Mignon F. Ballard Livres

"... I was sure to be scalped and chopped into little pieces with a tomahawk. Well, it would serve them right if I was. "Although I'd rather not." * * * In the autumn of 1831, feeling as though her heart and stomach had switched places, eleven year old Nell Webb travels from her home in the small village of Athens, Georgia, to the Cherokee capital of new Echota in the northern end of the state. Because of family circumstances, it has become necessary for her to live for a time with her uncle, a printer there, and his Cherokee wife, and to attend school with the local children. Instead of the expected teepees and mud huts, Nell is surprised to find a wide main street leading through a town square bordered by neat frame buildings, not unlike those in her hometown. Homesick and resentful, Nell's friendship and adventures with her classmate, Callie, and the kindness of her uncle, aunt, and others lead her not only to a growing understanding, but respect and affection for the people she once considered primitive. As the grim threat of removal looms closer, she shares the sadness and alarm at the injustice that her friends might be forced to leave the land they love.

Candles are gleaming, carolers, singing, and Christmas bells are joyfully ringing, but all is not well in Harmony. Residents of the small Georgia town are busily preparing for pageants and parties, and Molly Stonehouse, spending the holidays with her late husband's aunts on Muscadine Hill, is still anguished over the puzzling accidents that killed her husband and his friend Neil Fry months before. As children, both men had promised never to reveal a fearful secret, and now a pattern of threatening events emerge to warn Molly that among the mistletoe and merrymaking, a frightening drama is unfolding.

Things in the town of Stone's Throw, South Carolina, rarely get much spicier than the extra red pepper Lucy Nan Pilgrim sprinkles into her homemade cheese straws. So when an elderly but surprisingly childlike woman calling herself Shirley shows up on Lucy's doorstep looking for her mama, Lucy thinks it must be another of her friend Ellis's pranks. But Ellis doesn't know a thing about it, and what's more, the two suspect the woman might be Ellis's cousin, Florence, who disappeared as a child more than fifty years earlier.When the mysterious woman vanishes from Lucy's house, she and Ellis don't know what to think. And considering that Calpernia Hemphill, the town's theater and music aficionado, has just been found dead of an apparent fall from the tower at Bertram's Folly, life in Stone's Throw suddenly seems less safe than sinister.Luckily, guardian angel Augusta Goodnight shows up to calm Lucy's nerves (with a basket of strawberry muffins, of course). And not a moment too soon, because Shirley/Florence is found dead at the bottom of a steep flight of steps in the parking lot behind the Methodist church.She is not the last victim, and Ellis, whose inheritance could be threatened by the reappearance of her long-lost cousin, remains the number-one suspect. Augusta, Lucy, and the Thursday Morning Literary Society (which now meets on Monday afternoons) must use their heads---and a little bit of home cooking---to solve the mystery.

Searching for the mother who had abandoned her as an infant, Henrietta Meredith is drawn to Raven Rock, a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, and to the long-neglected Honeysuckle House where her mother once lived. Why did terrified Maggie Grey leave her baby with the kindly middle-aged Merediths promising to return, only to disappear forever? And what is the link between the faded snapshot of a group of young women and the dark period in the town's past? In her efforts to uncover the truth, Henrietta awakens a dormant evil, endangering her own life and the lives of those around her, the friendly people who had made a place for her in the community. Can one of them be hiding a dreadful secret? Here is the engrossing story of a young woman whose quest leads her down a dangerous, twisting path to a confrontation with unthinkable evil.