The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a Black man accused of rape.

Twenty years after breaking her engagement to a prominent Southern blueblood in the wake of her mother's suspicious death, Betts Barrett returns to her home on Bulls Island to fight local developers and faces unexpected and dangerous challenges.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the planes black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only...

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

When she discovers the body of her opinionated wedding planner face down in the pool, plus-sized P.I. and bride-to-be Savannah Reid must put her impending nuptials on hold to discover who else wanted this diva to make a hasty departure.

The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.

"The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of 'hyperempathy' -- which causes her to feel others' pain as her own -- sets off on foot along the dangerous...

House-sitting a family home in Malibu where she hopes for peace and healing in the aftermath of her daughter's death, Julia is unexpectedly drawn to a handsome man who oversees a lemon orchard, sends his earnings to an extended family in Mexico, and hides the pain of his own daughter's loss.

When the jet-setting, brain surgeon husband of her veterinarian friend dies after making a champagne toast at a star-studded party, plus-sized private eye Savannah Reid investigates. Savannah attends a birthday bash for her veterinarian friend Dr. Carolyn's husband. She's astonished to find that her no-frills acquaintance resides in a pristine hilltop mansion with Dr. Stephen Erling, a jet-setter brain surgeon boasting throngs of A-list patients...

Norton critical edition. Includes authoritative text, backgrounds, contexts, and criticism. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons.