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4.5 stars

Having long concealed his feelings for the Reverend Clare Fergusson, Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne is stunned when he becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his wife and risks everything in his investigation to find the real culprit.

Some of us understand place in terms of family and community, landscape, or even the weather. For others, the idea of place becomes more distinct and particular: the sound of someone humming while washing dishes, the musical cadence of a mountain accent, the smell of a tobacco field under the hot Piedmont sun. Some of North Carolina's finest writers ruminate on the meaning of place in this collection of twenty-one original essays, untangling North...

"Kit Noonan's life is stalled: unemployed, twins to support, a mortgage to pay--and a frustrated wife, who is certain that, more than anything else, Kit needs to solve the mystery of his father's identity. He begins with a visit to his former stepfather,Jasper, a take-no-prisoners Vermont outdoorsman. But it is another person who has kept the secret: Lucinda Burns, wife of a revered senior statesman and mother of Malachy (the journalist who died of...

4 stars

When Susannah, the owner of a new flower store, and her employee, a young widow named Colette Blake, join the knitting class at A Good Yarn, they meet a group of unforgettable women who offer them life-changing advice, support, and friendship.

A mother and daughter present personal essays that explore life through their close bond, in a volume inspired by their weekly column, "Chick Wit," that discusses such topics as their relationship, their carb counts, and the green jacket that almost caused a catfight.

3 stars

Named for a flower whose blood-red sap possesses the power both to heal and poison, Bloodroot is a stunning fiction debut about the legacies—of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss—that haunt one family across the generations, from the Great Depression to today.
The novel is told in a kaleidoscope of seamlessly woven voices and centers around an incendiary romance that consumes everyone in its path: Myra Lamb,...

3.9 stars

"A provocative and hauntingly powerful debut novel that will keep you turning pages into the early hours, The Bookseller follows a woman in the 1960s who wrestles to reconcile her daily life as a single bookstore owner with the alternate reality she suddenly begins to dream about each night, in which she is a happily-married wife and mother."--

2.6 stars

From one of our most acclaimed writers comes this dramatic tale of a well-born Southern woman whose life is forever changed by the betrayal of her mother and by the man she loves.
Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp - Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love...and first heartbreak. Years later, Thayer...

2.8 stars

"Cavendon Hall is home to two families, the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them, just as their ancestors did over the centuries. Charles Ingham, the sixth Earl of Mowbray, lives there with his wife Felicity and their six children: Guy, the heir, who is studying at Cambridge; their younger son Miles, attending Eton; and their four daughters Diedre, Daphne, DeLacy and Dulcie, affectionately called the Four Dees by the staff. Walter Swann,...

4 stars

Living in an igloo of ice and trash bags half a year after a cataclysmic nuclear disaster, Emily, convinced that she will be hated as the daughter of the drunken father who caused the meltdown, assumes a fictional identity while protecting a homeless boy.