At a literary festival, poet Linda Fallon meets, for the first time in years, fellow poet Thomas Janes. Thomas has arranged to be there hoping to reestablish contact with the woman he passionately pursued years earlier, in an affair that ended disastrously. As the story moves backward, it examines their love affair.

Impulsively taking a cruise to reconnect with an estranged friend, Violet suffers traumatic memories about her lost friendship and abandoned career before connecting with the voyage's dancing host, who harbors a shady agenda and inadvertently promotes her healing.

Spanning 40 years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and the dark and violent past of the extraordinary family into which they were born.

What if the old maid of Amherst wasn't an old maid at all? The poet dons a hundred veils, alternately playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil in this extraordinary adventure that will disturb and delight.

Cynthia Riggs has no problem making readers believe that her feisty protagonist can be almost indispensable to the new police chief. The years just seem to have sharpened ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull's mind, and she's got an encyclopedic knowledge of her fellow West Tisbury residents and their forebears. But most readers do wonder how the old lady came to be made the chief's official deputy. Author Cynthia Riggs obligingly offers that

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"A middle-aged poet finds herself adrift in her marriage and life now that her child has moved away to college. Her job teaching Greek myth to high school boys at a prestigious New York City academy has its small pleasures-her students offer surprising insights to stories she's studied for decades-but as her debut poetry collection approaches publication she starts to notice the seams of her life becoming unloosed. The chorus of voices in her life...

There's more than one reason the new West Tisbury police chief officially made ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull her deputy. For one thing, Victoria knows just about everything about everyone in Martha's Vineyard, not to mention their ancestors. Victoria may be afflicted with the usual aches and pains that descend on nonagenarians—she has a cutoff shoe to accommodate her bunion and a stout stick to help her on her walks across the fields

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Struggling to support her family in mid-nineteenth-century New York, writer Frances Osgood makes an unexpected connection with literary master Edgar Allan Poe and finds her survival complicated by her intense attraction to the writer and the scheming manipulations of his wife.

"The daughter of a Venetian musician, Aemilia Bassano came of age in Queen Elizabeth's royal court. The Queen's favorite, she developed a love of poetry and learning, maturing into a young woman known not only for her beauty but also her sharp mind and a quick tongue. When Aemilia becomes the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, she fears her mind will languish--until she crosses paths with an impetuous playwright named William Shakespeare and begins an impassioned...