Southern women may look as delicate as flowers, but there’s iron in their veins.
While the rest of the world has been roaring through the 1920s, times are hardscrabble in rural South Georgia. Widow Maggie Parker is barely surviving while raising her young son alone.
Then as banks begin to fail, her father-in-law threatens to take her son and sell off her livelihood—the grocery store her husband left her.
Can five Southern women band together, using their wisdom and wiles to stop him and survive the Great Depression?
In High Cotton, Chapter 1
She traded Sugar Hill for Vaudeville. Now she’s back.
The day Cora Fitzgerald turned sixteen, she fled Sugar Hill for the bright lights of vaudeville, leaving behind her senator-father’s verbal abuse. But just as her career takes off, she’s summoned back home.
And everything changes.
The stock market crashes. The senator is dead. Her mother is delusional, and her mute Aunt Clara pens novels that expose the town’s secrets. Then there’s Boone Robertson, who never knew she was alive back in high school, but now manages to be around whenever she needs help.
To make ends meet, the Fitzgerald women must open their home as a boardinghouse, but will the secrets they uncover prove their undoing?
Will the people of Cora’s past keep her from a brilliant future?
She’s bound by duty. He’s tethered to a dream.
Gennessee Taylor dreams of leaving the mill town of Sweetgum, Georgia. Although it’s where she met and fell in love with Tommy Mack, opportunities for a better life are limited. Tommy works a dangerous job and plays for the mill’s baseball team. Then Tommy gets a contract from a farm team for the Detroit Tigers.
They see their chance. But before they can finalize their plans, a fire breaks out in the mill. The biggest loss is Gennessee’s father, who dies in the fire, and her mother, who is crippled by her burns. Gennessee must stay to care for her mother and run the hotel her family manages.
Tommy can’t forfeit his dream and Gennessee can’t leave. She has no choice but to bid him farewell. Will they find a satisfying life without each other?
Coming in March of 2022
Mackenzie Adams has lived on Sugar Hill all her life. When her widowed father died, he left her the bookstore Spin A Yarn. Though Mack longs to travel and see the world, for now she must content herself to do it through books. Her days are filled with dreams to see Paris, Rome, Venice—until a secret unearths an adventure Mackenzie could never have imagined.
Will Slocomb fell for Mack when he saw her take out a bully harassing a new kid at school. She was eleven, and the bully bloodied her lip. In retaliation, she blackened his eye and sent him crying, a just fate, in Will’s mind. This heightened sense of justice serves him well as Gwinnett County deputy sheriff. Now, the sheriff is retiring, and Will plans to run the office. With their own Hooverville down by the river, the town needs a strong man.
But a chance find in an old book unleashes a maelstrom of greed and danger. Can Will protect her? And will Mackenzie finally see him for the man he is and not just a hometown boy?
Look for Book 4 sometime in late 2022