Indie Award winner Maryann McFadden takes you from present day to Victorian Hackettstown, NJ, as Rachel, the new cemetery keeper's wife, tries to unravel the mysterious rape and murder of Tillie Smith in 1886. THE CEMETERY KEEPER'S WIFE is a story about the power of the past and the hope of redemption that comes from uncovering the truth.

With his father, the caretaker of Gettysburg's Evergreen Cemetery, off fighting in the Union Army, Fred Thorn endures the three-day Battle of Gettysburg and then helps his pregnant mother and grandfather bury around one hundred soldiers.

“Part historical fiction, part heartbreaking romance, part bildungsroman, this book takes readers on a journey rich with detail and darkness” (Seattle Book Review). Henry Plageman is a master secret-keeper. A former Lutheran minister, he lost his faith after losing his infant son, Jack, many years ago; his wife, Marilyn, remains consumed by grief. But Henry has another life—another woman and another child—unknown to Marilyn. His lover, Lucy, yearns for a man she can be with openly while their eight-year-old daughter, Blue, tries to make sense of her parents’ fractured lives The Half Wives follows these interconnected characters through one momentous day, May 22, 1897, the sixteenth anniversary of Jack’s birth. Marilyn distracts herself with charity work. Henry needs to talk his way out of the police station, where he has spent the night for disorderly conduct. Lucy must rescue the intrepid Blue, who has fallen in a saltwater well. Before long, the four will be drawn to the same destination—the city cemetery on the outskirts of San Francisco—where the collision of lives and secrets leaves no one unaltered. A Finalist for the Townsend Prize “The developing San Francisco of the 1890s becomes a rich background for these three as they play out their messy, somber, intertwined fates.” —The New York Times Book Review “A poignant, sometimes heart-rending, beautifully crafted, always gripping tale of loss and love, and the human need to try to set things right.” —Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd “Pelletier’s writing is moving and enthralling . . . [She] keeps readers hooked right up to the book’s satisfying conclusion.” —Publishers Weekly

Johnny Monsons old friend Belinda Pappos has spent over thirty years as a clinical psychologist, working at a local clinic near Jacksonville, Florida. As a youngster, shed spent much of her free time during the beautiful summer of 1976 with Johnny, who lived on his sailboat at a city marina in St. Augustine, Florida. As an aspiring writer he relishes in the peaceful solitude offered by a life close to the sea yet, by its very nature, such solitude also brings with it time for introspection, maybe too much time? Life being life, Monson grows older, and he ruminants over a woman hed fallen in love with those long years agothinking, fantasizing, and searching his troubled soul for answers to questions that no one could answer. He turns back to his long-time friend for help. The therapist launches John Monson into a strange cerebral journey as he recalls the summer day when he first met a female student in St. Augustine. There was something anomalous about the woman, a mysterious quality that has befuddled him for almost forty years. Sailing, witchcraft, rough dialogue, a story that will keep the reader thinking, and a wealth of colorful charactersthose off-the-grid people who live, or are at least more noticed, in many of Americas small towns. These are hard-working, blue-collar folks who possess a very substantive yet illusory quality. Cuddle up in a blanket when its cold and rainy outside, pour yourself a warm cup of coffee, and read The Keepers Wife. The Keepers Wife is fun, thought-provoking and, at the same time, an easy read. The book will become legendary for its pure, psychological appeal.

From the New York Times bestselling author of House of Eve—a 2023 Reese’s Book Club Pick! *A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Christian Science Monitor* Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this “fully immersive” (Lisa Wingate, #1 bestselling author of Before We Were Yours) story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.

It takes a graveyard to raise a child. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family.

Having lived in a dozen different towns due to her husband's frequent corporate relocations, Joanna leaves her husband to return to the coastal South Carolina community she loves, while Paul, distraught by Joanna's abandonment, endeavors to win her back.

One woman’s struggle to restore an old slave cemetery uncovers centuries-old racism When China Galland visited her childhood hometown in east Texas, she learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves-Love Cemetery. Her ensuing quest to restore and reclaim the cemetary unearths racial wounds that have never completely healed. Research becomes activism as she organizes a grassroots, interracial committee, made up of local religious leaders and lay people, to work on restoring community access to the cemetery. The author also presents material from the time of slavery and the Reconstruction Era, including stories of “landtakings” (the theft of land from African Americans), and forms of slavery that continued well into the twentieth century. Ultimately Keepers of Love delivers a message of tremendous hope as members of both black and white communities come together to right an historical wrong, and in so doing, discover each other’s common dignity. “Galland captures the struggle to reclaim one small cemetery in Texas with such engrossing drama and personal detail that the story becomes something larger still-a universal struggle to reclaim the ground of Deep Compassion that lies untended in the human heart.”-Sue Monk Kidd

A general’s wife and a slave girl forge a friendship that transcends race, culture, and the crucible of Civil War. Mary Anna Custis Lee is a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and heiress to Virginia’s storied Arlington house and General Washington’s personal belongings. Born in bondage at Arlington, Selina Norris Gray learns to read and write in the schoolroom Mary and her mother keep for the slave children and eventually becomes Mary’s housekeeper and confidante. As Mary’s health declines, Selina becomes her personal maid, strengthening a bond that lasts until death parts them. Forced to flee Arlington at the start of the Civil War, Mary entrusts the keys to her beloved home to no one but Selina. When Union troops begin looting the house, it is Selina who confronts their commander and saves many of its historic treasures. In a story spanning crude slave quarters, sunny schoolrooms, stately wedding parlors, and cramped birthing rooms, novelist Dorothy Love amplifies the astonishing true-life account of an extraordinary alliance and casts fresh light on the tumultuous years leading up to and through the wrenching battle for a nation’s soul. A classic American tale, Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray is the first novel to chronicle this beautiful fifty-year friendship forged at the crossroads of America’s journey from enslavement to emancipation.

The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.