KDL Recommends

Television chef Gina Foxton finds her efforts to secure a job on a national cooking channel complicated by her unexpected attraction to a rival chef with an off-putting redneck personality.

In 1885, haunted by his devastating memories of the Civil War, Cass Wakefield journeys from his Mississippi hometown with his childhood friend Alison, a dying woman, who persuades him to accompany her to Franklin, Tennessee, to recover the bodies of her brother and father, a quest that reawakens Cass’s vivid recollections.

Stricken by polio, Paige Dunn continues to raise her daughter, Diana, with the help of her caretaker Peacie, in a novel set against the backdrop of Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1964.

Detective Dave Robicheaux struggles with alcoholism and rage while fighting to protect lives in Katrina-devastated New Orleans.

When the impending nuptials of seventy-one-year-old Mayor Hale Dunbar and the widow Gaylie Lyons are threatened by the bride-to-be’s disapproving grown children, the Nitwitts plan a welcome for the children designed to garner their approval.

With her favorite market, the Piggly Wiggly, on the verge of closing due to competition from the Mega-Mart across town, Laurie Lepanto launches a campaign to save the store.

Mrs. Threadgoode’s tale of two high-spirited women of the 1930s, Idgie and Ruth, helps Evelyn, a 1980s woman in a sad slump of middle age, to begin to rejuvenate her own life.

When Caroline Wimbley Levine returned to Tall Pines Plantation, she never expected to make peace with long-buried truths about herself and her family.

With Susan in Paris, Beth returns from college to house-sit the Island Gamble, intending to wrap herself in childhood memories and the island’s magic, until cunning Max Mitchell arrives on the scene and steals her heart.

Troubled by her unfaithful husband and difficult teenage daughter, Susan Hayes returns home to Sullivan’s Island in an attempt to reconnect with her past.

At age seventy-two, Emma Hanley plans to escape small-town Palmetto, South Carolina, and travel the globe. But when her fickle husband dies in undignified circumstances, Emma finds herself juggling the needs of her adult children.

Running the local general store for their small-town South Carolina community, manager Elizabeth enlists her two fellow shopkeepers and a crew of friends to save the store from a rival who would put her out of business.

When a wealthy plantation owner in 1944 Louisiana turns up dead and eviscerated, Deputy Raymond Thibodeaux is confronted by Adele Hebert, who is found covered in blood next to the body and who claims to be a shapeshifter.

Five years after fleeing to New York in the wake of a murder acquittal, Adam Chase returns to North Carolina, only to find himself trapped in the middle of a new case of murder as the people around him begin to die and he becomes the prime suspect.

A tale inspired by the life of Confederate general John Bell Hood is set in post-Civil War New Orleans and follows his tragic struggles with disabling war injuries, his marriage and eleven children, and his battle with yellow fever.

Relegated to the care of an eccentric great-aunt after her mentally unbalanced mother’s accidental death, 12-year-old CeeCee is quickly surrounded by the strong women and cultural elements of her new Savannah community.

In an attempt to relive the carefree days of college, four middle-aged friends reunite for a vacation in a North Carolina beach house and inevitably confront the demons of their shared past.

After a personal tragedy, writer Ava spends the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee at the invitation of an old friend and his aunts. But Woodburn Hall is anything but quiet: ancient feuds and modern-day rivalries emerge as Ava stumbles onto the darker side ofthe family’s history, and becomes tangled in their secrets.

Unduly familiar with choosing between sides throughout her lifetime, Nonny Frett finds herself once again caught in the middle between an escalating family feud that began before her birth and the realization of her own dreams.

Ten years after leaving, Arlene Fleet finds she still has not escaped Possett, Alabama, when an old classmate turns up asking questions about a crime Arlene committed in her youth, forcing her into a confrontation with her past.

Five very different Southern women meet in a nursing home and develop a friendship that resonates over the decades.

Anticipating a relaxing retirement, Father Tim returns to his hometown for the first time in decades when he receives an anonymous summons, an event that leads to his discovery of long-buried secrets and new people.

After her “stand-in mother,” a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters.

Clare makes a living as a divorce coach to help men and women mend their broken hearts, all the while refusing to fall in love again herself, until she meets Lex, a charismatic sea captain and recent arrival in town.

Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud.

Scout’s father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s.

Moving to a small South Carolina town in order to turn around a failing stationery shop, John Dodge is embraced by his new community, but finds his attempts to woo the widow owner of a neighboring store thwarted because of her inability to escape a painful past.

