Daughtry House

Five years after the final shot was fired in the War Between the States, Selah Daughtry can barely manage to keep herself, her two younger sisters, and their spinster cousin fed and clothed. With their family's Mississippi plantation swamped by debt and the Big House falling down around them, the only option seems to be giving up their ancestral land. Pinkerton agent and former Union cavalryman Levi Riggins is investigating a series of robberies and sabotage linked to the impoverished Daughtry plantation.

Joelle Daughtry has a secret. By day, the impoverished Southern belle has been helping her sisters to turn the run-down family plantation into a resort hotel after the close of the Civil War. But by night and under a male pseudonym, she has been penning articles for the local paper in support of constructing a school for former slaves. With the Mississippi arm of the Ku Klux Klan gaining power and prestige, Joelle knows she is playing a dangerous game. Loyalties shift when Schuyler Beaumont, childhood enemy, takes over his assassinated father's candidacy for state office.

In the fine tradition established by her Southern grandmama, Aurora Daughtry has recently orchestrated the marriage of her eldest sister and facilitated her middle sister’s engagement. Just when it seems there is nothing left to absorb her considerable talent for managing people, in walks federal deputy marshal Zane Sager. But Zane is not at Daughtry House for a vacation. He’s tracking a killer and collecting two key witnesses to a federal judge’s murder. Aurora takes it upon herself to disabuse the cynical lawman of his conviction that the world is out to get him.