shows up, fascinated by the canoe Buck is building.

"Viva Lost Vegas" is the sixth book in the Chloe Boston Cozy Mystery Series. The path of true love is often rocky, but Chloe and Alex are trying to smooth the way by eloping to Las Vegas. On the way, they take a detour through a ghost town and find a body in a pink Cadillac. Someone is killing Elvis impersonators. Will they be hearing funeral bells or chapel bells on their wedding day?

Barney Dwyer is a gentle giant who has yet to find a place in the world. Capturing two notorious outlaws has made a hero of him, so much so that rancher Robert Parmelee offers him a job on his ranch to put a stop to persistent rustling. Taking the job promises an income sufficient for Barney to marry his sweetheart. But this promise for the future falls into jeopardy when the outlaws escape, determined to kill Barney.

Chicken Liver Blues is an inimitable collection of twelve stories that at times barrels and swerves down rural backroads kicking up gravel and dust in its wake, and other moments it’s a calm late-night country cruise that soaks up the stars, the moon, and the heavens while contemplating the meaning of life. In TWENTY DOLLARS, a working-class man whose marriage is on the brink of unraveling is convinced to go out for another night of drinking, but this time his night out with the guys changes his life in more ways than one. BLUESMAN OF THE WOODS involves a young guitar rambler and his ...

In this continuation of the Southern Roads series, Dr. Jay Cross is worried things are getting serious between Rachel Hutchins and Barry Devine, and decides if he's going to land the brainy beauty, he's going to have to up his game. So Jay approaches the three Armstrong brothers, all of them strapping ex-military men, and asks them to make him over from a small-framed British intellect into an alpha male Southern boy who will get Rachel's attention. The brothers agree and are determined to make a southern man out of him, but will all the sweat and humiliation be a waste of time?

Lew Sherry and Pete Lang accept an offer they simply can't resist. Oliver Wilton is willing to pay the cowboys $1,000 a day for ten days to protect him from danger that has him living in a state of terror. A seafaring man has arrived at the inn in town and has made no secret of the fact that he's come to settle a score with Wilton.

Neal Burgess, a semi-retired, middle-aged computer analyst from California, had just cashed in from a start-up company he helped bring to life. He bought the sailboat of his dreams and was enjoying his new liveaboard lifestyle in a small marina in southern Alabama, intending to just kick back, relax, do some writing, and focus on his zen practice. Life there was idyllic and blissfully uneventful until the day he met Cap'n Billy, a prototypical, down-home good ol' boy who operated a small shrimping trawler along the inland waterways that lined the Gulf.

When Jack Parker’s father dies, Jack knows one thing: Tom Parker was a good man. Beyond that, decades of distance and silence had kept the two men from truly knowing each other. Jack attends the funeral with the hope he can shovel some dirt onto Tom’s casket, collect a few commiserations, and put miles between himself and the questions he’d let simmer since he’d left home years before. But when a group of strangers appears at the funeral, Jack realizes he has more questions than answers about how his father actually lived his life.

The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant for a white family, and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household.

The "Last Best Class" of Fish River Community School had lost one of its members every year since the second grade. Waffle Houses were popping up throughout small-town Alabama with one corporate rule: "Good Food Fast." Struggling to cope with the tragedy that shadowed him most of his life, Dr. Jimmy Ryan dedicated himself to bringing people back from the brink, driven by his own guiding principle "Ain't Dead Yet." Not until Jimmy's own death did the folks at the Waffle House in Penelope, Alabama, learn the full extent of the secrets buried with the dead.

Three generations. One summer that will change everything. Jenna has returned to the sunny shores of Lake Summers, tucked under the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, with her daughter Sophie to care for her aging mother, Sweet. Recently divorced, Jenna finds comfort in lazy afternoons along the water and long nights watching Sweet tell Sophie stories about her long-lost loves. When she meets Sweet’s new next-door neighbor, Troy, she recognizes him instantly as the boy with whom she shared her first kiss.

In "Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.

Based on true crime, Jar of Pennies follows the story of how a murderer was brought to justice in small town east Texas. A book as much about east Texas culture deep in the pine forests of the state as it is about a chain of murders and the gathering of evidence, this riveting narrative has elements of both humor and noir as it rockets to its conclusion.

Rachel Ruskin never intended to return to her family’s tobacco farm in Shiloh, North Carolina. But when her academic career studying Southern folklore in New York City flames out, she has no choice. Back in her hometown in the wake of family loss, she is alone, haunted by memories, by ghosts, and by Shiloh’s buried history of racism and violence. When another child is accidentally shot and killed, however, Rachel can no longer avoid confronting her own past wrongs; nor can she continue to hold herself apart from her community.

The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a 10-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression.

Cookbook author Holly Llewellyn is the last person who should be labelled an 'enemy of the state'—or is she? After all, her brother is a missing traitor, and with her ties to the president, the Secret Service isn't taking chances... So they send in agent David Goddard, undercover. But after one glance, David knows Holly isn't just an 'assignment'—she's a woman who'll change his life!

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate. Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact.

What separates the struggling small business owners from the mighty rich CEOs who seem to have everything working in their favor? Why is it that one person can start a business and become wealthy, happy and incredibly successful while the other person have nothing to show for no matter what they do? What's the truth behind their success? Are they lucky? Are they born talented or do they have breakthrough approaches to doing business? What if I told you that none of this matters much at all? You can have an amazing idea. You can have an amazing product that meets a massively ...

Jack Duncan is a high school senior whose dream is to play baseball in college and beyond - as far away from Delano as possible. He longs to escape the political turmoil surrounding the labor struggles of the striking fieldworkers that infests his small ag town. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died under suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier, he's had to be the sole emotional support of his mother.