This work, a collection of essays on the natural world during a year spent in the Blue Ridge valley of Virginia, reflects the author's interactions with her wilderness surroundings. The author takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics; in the fall, she...

While driving along a suburban back road, Hilary Blum, who's just lost her job and whose deadbeat husband has left her alone to care for her son with Asperger's, witnesses a freakish accident. A car ahead of her careens down a hill and slams into a tree. Stopping to help, she discovers the driver dead--and a satchel stuffed with a half a million dollars. That money could prevent her family's ruin and keep her special needs son in school. In an instant,...

"Already well-versed in the natural healing properties of herbs and oils, Jennie Pickett longs to become a doctor. But the Oregon frontier of the 1870s doesn't approve of such innovations as women attending medical school. To leave grief and guilt behind, as well as support herself and her challenging young son, Jennie cares for an elderly woman using skills she's developed on her own. When her patient dies, Jennie discovers that her heart has become...

"Sienna Scott grew up in the dark shadow of her mother's paranoid delusions. Now, she's returned home to confront her past and the unsolved murder that altered the course of her life. In her mother's shuttered house, an old fear that has haunted Sienna for years rears its ugly head -that it was she who had been the killer's target that night. And now, with it, a new fear-that the killer not only intended to remedy his past mistake-he's already begun....

"A novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune--an unlikely friendship that changed the world, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Personal Librarian. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist...

Officer Miranda Rader of the Harmony, Louisiana PD is known for her honesty, integrity, and steady hand in a crisis - but that wasn't always so. Miranda comes from the town of Jasper, a place about the size of a good spit on a hot day, and her side of the tracks was the wrong one. She's worked hard to earn the respect of her coworkers and the community. When Miranda and her partner are called to investigate the murder of one of the town's most beloved...

This novel is a portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother's disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend,...

"It is 1914 and the world has been on the brink of war so many times, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia and...

When a single mom becomes an "empty nester," she spreads her wings to rediscover herself -- and her passions -- in this heartwarming novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber. Jenna Boltz's life is at a crossroads. After a messy divorce nearly twenty years ago, she raised her two children on her own, juggling motherhood with her beloved job as a Seattle intensive care nurse. Now that Paul and Allie have gone to college and moved...

Six-foot-tall, redheaded ex-cop and Boston-based private eye Carlotta Carlyle knows all about urban survival. That's why she's happy to do her neighbor, Valentine, a favor like this one. The elderly recluse needs help burglar-proofing her rent-controlled apartment. But it seems Valentine's fears are more immediate and threatening than she's letting on. Because just twenty-four hours later, the old woman turns up dead in her ransacked home. Finding...