Deborah Smith

It's Valentine's Day weekend in Mossy Creek, and Creekites don't need any new romantic dilemmas. The town's still buzzing over Ida and Amos's kiss. Hannah's heart flutters every time a certain handsome Scottish photographer walks into her library. Peggy's debating her first real date since her husband died. Harry's keeping a romantic secret from Josie. Sandy's got a romantic surprise for Jess. Sagan has to decide whether he and Emily really are a...

Maybe it's the post-New Year's boredom. Maybe it's the cold, frisky air. Whatever the cause, the citizens of Mossy Creek seem determined to get into trouble on a clear winter day in mid-January. Police Chief Amos Royden and his loyal officers, Mutt and Sandy, can barely keep up with the calls. Hank and Casey Blackshear's great aunt Irene, 93, leads a protest march of angry old folks--on their electric scooters. Louise and Charlie Sawyer battle renovation...

Settle back into that comfortable chair and enjoy a second helping of poignant, humorous and nostalgic tales about how things used to be in the legendary South. From vindictive mules and small town marriage rituals that include a pig, to Grandma's story of how a quilt square got her a husband and a home remedy of the hemorrhoidal variety that goes awry, More Sweet Tea delivers what readers have been thirsting for since the first in the Sweet Tea series,...

Her Harvard-student son just eloped with the First Daughter. CNN is parked on the road to her apple orchards. Secret Service agents have commandeered her country kitchen. The irate First Parents are threatening to have her taxes audited. The President's handsome, tough, ex-military nephew is setting up camp in her guest room. Hush McGillan's quiet Appalachian world of heirloom apples, country festivals, and carefully guarded family secrets has just...

For Darl Union, life in Burnt Stand, North Carolina, has always been a mixture of wealth, privilege, loneliness and sinister family secrets. Even her childhood love for Eli Wade, the son of a stone cutter, was tangled in a web of deceit and murder. His father, an innocent man, died for killing her great aunt. Now Darl and Eli must come to grips with the past and all its mysteries.

Kara Whittenbrook is an unlikely heiress. Down-to-earth and lovably quirky. She's never fit in with the stodgy Whittenbrook clan of Connecticut. Growing up at her parents' rainforest preserve in Brazil, she has a quaintly off-beat view of life. Now her beloved parents have died in a plane crash, and Kara's learned a stunning truth. She was adopted. Her birth parents are Mac and Lily Tolbert. They live and work on a backwoods cattle ranch in northern...

Shy, charming, peculiar, and web-toed, Alice Riley has suffered for years at the hands of her dead mother's self-righteous family, while she hides a bevy of secret abilities. When Alice rescues a drowning child, her amazing talents are exposed. Alice can remain underwater for extraordinary periods of time, and she can locate submerged objects through some type of natural sonar ability. Her new fame/notoriety puts Alice in the national news, amidst...

Dear Dr. Firth: I know you are in your cups at this time, drinking, taking pills, and sleeping under trees, but I have some experience rehabilitating lost souls in that regard, and so I am enclosing a box of my biscuits and a cold wrapped container of cream gravy for dessert. Please eat and write back. We need a veterinarian of your gumption here in the Crossroads Cove of Jefferson County. --Delta Whittlespoon, proprietress of The Crossroads Café Biscuit...

Four teens go to the lake to enjoy a day of sun and swimming and foolish choices, and encounter a crazy old recluse named Ned. He tells them about Bessie, a monster that supposedly lives in the lake. Most of them mock the old man and discount Bessie as an urban legend. One is willing to believe, and listen to his warnings. What happens next will haunt the survivor for years to come ... Look for "Bessie's Revenge," in Don't go in the Water, Classic...

Mina Harker allowed Dracula to change her, believing that he held answers to life's questions. But God brought her back from the edge of the abyss through the love of her husband and her friends. Now she's not quite a vampire, but she's definitely something more than a human, and she must face what she has allowed herself to become and what it will mean for her life from now on. Can God truly still have a plan for her, in spite of her many mistakes?...