When a southern writer demands that their untraditional, shoestring film company make the movie of her life, producer Angie accompanies her colleagues to Georgia, where a man from her past is preparing to marry a wealthy debutante.

Emmett and Lauren Sullivan have always been a team, working together to raise their daughters on tranquil Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. Now, with all their attention focused on nine-year-old Ainslie, they barely notice as their older daughter Sloan drifts further away from them and toward a reckless path that could tear the family apart.

Returning to her childhood home in the Lowcountry at the request of her mother, Caretta Rutledge, who had thought she had forever buried her Southern roots and her troubled family, unexpectedly begins to reconnect with her friends and family while she fixes up the family beach house, learning that in order to live life to the fullest, she must forgive and forget the past.

In a Southern shrimping village, the entire town rallies to find a missing vessel and its captain, Bud Morrison.

Toy Sooner, a single mother and marine biologist opening a turtle rehab facility with the help of a director at the South Carolina Aquarium, must find a way to deal with the return of her daughter’s vindictive father, who has just been released from prison.

In the wake of racial tensions in 1960s Alabama, sheltered white college student Stella participates in her first freedom movement and finds her life changed in several ways when she develops friendships with local African Americans.

Leaving her beloved Memphis to help her husband’s pipe dream of running a Vermont inn, southern belle Leelee Satterfield discovers numerous unanticipated challenges and is forced to apply her southern-style wits in the wake of a cruel swindle.

Returning to her tiny hometown of Dacus, South Carolina, attorney Avery Andrews suddenly finds herself caught up in the battle between a real-estate developer and environmentalists, a battle that is complicated by a brutal murder.

Struggling with a lackluster teaching position at an archaeology field school in South Carolina, Tempe Brennan discovers a fresh skeleton among ancient bones and traces leads to a free street clinic where patients are going missing.

Hugh and Serena Hallam’s family prospers on their cotton farm in late 1850s Tennessee until the Civil War erupts, causing Hugh to join the Confederate Army and forcing Serena to hold onto the farm, slaves, and family.

Two Confederate and two Union generals (Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain) examine their careers leading to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in a prequel to The Killer Angels.

The two sides of the country go to war in the last of the trilogy that includes Killer Angels and Gods and Generals.

Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet tell the Southern view of the battle at Gettysburg while Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and General John Buford present the Northern view.

Four friends share a relationship during the women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth-century North Carolina, including opinionated women’s rights advocate Bertie, stylish dinner-party hostess Guerine, quiet farmer’s daughter Doodle, and city debutante-turned-country schoolteacher Ina.

Eighty-four-year-old Lily Davis Woodward looks back at a turning point in her life, when she had to choose between her World War II soldier husband and the poor Italian immigrant planning the fireworks display to celebrate the soldiers’ return.

When a rising figure in the perfume and flavor industry samples a unique apple picked from the mountain orchards of a widowed single father, her ensuing search for the apple’s origins brings her into the farmer’s mysterious world.

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women—black and white, mothers and daughters—view one another.

The lives of three generations of two African-American families intertwine in the aftermath of the Civil War as newly freed slaves struggle to build new lives in The Bottom, a poor settlement just down Red River from Colfax, Louisiana.

A multigenerational saga of the Belle family of strong-minded Southern women includes Musette, whose psychic abilities astonish her neighbors even after her death, and Dixie, who serves tea to the statue of a Confederate soldier.

When his attempts to get to know his dying father fail, William Bloom makes up stories that recreate his father’s life in heroic proportions.

Divorcée Delilah Dickinson has high hopes for her new tour to sites associated with Margaret Mitchell. Unfortunately, by the time the group reaches “Tara” for a dinner dance, the actor playing Rhett Butler turns up dead. A sheriff’s department investigator tries to catch the killer by keeping the group at Tara overnight-with Delilah’s unasked for assistance, of course.

After ending her relationship with her unfaithful fiancé, out-of-work Charleston pastry chef Teeny Templeton is wrongly accused of his murder days later and turns to a lawyer ex-boyfriend, who broke her heart a decade earlier, for help.

Introduces the colorful and offbeat inhabitants of a sleepy, southern Georgia town, including Roger, a studious peanut virologist; Della, a newcomer and painter of chickens; and Louise, who is trying to summon Martian invaders.

Inheriting an historic home from an elderly man she had recently met, Melanie Middleton, a Charleston real-estate agent who possesses the ability to see ghosts, finds herself dealing with an entire family of haunts and joins forces with Jack Trenholm, a handsome writer, to unravel the house’s dark history and find some long-missing diamonds.