"Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that...

After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. This lively and panoramic book, which was recently cited by David Denby in the New Yorker as being Sinclair's "most readable" novel, is now the...

"For at least two centuries, the South's economy, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways and more have figured prominently in nearly all facets of American life. In A New History of the American South , W. Fitzhugh Brundage joins a stellar group of accomplished historians in gracefully weaving a new narrative of Southern history from its ancient past to the present."--

Former LAPD hostage negotiator Jeff Talley takes a job as chief of police in a small town far from the city, but his new peace is overturned when three young men, fleeing a robbery, invade a local home and take a family hostage. Former LAPD SWAT unit hostage negotiator Jeff Talley is thrown back into the high-pressure world he's tried to leave behind when a family is taken hostage in their Los Angeles home by three fleeing robbers. But Talley's nightmare...

"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

Laurel Gray Hawthorne's life seems neatly on track -- a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna -- until everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of a her 13-year old neighbor Molly Dufresne.

Dana, a Black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned...

Ramona (1884) is a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Inspired by her activism for the rights of Native Americans, Ramona is a story of racial discrimination, survival, and history set in California in the aftermath of the Mexican American War. Immensely popular upon publication, Ramona earned favorable comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and remains an influential sentimental novel to this day. Orphaned after the death of her foster...

Newly established PI Savannah Reid of California, unjustly fired from the police force, lands her first client. A man is looking for his sister to share an inheritance. No sooner does Reid find the sister than she is murdered. Was the killer the brother, or is there another killer?

For years Lizzie has given her twin sister Frances an inferiority complex. Both are English career women, but Lizzie is married with four children. One day Frances falls in love with a Spaniard. He refuses to leave his wife, but Frances decides to have a baby anyway, moving to Spain to be a single mother. At which point Lizzie's life begins crumbling from envy. By the author of The Rector's Wife.