In EDISTO SONG a young woman, at the pinnacle of success, is forced to reexamine her dreams as she finds her life as a concert pianist not what she envisioned and those her life is entwined with far from what she believed of them. Sarah Katherine Avery, becoming internationally known as a young concert pianist of great promise, finds herself at a difficult moment in her career-home in New York, getting ready for a concert with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra but feverish and ill. After pushing on for weeks through illness, her neighbor and friend encourages her to talk to her agent about taking a break for healing after this concert. Worn and disillusioned, Sarah heads over to the concert hall to talk to Jonah but the shock of what she encounters at that meeting spirals her life in a new direction. Andrew Cavanaugh has traveled to New York from Beaufort to be a support to his boss's daughter, Sarah Katherine Avery-Suki to him-for her concert performance. A friend of Suki's since childhood years at Edisto, and always a supporter of her gift and her music, Andrew is shocked when Suki collapses on stage. He learns as he sits with her at the hospital that her life holds unhappiness none of them knew of but her answers for how to resolve her current problems threaten to send his well-ordered life right out the window. EDITORIAL REVIEWS: "It's easy to love a place like Edisto Beach and when you can't be there to feel the waves tickling your feet, you can visit through story. Reading Lin Stepp's Edisto series lets you feel the sun on your shoulders, the sand between your toes, and hear the shore birds welcoming the day as you cheer on a cast of characters who will win your heart as they find healing and new joy at Edisto." - Ann H. Gabhart, bestselling author of An Appalachian Summer "A heartwarming, tender story about young love." - RT Book Reviews "In a story as cozy and familiar as home ... a sentimental love story with a focus on healing, faith, and family." - All About Women Magazine REVIEW "Your books take me out of the fast-paced world I live in." - - Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief, Southern Writers Magazine "I adore Lin Stepp's writings. If you have not 'discovered' her, you are missing out.... A delightful, heartwarming book." - Julia Wilson, Christian Bookaholic Review, UK

"A phenomenal read."--Sharon Sala, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Is it a flesh and blood killer--or restless spirits? According to Sophie the psychic, beautiful Edisto Beach becomes a hotbed of troublemaking spirits every August. But when a visitor dies mysteriously during a beach house party, former big-city detective Callie Morgan and Edisto Beach police chief Mike Seabrook hunt for motives and suspects among the living. With tourists filling the beaches and local business owners anxious to squelch rumors of a murderer on the loose, Callie will need all the help she can get--especially once the killer's attention turns toward her. Edisto Jinx is a phenomenal read from beginning to end. The psychological twists are as intriguing as the vivid imagery of Ms. Clark's writing. From characters with just the right amount of flaws to make them realistic, to the eerie peek into a madman's mind, it is a gem of a story I didn't want to end.--Sharon Sala, author of Cold Hearts, book two of the Secrets and Lies trilogy. August 2015 from Mira Books Edisto Jinx has everything you want in a good island read: sand, food, drinks, people you care about, beautiful sunsets, secrets, murder, and page-turning suspense. C. Hope Clark took me to one of the most unspoiled South Carolina islands and gave me plenty of reasons to want to stay with Callie Morgan and a richly drawn cast of beach-town regulars. Pull up a beach chair, dip your toes in the gentle waves, and enjoy!--Cathy Pickens, author of the Southern Fried mysteries and Charleston Mysteries: Ghostly Haunts in the Holy City C. Hope Clark is the award-winning author of the Carolina Slade Mysteries and now the Edisto Island Mysteries. During her career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she met and married a federal agent--now a private investigator. Together they plot murder mysteries at their lakeside home in South Carolina. Visit Hope at chopeclark.com.

A cold case heats up . . . A dead man in Big Bay Creek, spring break, and a rogue FBI agent would be enough to drive Chief Callie Jean Morgan to drink . . . if she hadn't already quietly crawled inside a bottle of gin to drown her sorrows over a life ripped apart by too many losses. When her investigation into the stranger's death heats up an unsolved abduction case, Callie finds herself pitted against the town council, her son, the agent, and even the raucous college kids enjoying idyllic Edisto Beach. Amidst it all, Callie must find a way to reconcile her grief and her precious taste for gin before anyone else is killed. C. Hope Clark is the award-winning author of the Carolina Slade Mysteries and now the Edisto Island Mysteries. During her career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she met and married a federal agent--now a private investigator. She plots murder mysteries at their lakeside home in South Carolina when not visiting Edisto Beach. Visit Hope at chopeclark.com.

The New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street novels delivers a tale that spans two generations of sisters and secrets, set in the stunning South Carolina Lowcountry. Eleanor Murray will always remember her childhood on Edisto Island, where her late father, a local shrimper, shared her passion for music. Now her memories of him are all that tempers the guilt she feels over the accident that put her sister in a wheelchair—and the feelings she harbors for her sister’s husband. To help support her sister, Eleanor works at a Charleston investment firm during the day, but she escapes into her music, playing piano at a neighborhood bar. Until the night her enigmatic boss walks in and offers her a part-time job caring for his elderly aunt, Helena, back on Edisto. For Eleanor, it’s a chance to revisit the place where she was her happiest—and to share her love of music with grieving Helena, whose sister recently died under mysterious circumstances. An island lush with sweetgrass and salt marshes, Edisto has been a peaceful refuge for Helena, who escaped with her sister from war-torn Hungary in 1944. The sisters were well-known on the island, where they volunteered in their church and community. But now Eleanor will finally learn the truth about their past: secrets that will help heal her relationship with her own sister—and set Eleanor free....

