ReviewEnchanting and exciting, romantic and believable-I wasn’t able to tear myself away! (Melissa Marr, author of the New York Times bestselling Wicked Lovely series ) About the AuthorCynthia Hand is a native of southeastern Idaho and currently lives with her husband and two children in Southern California, where she teaches writing at Pepperdine University. She has graduate degrees in creative writing from Boise State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Instead of a muse, Cynthia has a guardian angel named Buster. He wears a Stetson in place of a halo, prefers a beat-up pickup truck to flying, and loves to correct Cynthia’s grammar.

Chapter 1: A Bad Choice and a Worse One My dad always said that his feet were the only stupid parts of his body. They had walked him into every bad decision he had ever made, so he had to watch them carefully. He repeated that little pearl of wisdom so often that I began to take it literally and stare at my feet when they were moving. I had my eyes on them the afternoon they walked me into my career in agriculture. I blame my feet because I was only thirteen at the time and not exactly in the job market.On that particular day, I was mostly thinking about what I could eat when I got home from school. I was trudging along the dirt lane from the bus stop while my sisters and cousins rushed past me, trying to escape the biting New Mexico wind. The lane's rutted tracks had filled with water from a snowstorm and then frozen into narrow strips of dirty ice. It felt powerful and satisfying to crush the fragile surfaces and watch the underlying brown water ooze around my...

First in a delicious new mystery series filled with casseroles, confidences, and killers...Lilah Drake's Covered Dish business discreetly provides the residents of Pine Haven, Illinois, with delicious, fresh-cooked meals they can claim they cooked themselves. But when one of her clandestine concoctions is used to poison a local woman, Lilah finds herself in a pot-load of trouble...After dreaming for years of owning her own catering company, Lilah has made a start into the food world through her Covered Dish business, covertly cooking for her neighbors who don't have the time or skill to do so themselves, and allowing them to claim her culinary creations as their own. While her clientele is strong, their continued happiness depends on no one finding out who's really behind the apron.So when someone drops dead at a church Bingo night moments after eating chili that Lilah made for a client, the anonymous chef finds herself getting stirred into a cauldron of...

"Alex Duarte is my kind of cop. I hope he sticks around for a long, long, time." – Michael Connelly It was supposed to be a low-level bust for ATF agent Alex Duarte, with the hope that he could work it up the ladder to someone important. He just didn't know how important. In New Orleans to check out a mysterious Panamanian named Ortiz who likes to trade guns illegally and import marijuana by the truckload, Duarte suddenly finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he has ever known. Because guns and drugs are bad enough-but there are other things that are much, much worse. A shadowy colonel who is not what he seems… a white supremacist intent on becoming "the man who changed America"… an attractive FBI agent with a lot of pull and a lot of secrets… Alex Duarte knows he's in deep with these characters. He just hopes he's not over his head.

War is on the horizon for the Galaxy. The Empire of Man has been thrust into civil war as the Cabal makes it's presence known. Earth is on the rise as plans within plans come to fruition. Mar's intends to take the war to Earth directly and Athena Lee is smack-dab in the middle of it all. Again. Will she survive or will the Earth win and reconquer the galaxy?