Even as Lady Polly rejected another proposal of marriage, her heart burned for the man she'd rejected five years ago. She'd heard that in his misery, her beloved Lord Henry Marchnight had become a rogue and a gambler. But when he appeared before her on a deserted terrace and stole a kiss, Polly knew that her passion hadn't died. The man still knew how to steal her reason with one touch. But reason she needed as suspicions of criminal behavior hovered about Lord Henry. Should she return to her routine of spurning suitors? Or should she do what she should have done five years ago--trust her love and follow her heart...?

In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post.As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family.

For readers of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, Joshilyn Jackson, and Fannie Flagg, with a touch of Terms of Endearment A laugh-out-loud funny yet poignant novel about a daughter determined not only to keep her mother among the living but to find out the secrets of her long-buried past Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors--and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young, modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late fifties when Willow was born, so Willow knows she's here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow's father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere: it's just her and her bigger-than-life mom, Polly. Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and Polly has her own secrets that she won't reveal. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, fifty years ago and vow never to return after a mysterious and terrible incident? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun The Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her closely guarded past and a final trip back to Bethel that will end with them, like Huck Finn, riding a river raft back home? THE BOOK OF POLLY has a kick like the best hot sauce, and a great blend of humor and sadness, pathos and hilarity. This is a bittersweet novel about the grip of love in a truly quirky family and you'll come to know one of the most unforgettable mother-daughter duos you've ever met.