Small States

In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina. Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted 1940 Ford coupe.

The Russell women have always lived in a house that is as special as they are—a century-old Victorian with a radio that tunes itself to the listener’s mood and a pantry that rearranges to provide just the right ingredients for any baking need. Lilith Russell was the exception. She left the family home in Ivy Ridge, Georgia, and has been flitting like a hummingbird from place to place with her daughter, Mattie, in the decades since, only returning each summer to drop Mattie off with Lilith’s sister, Penelope.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

The sheriff's deputy at the front door brings hard news to Ree Dolly. Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date. Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley.

On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again.

At the age of 11, Mel Smith’s life found its purpose when she met Sarah Ross. Ten years later, Sarah’s sudden death threatens to break her. To fulfill a final promise to her best friend, Mel travels to an idyllic small town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. Yet Morgan’s Gap is more than a land of morning mists and deep forest shadows.

I wasn’t looking for love. Putting down roots in this small, Southern town was the last thing on my mind. Ben changed all that with his kind nature and gentle ways. Somehow, he painted over the cracks on the canvas of my heart. Never did I feel more alive than with my arms around his waist on the back of his motorcycle and my hair blowing in the wind. But I was a nobody. To his family of wealth and privilege, I wasn’t worthy of him. And they were willing to do whatever it took to drive us apart.

They were the perfect family…until the summer that changed everything. Lauren Moorfield has everything - a wonderful husband, two adorable kids, a dazzling career, and a dream house to die for. Then one day, 20 year old Isabella shows up at the family home, claiming Lauren’s husband Jeff is the father she never knew - the father who left her mother before she was born. As Jeff and Lauren attempt to make sense of the situation, they welcome her into the family. Jeff assures Lauren that he has no idea about Isabella’s existence, but as time goes by, and despite her best efforts to make ...

After finding her ex-boyfriend robbing someone, Cece Jennings finds herself on the receiving end of threats from her ex and his family. She’s used to some danger—after all, she and her friends have earned the nickname Danger Girls for their infamously bad luck—but when things go too far, she calls in help. Travis Bane comes to her rescue and even tolerates her crazy grandma. When things get scary, he’s there for her. Her ex won’t back down easily, though. Not even in the face of a gun-toting grandma who isn’t afraid to shoot. Travis has finally found something interesting in ...

You can only run so far before you have to stand and fight. Secretive and mysterious, Isabella Rialto arrives in Pelican Pointe with little fanfare. All she wants is to find solace, shelter, and live a quiet life in Sea Glass Cottage. What she gets instead is Thane Delacourt, an ex-NFL jock who’s come back home to raise his little boy. From their first meeting, sparks fly. The last thing Isabella needs is a bunch of messy complications. And Thane’s leery of making one more relationship mistake. Plus, he has Jonah to think about. But that’s nothing compared to Isabella’s past, a past...

Cozy mystery with a side of chocolate. Emotionally reeling after the death of her grandmother, Gemma Channing is settling into Coyote Wells, the hometown where she grew up, after a ten-year absence. While coming to terms with the loss of her Gram, disturbing things begin to happen. Women are disappearing. Just when she begins to realize Coyote Wells has changed—and not for the better—she’s forced to bump heads with Lando Bonner, her ex, a man who still carries around a grudge. But since she’s digging for answers trying to explain exactly how her grandmother died, she needs his help....

An inheritance has reunited three estranged cousins. Their grandmother Lucy left Nessa, Flynn, and April her cabin nestled in the woods near Blossom, Texas, as well as a hope chest to be unlocked after they complete a special task. Together, they must hand stitch a cherished quilt Lucy left unfinished. It meant everything to her. And now, to three people struggling with their own patchwork pasts.

A historic western that opens in 1873, a time when recession is forcing thousands westwards to recoup their fortunes. The West is tough, brutal and the Indian is the enemy. But when a white woman is raped, it is a half-breed Cheyenne who comes to the rescue. From the author of Jake and Upland Passage.

Love takes flight when a crash-landing beauty meets a grumpy farmer. When Sophie Dunham crash-lands her hot air balloon on Davis Pruitt’s hops farm, she vows to help him heal and keep up with chores as penance, even if her secret crush on the grumpy farmer twists her in knots. Davis can’t believe his bad luck. Sophie, the bubbly second-grade teacher with a hot-air ballooning side-hustle, crash-landed, and now she won’t leave. The attraction between them is hot enough to lift twenty balloons, but he's been down the commitment road once before. Davis’s first marriage failed, and he's ...

After his son is convicted of capital murder, Vietnam War veteran Jeremiah Fitzjurls takes over the care of his granddaughter, Joanna, raising her with as much warmth as can be found in an Ozark junkyard outfitted to be an armory. He teaches her how to shoot and fight, but there is not enough training in the world to protect her when the dreaded Ledfords, notorious meth dealers and fanatical white supremacists, come to collect on Joanna as payment for a long-overdue blood debt.

Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams, Adam Chandler explores the inseparable link between fast food and American life for the past century. The dark underbelly of the industry’s largest players has long been scrutinized and gutted, characterized as impersonal, greedy, corporate, and worse. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal and emblematic of a larger-than-life image of America.

Ava Dove—the sixth of the seven famed Dove sisters and owner of Ava Dove’s Landscaping and Specialty Teas—is frantic. Just as her new tearoom is about to open, her herbal teas have gone haywire. Suddenly, her sleep-inducing tea is startling her clients awake with vivid dreams, her romance-kindling tea is causing people to blurt out their darkest secrets, and her anti-anxiety tea is making them spend hours staring into mirrors. Ava is desperate for a remedy, but her search leads her into dangerous territory, as she is forced to face a dark secret she’s been hiding for over a decade.

For twelve-year-old Martha "Sonny" Creech, there is no place more beautiful than her family's cotton farm. She, her two brothers, and her parents work hard on their land - hoeing, planting, picking - but only Sonny loves the rich, dark earth the way her father does. When a tragic accident claims his life, her stricken family struggles to fend off ruin - until their rich, reclusive neighbor offers to help finance that year's cotton crop.

When tragedy strikes Leona Harper, the devastated pastor's wife summons her estranged children home. But parenting young adults in the glass house of the parsonage proves more difficult than reinventing herself. Determined to give her broken family a shot at a second chance, Leona begins the painful journey of putting one foot in front of the other. Reconciliation and healing won't come easy in this zany, trouble-filled, hilarious adventure. Brimming with wit, authenticity, and Southern charm, this series explores the inspirational and emotional healing of a family.