Orem Library

As the members of the garden club in Darling, Alabama, prepare to plant roses for their annual Confederate Day celebration, they find themselves distracted by a series of mysteries involving stolen funds, a secret code, and a local resident's odd behavior.

Respectable couple Odell and Joyce Watson find their lives upturned by their neighbors Milton and Yvonne Hamilton.

When the Texas Star herself--aviatrix Miss Lily Dare, the fastest woman in the world--is threatened and her plane sabotaged, the Darling Dahlias must weed through the rumors to find the truth to take down a saboteur who may be propelled by revenge.

The house fire claimed the life of a local woman, as well as one of the firefights. Investigation shows the woman was murdered, and Chief of Police Jane Hardy plunges into the investigation. Then her fifteen-year-old son is accused of a horrific crime. Can Jane trust her ex, Reid, to prove Will's innocence? Do the three days missing from Jane's memory hold the truth about what is happening now? -- adapted from back cover

"Police Chief Jane Hardy is still reeling from the scandal that rocked her small-town department just as she took over for her retired father - the man who wrecked her life with one little lie. Now she's finally been reunited with her presumed-dead fifteen-year-old son, Will, and his father, documentarian Reid Bechtol. When a murder aboard the oil platform Zeus exposes an environmental terrorist's plot to flood Mobile Bay with crude oil, Jane and...

Sixteen-year-old Alex feels so disconnected from his friends that he starts his junior year at a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, high school by attempting suicide, but soon, a friend of his older brother draws him into cross-country running and a new understanding of himself.

After the death of his father, ten-year-old Moon leaves their forest shelter home and is sent to an Alabama institution, becoming entangled in the outside world he has never known and making good friends, a relentless enemy, and finally a new life.

Patricia Anne and Mary Alice attend a folk art show and find a former student in charge. The next day, after hearing the news that the gallery owner has died under suspicious circumstances, they find the student, Claire, huddled on the front porch claiming to have narrowly survived an attack on her own life.

When her mother uproots them again to another home and takes a job as housekeeper, ten-year-old Mavis is determined to find a best friend in Landry, Alabama, where the summer also holds the promise of friendship and change for a sad man, a stray dog, and a timid girl.

So begins The Well and the Mine, a magnificent debut novel set in 1930s Alabama. The place is Carbon Hill, a small coal-mining community, in the midst of the Depression. The Moore family, a loving brood of five, is better off than most, generous to their less fortunate neighbors. But darkness arrives at their doorstep when a mysterious woman throws a baby down the Moores' well, and the story slowly unfolds, through the alternating voices of nine-year-old...