Is Liam Berne a loving son--or a murderer? The second book in the Ozark Mountain Trilogy, Only by Death is a thought-provoking suspense story of a man who loses everything and learns he must die to find life.After much agonizing, Liam Berne takes his mother, who has Alzheimer's, to the Sure Foot River and drowns her. A mercy killing, he tells himself, to spare her years in a nursing home. And getting his inheritance early isn't a bad thing either.Dixie Berne's body...

One man's hatred sets off a community crisis in a chilling page-turning read that is also startlingly inspirational. Textile magnate G. R. Logan lays off a thirty-year employee who dies weeks later, and the man's son means to make Logan pay. In her second novel in the dramatic Baxter series, Kathy Herman unleashes a kidnapper's unresolved anger and explores the honest depths of a believer's anger at God. Sinister messages threaten the lives of two teenage girls while the citizens of Baxter...

Can You Ever Escape Your Past?At eighteen, popular Ivy Griffith likes nothing better than getting stoned with her boyfriend, Pete, and his basketball buddies–until one afternoon when a nightmare unfolds. Ivy watches in horror as her boyfriend and his friends murder a teammate and bury his body in a remote location. The four friends make a pact to keep the killing quiet, and Ivy flees her parents’ Colorado home for college and never looks back.Now, after ten...

CNA Sally Cox is about as happy to be at Walnut Hills Nursing Center as the patients are. But it’s work or starve, now that her husband has found a younger companion. Sally’s new crowd skews toward the elderly—ninety-year-old Elsie Rigsby, for instance, whose dementia comes and goes with her gold-digging son and grandson’s visits. Elsie’s not going to tell those vultures where she stashed her money. Still, she’s not getting any younger, and someone besides her needs to know. Three deaths l...

Things Aren’t Always How They Appear!Guy Jones is about to burst his buttons. He just won the biggest case of his career and is being hailed by his law partners. But his wife, Ellen, is consumed with her quirky, needy friends and misses his victory dinner. Little does she know that Kinsey Abbott, Guy’s pretty legal secretary, is more than happy to keep him company. Communication between the Joneses rapidly deteriorates when Ellen’s stubborn loyalty to an Iranian co...

Eighteen-year-old Angie Marks, tattooed and pierced, shows up in the small town of Baxter without a place to stay. When eccentric millionaire Patrick Bailey hires her to be his housekeeper, and then when Angie risks her own safety to help Mr. Bailey get his twin great-grandsons out of a rattlesnake's strike zone, she finds herself fully at the center of the town's curiosity. At Monty's Diner they say she might be involved with Billy Joe Sawyer, using rattlers to intimidate the key witnesse...

When twenty-four-year-old Hawk Cummings wakes up by Beaver Lake at sunset, all he remembers is a dream about a spider that spewed venom. Then he realizes that Kennedy--the young woman he broke every vow to have an affair with--is gone. He rushes to her house only to find it empty. No furniture. No pictures. No sign that anyone lived there.Ashamed and confused, Hawk decides not to report anything to the sheriff. Then Hawk realizes that someone else in town knows what happened to his...

The Past Is BackEllen Jones’s hands are full after she begrudgingly brings her aging father to Seaport. Lawrence’s memory is failing—though he can’t seem to forget what he’s been holding against Ellen for the past forty years. But when he’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Ellen realizes she never released her resentment and it’s too late for reconciliation. Then suddenly—literally overnight—her son, Owen, comes face-to-face with the consequences of his wilder days gone...

Her Sister Couldn't Be Alive . . . Could She?It had to be Riley Jo. She was certain . . . wasn't she? But when Abby Cummings tells her mother she thought she saw her sister at the store, her mother quickly dismisses the idea. After all, Riley Jo and their father had been missing for years. Presumably dead. Yet Abby cannot ignore her intuition. Telling her friend J. D., they investigate. But J. D. may know more about the disappearance than he's telling, or even real...

Furious that his girlfriend chose to bring twin babies to term, Dennis walks out of Jennifer's life. And now the Centers for Disease Control have quarantined Jennifer, along with 200 others who attended the reception for a missionary couple bearing a deadly virus. Is Jennifer at risk? Does Dennis even care what will happen to the twins, separated from their mother at birth? Fear takes hold in the town as violence erupts, and Baxter experiences an outbreak deadlier than any virus. Still, wo...

A dangerous gamble... a terrible secret... a deadly choice...It’s summer in Sophie Trace, and Ethan Langley has returned home from college, eager to grow his friendship with Vanessa Jessup and her infant son, Carter. And Vanessa’s parents, Police Chief Brill Jessup and her husband, Kurt, approve: Ethan is thoughtful, kind, hardworking, and ambitious. But before Ethan has time to settle in, a series of random shootings shatters his world. While police are scrambling for suspects, Ethan lear...

A family crisis... a murderer on the loose... and heart-pounding suspense. When Vanessa Jessup returns home from her sophomore year of college, her mother, Police Chief Brill Jessup, is stunned to see that she’s pregnant—by one of her professors. While Brill is glad her daughter rejected the father’s abortion ultimatum, she’s also hurt that Vanessa ignored her upbringing and angry that the professor has disappeared without so much as a nickel of child support. But that’s not all Brill’s go...