The Brown Baggers — Middle Grade Contemporary Fiction with a twist.  Beloved middle school lunch lady is secretly living a life of loneliness and shame.  She has a crush on the science teacher, her long-lost daughter has returned home, and her new assistant has found out she uses magic in the kitchen to help students navigate the hardships of life.  After a hurricane rocks their small island, she finds that her magic has limitations.  She enlists the help of some down-on-their-luck students to plant a school garden and together they pull off the impossible to save their community while leading the lunch lady to forgiveness and true love.  

The Pig Farmer – Adult Historical Fiction.  In 1943, 250 Nazi POWs were brought to Fort Dagger and employed in the slaughter houses in rural northern Illinois.  Three prisoners escaped.  Two were caught.  One disappeared into the night and was hidden in a root cellar by a naïve farm girl who knew little about Hitler and the atrocities taking place on the other side of the world.  After the war, he emerges from his underground hideaway and assimilates into a small town, maintaining a simple life as a loving husband and prosperous pig farmer.  His true identity is called into question late in life when he develops dementia and his estranged son and his son’s new wife, who is a Jew, move back to the family farm to care for him.

The Hairdressers’ Daughters – Adult Contemporary Fiction about family secrets and assisted suicide.  All the ladies in this factory town whisper the address for the Pink Parlour.  Dee and her sister are the go-to gals for dye jobs and die jobs.  They help with wigs, makeup, and mastectomy bras, and when you’re in the final stage, they help you go gently into that goodnight.  That’s what girlfriends do.  It’s a noble cause until the family is torn apart when the sisters use the same means to take justice into their own hands after a patron of the Pink Parlour confesses a heinous crime.  Now Dee’s estranged daughter returns home with an inoperable brain tumor and makes a simple request.

Proximity — Psychological Thriller.  Lindsey has given the best years of her life to her marriage and the shared dream of a large family.  She and her husband, Will, have spent nearly ten years trying to conceive another child while Will commutes back and forth to his government job in D.C.  Lindsey is blindsided by his decision to give up on IVF and is worried he is having an affair.  Has she been too focused on her new real estate career to notice?  Does she even care now that she has romantic feelings for her newest client?  Everything starts to come into focus when Lindsey and Will’s only child loses her sight in a suspicious accident and leads Lindsey to the terrifying conclusion that one can be too close to the truth to not see the whole for what it is.

MOJO — Psychological Thriller with Male Protagonist.  In the aftermath of a terrorist attack that shuts down the NBA, former basketball superstar known to his fans as MoJo, adjusts to mainstream life in the Midwest as husband and caretaker for his broken-down brother who served time in prison for a teenage mistake.  Driven by guilt that he should have served the sentence instead of his brother, and in fear for his family’s safety, MoJo steps up to save his brother from a bad debt and finds himself playing a dangerous game in an underground basketball league run by a former teammate with a grudge and his Russian mobster family.

Spin Cycle – Young Adult Fiction.  A coming of age story about a Midwestern teen torn between her parents and a high school dropout who works at her family’s laundromat.  In a small town where white cheerleaders don’t mix with migrant Mexicans, the young lovers engage in a forbidden romance in the backroom of the laundromat until an early morning robbery turns deadly.  Pregnant, alone, and on the run, the teen finds safe harbor in a sleepy fishing village in Mexico where she discovers the rich history of her boyfriend’s family and learns to appreciate her own.