The lush, secluded mountains of North Carolina's Lake Lure had drawn Lauren Castle into their spell. It was here, in 1938, that Hollywood's most beloved glamour girl, Victoria Frazer, drowned during a scandalous affair with actor Roger Brandt. Few knew about the baby spirited away into the night. That baby was Lauren's mother. It has been two years since Lauren's filmmaker husband died mysteriously at Lake Lure while making a documentary on Roger...

Maya and Rebecca Ward are both accomplished physicians, but that's where the sisters' similarities end. As teenagers, they witnessed their parents' murder, but it was Rebecca who saved Maya from becoming another of the gunman's victims. The tragedy left Maya cautious and timid, settling for a sedate medical practice with her husband, Adam, while Rebecca became the risk taker.

"At first glance, few would guess that Luna and Cullan Bodman are siblings. Cullan, efficient and serious, is rarely out of a business suit. Luna reads palms and tarot cards, and loves flowing skirts and dangling jewelry that matches her unconventional spirit. Still, her artistic eye is an asset to the family's furniture restoration business. When Cullan stumbles across something unexpected in a piece he just acquired, and a client of Luna's reveals...

Home Fires tackles one of the contemporary South's most burning issues. When racial tension erupts in the sleepy community of Colleton County, North Carolina, Deborah is caught off guard. She is happily tending her own home fires: her simmering romance with Kidd Chapin, the house she's building on her family's land, and her campaign for reelection as district judge. But then the first black church is burned, and all of Deborah's alarms go off. Narrator...

"Summer Merriweather's career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder's thread. Academic life at her Virginia university is a viper's pit, so Summer spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with any luck, will finally get her published, impress the Dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack. Returning to Brigid's Island, NC,...

Best-selling author Margaret Maron creates entertaining mysteries filled with warm southern charm, colorful down-home characters, and smoldering grudges. In Storm Track, swirling dark clouds of illicit affairs and brutal murder threaten Colleton County, North Carolina. No one worries much about the scantily clad woman found strangled in the Orchid Motel-she must be a tourist who brought along her own problems. But when the victim turns out to be the...

The fourth, ground-breaking mystery featuring African-American maid and amateur sleuth Blanche White by Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award winning author Barbara Neely. Blanche White returns to Farleigh, North Carolina, for the summer to help her best friend with her catering business. It's a homecoming rich with the potential for new romance and fraught with the pain of facing the man who raped her at knife-point years ago but was never prosecuted...

Adam Chase has spent the last five years in New York City trying to erase his worst memories and the scorn and abandonment of his family. Then a phone call from his best friend awakens in him a torrent of emotion and pain. Having left North Carolina and its red soil for good, he never thought returning would be easy-but being remembered as a murderer doesn't help much. Adam is beaten, accosted, and hostilely confronted by his family, including Grace,...

"Avery Robinson decided to be a physician after helplessly watching her mother lose a battle with a terrible disease. Now at risk of developing the same illness, Avery guards her heart from love. She's driven to protect her loved ones as a workaholic doctor in the tiny mountain town of Riverbend Gap, North Carolina. Contractor Wes Garrett is hiking the Appalachian trail, in memory of the man who died saving his life, when an illness racks his body....

A mysterious ornithologist staying at Mrs. Lattimore's Victorian home and doing research on Southern vultures seems familiar to Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, especially after a murderer strikes.