The move from New Jersey to Hilton Head, South Carolina, wasn't easy for the Russo family-difficult enough for Big Al and Connie, but even harder for their daughter Maria Graziella, who insists on being called Grace. At thirty-one and still, shockingly, unmarried, Grace has scandalized her staunchly traditional Italian family by moving in with her boyfriend Michael-who, though a truly great guy, is agnostic, commitment-phobic, a scientist, and (horror...

Bleached-blond call girls rarely bring good news, especially the one who bursts through the door of Bay Tanner's struggling inquiry agency and into her already complicated life. Karen Zwilling swears she's been viciously attacked but can't-or won't-go to the police. With the tragedy of her husband's murder finally resolved, Bay has been yearning for a little tranquillity, but that hope is shattered, both by Karen's plea for help and by the unexpected...

Towering live oaks guard old secrets and powerful forces that even the spirited Bay Tanner can't control... A freak summer storm has Bay Tanner, sometime private investigator, cooped up with her ailing father at his antebellum mansion near Hilton Head. Desperate for a distraction, Bay recovers a cooler bobbing along on the incoming tide. What she discovers inside will plunge her into a world of ancient magic where the power of the "root" has held...

Approached by a true-crime writer for help in solving the disappearance of a wealthy man whose estate is being held in court, investigator Bay Tanner checks out links between the disappearance and an assistant's suicide while wondering about the writer'strue motives.

"Preschool Teachers' Lives and Work focuses on preschool teachers as people, what they do, and how they are affected by what they do. Highly politicized and hotly debated, preschool today is increasingly focused on comparatively narrow views of school readiness and academic outcomes which are generally in opposition to the broader view of readiness proposed by NAEYC. This powerful book, based around interviews and data drawn primarily from Head Start...

"While recovering from a traumatic head injury, Polly Schuster struggles to find her way through one chaotic week in July when her entire extended family descends upon the bucolic town of Livingston, Montana for their annual gathering. As she contents with a series of unexpected events and the haunting echoes of her past inconveniently resurfacing as a result of her injury, Polly soon learns that her perception of her family and their life together...