Maggie Lodge, assistant to the reclusive advice columnist known only as Dear Aunt Cornelia to her readers, hires down-but-not-quite-out private eye Sam Sage to help track down the person who is blackmailing her employer. Maggie and Sam are a mismatched pair. As far as Sam is concerned, Maggie is reckless and in over her head. She is not what he had in mind for a client, but he can't afford to be choosy. Maggie, on the other hand, is convinced that...

"Set amid California's wildfire season, a vivid and magical novel following a family in crisis thrust on a collision course with the world around them that has an outcome beyond their wildest imaginings...When Lu and George Barnes drop their only daughter, Pippa, off at college, they return to their Sonoma home to find that their paths have diverged. Confronted with an empty nest, Lu's increasing dissatisfaction with their materialistic lives becomes...

Instead of sailing away on a carefree cruise, Maggie Patterson is stuck in charge of her sister's pet-friendly bar, just in time to watch a murder turn the idyllic town upside down. --Publisher

Lonely-hearted waitress Katie Smith has nowhere to go for Christmas, and a huge crush on her gorgeous diner patron Juan Martinez. So when Juan asks Katie to pose as his girlfriend for holiday festivities at his family's winery, Katie leaps at the chance... that is, until an accident lands Juan in a coma right after giving his folks the "news." Katie knows she should tell the Martinezes the truth, but when they immediately embrace her, Katie is reluctant...

Settling in the swamps of early-nineteenth-century Ohio, the Goodenough family establishes an apple orchard that begins a long family battle, and years later, as their youngest son wanders through Gold Rush California, his family's past makes an unexpected appearance.

Plagued by strange events at a construction site, including the discovery of a dead body, Shannon wonders if someone wants to stop the renovations on an old asylum and vows to complete the project even if it kills her.

Already in the midst of the See-No-Evil killer murder trial, the sleepy town of Oak Knoll is shocked at the murder of Marissa Fordham. Sheriff's detective Tony Mendez is perplexed by the case. The only witness to the crime, the victim's young daughter, implicates her own father. To assist him on the case, Tony calls on child advocate Anne Leone, who also happens to be the star witness in the See-No-Evil trial.

Nineteen-year-old Excel reluctantly makes the long trek back to the apartment where he grew up in Colma, Calif., from Hello City, a relaxed town of hippies and techies near the Mexican border, where he'd moved nine months earlier with his girlfriend, Sab. Excel has a debt in Hello City-$10,000, to be exact-and his only option is to ask for his old job at The Pie Who Loved Me, a restaurant where "pizza goes to die." His mother, Maxina, a former action...

Every Friday night in the idyllic seaside town of Pacific Cove, the Roundup Crew, a group of dog-loving friends, meets at a neighborhood wine bar for Yappy Hour. When Rachel, the owner, mysteriously leaves town and asks her sister, Maggie, to run the bar in her absence, things get complicated fast. Maggie arrives to open up and finds a body sprawled on the floor, an incriminating letter with Rachel’s name on it nearby... When Rachel is declared...

From a house on the edge of her family's dusty farmland airstrip near Chicago, the child Cassie O'Malley would sneak into the night to look at the planes sitting shimmering in the moonlight. Her World War I veteran father, Pat, wanted his son to be a pilot, not his reckless, red-haired daughter. But it was Cassie who had the gift. Ever since she could remember, Cassie felt the pull of getting in a cockpit and taking to the skies. Observing all the...