Buffalo Valley faces a new challenge. Everyone thinks Vaughn Kyle has come to town to meet Hassie Knight. After all, Vaughn was named after Hassie's dead son, and this is the first time he's come to town. What the folks in town don't know is that Vaughn's fiancée, Natalie Nichols, works for the Value-X conglomerate, and that Natalie has asked Vaughn to use this visit as a scouting trip to evaluate Buffalo Valley as a location for one of their superstores....

"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American...

When Hannah Breed confides to midwife Rose Carroll that she's pregnant out of wedlock, Rose promises to help her through the pregnancy and figure out a way to break the news to her family. But that night, amid the noise and revelry of the Independence Day fireworks, Hannah is found shot dead. After a former slave and fellow Quaker is accused of the murder, Rose delves into the crime, convinced of the man's innocence. An ill-mannered mill manager,...

In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion—and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies. Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children—wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa. Settling...