Janet Metzger

"When bullying threatens to destroy a teen's life, painful memories resurface for dedicated high school teacher Laura Reed and pediatrician J.C. Fullerton. With the support of the Sweet Magnolias, they bring the town together to ensure that a promising student's future isn't ruined. And to establish once and for all that bullying has no place in Serenity, South Carolina. Both J.C.'s and Laura's passion for the cause is deeply personal, and their growing...

Enjoying summertime weeks of freedom at a popular Jewish beach with their children, beautiful Ada thrives away from her strict husband, while chef Vivie develops diplomatic skills, and unmarried Bec is forced to choose between family beliefs and her passion for a married man.

"No women need apply." Western towns looking for a local doctor during the frontier era often concluded their advertisements in just that manner. Yet, apply they did. And in small towns all over the west, highly trained women from medical colleges in the East took on the post of local doctor to great acclaim. These women changed the lives of the patients they came in contact with, as well as their own lives, and helped write the history of the West....

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis. Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her "a magician of self-consciousness," while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, "Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive." Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis's...

This classic mystery features a family feud, feline intervention, and the spirited septuagenarian sleuth from The Cat Saw Murder. A strange encounter with a little girl named Claudia and a dead toad sparks Rachel Murdock's obsessive curiosity, and she winds up renting the house next door just to see how things play out. But soon, after she and her cat Samantha move in, Rachel realizes they've landed right in the middle of a deadly love triangle that's...

After her beloved dad got addicted to right-wing talk radio and Fox News, Jen Senko feared he would never be the same again... Frank Senko had always known how to have a good time. Despite growing up in a poverty-stricken family, during the Depression and having to fight his way to middle-class status as an adult, he tended to look on the bright side. But, after a job change forced Frank to begin a long car commute every day, his daughter Jen noticed...

Lum has always been on the outside. At eight, she was diagnosed with what we now call an intersex condition and is told she can't expect to marry. Now, at thirty-three, she has no home of her own but is shuttled from one relative's house to another-valued for her skills, but never treated like a true member of the family. Everything is turned upside down, however, when the Blue Ridge Parkway is slated to come through her family's farmland. As people...

A drunken man is shot dead on his doorstep in this classic mystery starring the "observant [and] appealing" seventy-year-old sleuth (Publishers Weekly). Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies' Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home-and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire...

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: enduring peace depended as much on recognition of the fundamental...

When Rachel Murdock and her sister Jennifer receive a call for help from their favorite niece, Lilly, in Breakers Beach, California, they quickly hop a train from Los Angeles to see her-but not before collecting their prized cat Samantha in a picnic basket and bringing her along for the ride. Samatha, it turns out, is an heiress, the inheritor of a fortune left by a wealthy relative, and so the attempt at the cat's life, made right after they arrive,...