It’s 1982, and Dee Ann Bulluck has enjoyed three peaceful years as a young wife, mother, and technical college instructor since moving to a backyard apartment in small-town Narrow Creek, North Carolina. Then her landlord Floyd Powell dies while sitting in his recliner on a calm Saturday morning. Turns out, his death is due to something more sinister than his diet of honey buns and Pepsi Colas, and the major suspect is Miss Josie, his wife of thirty-five years. Convinced of Miss Josie’s innocence—and by the fact that if her landlady goes to jail, she and husband Joe will likely lose their sweet deal of an apartment—Dee Ann agrees to help Miss Josie prove she's blameless. Their bumbling investigation manages to reveal Floyd’s involvement in some unsavory enterprises, including bootlegging. The reappearance of Miss Josie’s long-lost beau and the meddling of her overbearing, big-city daughter complicate their amateur sleuthing. Her landlord may be dead, but Dee Ann is busy with life: Monday night choir practice at the Methodist church, house-hunting with Joe, and controlling mischievous three-year-old Heather. She barely has time to hide in Miss Josie’s closet to eavesdrop or creep through the woods looking for a still. Will Miss Josie wind up in the big house while Dee Ann ends up with no house? Like its heroine Dee Ann Bulluck, Life and Death in Narrow Creek is smart and sassy, witty and insightful. Readers will discover a cozy mystery warmed by the culture yet complicated by the social issues of the early 1980s in a small Southern town. Book Review: “Small-town stories have an irresistibly quaint allure; throw in a mystery, dark secrets, and down-home characters who may not be what they seem, and it can result in an enjoyable read, as it does in this case.” -- Kirkus Indie Reviews

It’s October in small-town Narrow Creek, North Carolina, and Dee Ann Bulluck is set for a fun morning of picking pumpkins when five-year-old Heather discovers a lady “taking a nap” in Elmer’s Pumpkin Patch. The attractive, well-dressed woman in stiletto heels isn’t asleep—she’s dead—and amateur detective Dee Ann wonders about the identity of this stranger and who strangled her. As usual, husband Joe advises her to stay out of police business. Chief McSwain doesn’t want her meddling in his investigation either. But Dee Ann has a mind of her own and suspects to pursue. Who lured this woman to town and killed her? Was it a plotting boyfriend or a double-crossing drug dealer? Or maybe the body of the mystery woman was randomly dumped off the nearby interstate? It’s almost more than a working mama who’s also trying to renovate an old Victorian home has time to investigate, especially when Dee Ann is asked to tail one of her suspects to an out-of-town location. Husband-wife feuds and wife-mistress confrontations offer clues, or do they? Will Dee Ann discover the killer's identity ? Or will she become the next victim when she gets too close to the truth? Set in 1984, this third cozy mystery in the Narrow Creek Series again features feisty, opinionated Dee Ann Bulluck along with many of the quirky Southern characters readers have come to know in Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder and Life and Death in Narrow Creek.

Early in the Period of Death, the drug cartels of Central America and northern South America welcomed the millions of people from the north into their gigantic pens from which there was no escape. The pens were dozens of miles on a side; it was hell on earth, as the only thing there was to eat was each other. The gangs survived the apocalypse by trading, killing and eating these millions of victims. And when the captives were gone, the gangs ate each other. But some survived.

In the vein of The Liar's Club and The Glass Castle, Jenny Forrester's memoir perfectly captures both place and a community situated on the Colorado Plateau between slot canyons and rattlesnakes, where she grew up with her mother and brother in a single-wide trailer proudly displaying an American flag. Forrester’s powerfully eloquent story reveals a rural small town comprising God-fearing Republicans, ranchers, Mormons, and Native Americans. With sensitivity and resilience, Forrester navigates feelings of isolation, an abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, and a failed college attempt to forge a separate identity. As young adults, after their mother’s accidental death, Forrester and her brother are left with an increasingly strained relationship that becomes a microcosm of America’s political landscape. Narrow River, Wide Sky is a breathtaking, determinedly truthful story about one woman’s search for identity within the mythology of family and America itself.

For readers of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone and David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, C. B. Bernard’s debut novel shows a father and a daughter fighting toward hope through a traumatic past. In the town of Disappointment, Oregon, washed-up boxer Lewis Yaw makes ends meet as a fishing guide. He’s lived a life of violence, but doesn’t understand real strength until he meets Janey, who can see good in even the most damaged things—including him. When she gives birth to their daughter, Grayling, Lewis worries that he’ll mess her up as badly as his father did him. But he also sees a chance to right the wrongs of the past. By high school, Gray has become his apprentice guide, his sparring partner, and his pride and joy. Life in their small town is nothing short of challenging—there’s a marauding bear roaming the streets, a rival guide trying to kill Lewis, and a poacher littering deer carcasses along the river—but he is closer to happiness than he ever thought possible. When tragedy strikes, Lewis can’t break free of his past, leaving Gray to fight to save the only thing she has left: her family.

Charles Dickens constantly eludes critical interpretation. While there have been commentaries on his humor, his seriousness, his social concerns, and other specific aspects of his work, such accounts have tended only to divide our understanding of the novels, to lead us to see them as failures of artistic unity. It is this question of unity that provides the keynote of Dr. Daldry's book. The author seeks a language that can treat the diverse aspects of reader, writer and text as a unityóit thus extends Robert Newsom's analysis of ^IBleak House to the oeuvre as a whole. The thesis is worked out in detail with reference to several of the novels, and represents a challenging re-evaluation of Dickens' achievement as a novelist.^R