A Boston woman visiting her Southern hometown must smoke out a fire-starting killer in this cozy mystery by a New York Times–bestselling author. Laura Fleming is always happy to visit her ever-extending family in Byerly, North Carolina. This time, though, it’s not kin calling her back home, but businessman Burt Walters. Burt’s hoping Laura can dig up dirt on Marshall and Grace Saunders, proposed buyers of Walters Mill. Laura knows Burt has good reasons for opposing the deal, and not just because the Saunderses are Yankees. But the mill has long been Byerly’s bread-and-butter, and stakes are high. Half her family is pro-buyout and half against—Laura’s Shakespeare-quoting husband, Richard, likens it to the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, only nastier. Soon it’s more than tempers flaring, for a spate of suspicious fires culminates in Marshall’s death. With her cousin Linwood a prime suspect, Laura is called to uncover the truth. Amid a mess of double-crossing, blackmail and fraud, she sets a trap to catch a killer—but may catch more than she bargained for...

Nathaniel Lyon (1818–1861) was the first Union general to die in the Civil War. Killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, he became the North’s first war hero, famed as the man who saved Missouri for the Union. In Damned Yankee, chosen by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book in 1991, Christopher Phillips portrays Lyon not as the savior of a border state threatened by secessionist extremists but as an unbalanced, monomaniacal Unionist zealot who purposely—and perhaps unnecessarily—brought war to a fragile state whose populace had voted overwhelmingly to stay out of the conflict. Phillips meticulously examines Lyon’s role in the Camp Jackson affair, his quest to oust the pro-southern governor of Missouri, and his campaign to eliminate the secessionist element in the state. He contends that Lyon’s actions in Missouri in 1861 were congruent with his dogmatic personality and troubled past. Damned Yankee is a complex, often shocking, portrait of one of the most controversial figures of the Civil War and a sobering study of how the faults of men may greatly affect history.

Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds onto its desperate alliance with the USA’s worst enemy, while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove’s compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last. The third war in sixty years, this one yet unnamed: a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing the same continent and both calling themselves Americans. At the dawn of 1944, the United States has beaten back a daredevil blitzkrieg from the Confederate States–and a terrible new genie is out of history’s bottle: a bomb that may destroy on a scale never imagined before. In Europe, the new weapon has shattered a stalemate between Germany, England, and Russia. When the trigger is pulled in America, nothing will be the same again. With visionary brilliance, Harry Turtledove brings to a climactic conclusion his monumental, acclaimed drama of a nation’s tragedy and the men and women who play their roles–with valor, fear, and folly–on history’s greatest stage.

A puzzling corpse stirs up trouble for a Boston woman visiting her Southern hometown in this cozy mystery by a New York Times–bestselling author. A Burnette family gathering is no small affair, thanks to Laura Fleming’s ever-extending extended clan. Being back in Byerly, North Carolina, gives Laura and her scholarly husband a chance to catch up on gossip about old rivalries and rekindled romances. New love is in the air too, though uncharitable kinfolk speculate that cousin Thaddeous’s girlfriend, mill receptionist Joleen, has an ulterior motive for dating him. Byerly’s mill has long been the town’s lifeblood, but when Laura arrives to try and fix Joleen’s faulty PC, she finds that death has just paid a visit. A stranger’s body lies on the office floor, and the victim bears a striking resemblance to Big Bill Walters. Did the mill’s founder have a doppelganger, or was someone in Byerly’s first family spreading wild oats? Laura isn’t planning to get involved—she’s busy trying to help Aunt Daphine, who’s being blackmailed over a decades-old secret. But the twin mysteries will have other deadly repercussions, unless Laura can see through a killer’s disguise . . .