The Lemon Jelly Cake carries readers back to kinder, gentler times in small-town Central Illinois at the turn of the century. Evoking a forgotten America of lush lawns, bountiful summer picnics, shaded front porches, and gentle humor, the tale is set in an era when the day's toughest decision might have been what to serve for dinner or which suit or dress to wear. The Lemon Jelly Cake was a selection of the Literary Guild and was serialized in Woman's...

Twelve-year-old Frankie Joe Huckaby, forced to live with the father he never knew, a stepmother, and four half-brothers in Illinois, starts a delivery service to finance his escape back to his mother in Texas, not realizing he is making a better life for himself than he ever had with her.

A former rock star tries to overcome the break-up of his band, his mother's death, and his wife's desertion while living in his bathrobe and renting his childhood home to eccentric tenants and becoming entwined in their comically disastrous lives.

A tale inspired by the historic Tri-State tornado of 1925 follows the experiences of businessman Paul Graves and his family, who throughout a year after the storm watch their community struggle to rebuild and who miscalculate growing resentment about the twist of fate that left their home and business untouched.

Working mother Kate Warner's life in suburban Pickard, Ill., is shattered when her eight-year-old daughter, Jenny, gets off the school bus one afternoon and disappears just steps away from home. To make matters worse, Kate's husband and Jenny's dad, Richard, becomes the prime suspect. Other suspects include Richard's business associate, a local physician and the anonymous caller who keeps taunting the Warners.

A middle-aged anthropology professor contemplating his future becomes romantically involved with a woman released from jail after shooting her husband, the pastor of a snake-handling church.

Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide.

Suffering a hangover from a graduation party, eighteen-year-old Whitley is blindsided by the news that her father has moved into a house with his fianc©♭e, her thirteen-year-old daughter Bailey, and her son Nathan, in whose bed Whitley had awakened that morning.

Kitt Lundgren and Mary Catherine "M.C." Riggio of the Rockford, Ill., VCB (Violent Crimes Bureau) vow to catch a serial killer who sets the suffocated bodies of 10-year-old girls in their own beds, dressed like angels in frilly white nightgowns, hair spread out on their pillows and pink lip gloss applied postmortem to their mouths. Kitt, a recovering middle-aged alcoholic, tried and failed to catch the murderer five years earlier, during a 2001 killing...

While helping a childhood friend find the father she never knew, V.I. stumbles into a web of corporate deception