At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters, scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain, through a year and four races at Indian Mount Downs,...

"When two brothers decide to prove how brave they are, everything backfires--literally"--

The sleepy little town of Crozet, Virginiahas seen its share of mischief and mayhem, but nothing like this. While visiting the Mt. Carmel monastery, Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen witnesses a statue of the Virgin Mary cry tears of blood. Legend says this fortells crises, and soon a monk is found frozen to death near the statue. Before long the monk's body disappears, another Crozet citizen dies, and a shocking revelation to an ages-old mystery surfaces....

A Virginia newspaper runs an obituary on the headmaster of a girls' school, only to discover he is alive. But a few days later he is murdered. Postmistress Mary Minor Haristeen goes to work, her sleuthing cat in tow.

Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Brown was promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. Instead she finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil's Half-Acre, a jail where slaves are broken, tortured,...

Chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta of Richmond, Virginia, investigates a body found in a ship's container from Europe. A tattoo on the body sends her flying to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, where she learns of a killer known as The Werewolf.

When thirteen-year-old Logan and his family move into a run-down old house in rural Virginia, he discovers that a woman was murdered there and becomes involved with his neighbor Arthur in a dangerous investigation to try to uncover the killer.