Comfort Snowberger is well acquainted with death since her family runs the funeral parlor in their small southern town, but even so the ten-year-old is unprepared for the series of heart-wrenching events that begins on the first day of Easter vacation with the sudden death of her beloved great-uncle Edisto.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, a cadre of freewheeling, Southern pot smugglers lived at the crossroads of Miami Vice and a Jimmy Buffett song. These irrepressible adventurers unloaded nearly a billion dollars worth of marijuana and hashish through the eastern seaboard’s marshes. Then came their undoing: Operation Jackpot, one of the largest drug investigations ever and an opening volley in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs. In Jackpot, author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country’s most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law. In a cat-and-mouse game played out in exotic locations across the globe, the smugglers sailed through hurricanes, broke out of jail and survived encounters with armed militants in Colombia, Grenada and Lebanon. Based on years of research and interviews with imprisoned and recently released smugglers and the law enforcement agents who tracked them down, Jackpot is sure to become a classic story from America's controversial Drug Wars. “The adventures, the long-gone economy, and the sting that ultimately brought them down and changed US drug policy are meticulously documented and lucidly spun…. Part New Yorker feature-part Jimmy Buffet song. . . . The result is adventuresome, lavish, informative fun.” —GQ “[A] rollicking story, Ryan manages to pack in one amusing tale after another.... Jackpot is a rip-roaring good read.” —Charleston City Paper “High times on the high seas: Investigative reporter Ryan recounts the glory days of dope smuggling and their terrible denouement.... A well-told tale of true crime that provides a few good arguments for why it should not be a crime at all.” —Kirkus Reviews “Reads like an international thriller. . . . chock-a-block with hilarious and hair-raising anecdotes of fast times.” —New York Journal of Books “[A] thoroughly researched account of Operation Jackpot, the drug investigation that ended the reign of South Carolina’s ‘gentlemen smugglers,’.... Ryan recreates the era with a vivid, sun-drenched intensity.” —Publishers Weekly

The first biography of the acclaimed African American linguist and author of Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect In this first book-length biography of the pioneering African American linguist and celebrated father of Gullah studies, Margaret Wade-Lewis examines the life of Lorenzo Dow Turner. A scholar whose work dramatically influenced the world of academia but whose personal story—until now—has remained an enigma, Turner (1890-1972) emerges from behind the shadow of his germinal 1949 study Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect as a man devoted to family, social responsibility, and intellectual contribution. Beginning with Turner's upbringing in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., Wade-Lewis describes the high expectations set by his family and his distinguished career as a professor of English, linguistics, and African studies. The story of Turner's studies in the Gullah islands, his research in Brazil, his fieldwork in Nigeria, and his teaching and research on Sierra Leone Krio for the Peace Corps add to his stature as a cultural pioneer and icon. Drawing on Turner's archived private and published papers and on extensive interviews with his widow and others, Wade-Lewis examines the scholar's struggle to secure funding for his research, his relations with Hans Kurath and the Linguistic Atlas Project, his capacity for establishing relationships with Gullah speakers, and his success in making Sea Island Creole a legitimate province of analysis. Here Wade-Lewis answers the question of how a soft-spoken professor could so profoundly influence the development of linguistics in the United States and the work of scholars—especially in Gullah and creole studies—who would follow him. Turner's widow, Lois Turner Williams, provides an introductory note and linguist Irma Aloyce Cunningham provides the foreword.

The Gullah people are one of our most distinctive cultural groups. Isolated off the South Carolina-Georgia coast for nearly three centuries, the native black population of the Sea Islands has developed a vibrant way of life that remains, in many ways, as African as it is American. This landmark volume tells a multifaceted story of this venerable society, emphasizing its roots in Africa, its unique imprint on America, and current threats to its survival. With a keen sense of the limits to establishing origins and tracing adaptations, William S. Pollitzer discusses such aspects of Gullah history and culture as language, religion, family and social relationships, music, folklore, trades and skills, and arts and crafts. Readers will learn of the indigo- and rice-growing skills that slaves taught to their masters, the echoes of an African past that are woven into baskets and stitched into quilts, the forms and phrasings that identify Gullah speech, and much more. Pollitzer also presents a wealth of data on blood composition, bone structure, disease, and other biological factors. This research not only underscores ongoing health challenges to the Gullah people but also helps to highlight their complex ties to various African peoples. Drawing on fields from archaeology and anthropology to linguistics and medicine, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage celebrates a remarkable people and calls on us to help protect their irreplaceable culture.

THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT—Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller “Poignant, engrossing.”—People • “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong. Publishers Weekly’s #3 Longest-Running Bestseller of 2017 • Winner of the Southern Book Prize • If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection This edition includes a new essay by the author about shantyboat life.