MacBrides

Dear Dr. Firth: I know you are in your cups at this time, drinking, taking pills, and sleeping under trees, but I have some experience rehabilitating lost souls in that regard, and so I am enclosing a box of my biscuits and a cold wrapped container of cream gravy for dessert. Please eat and write back. We need a veterinarian of your gumption here in the Crossroads Cove of Jefferson County. --Delta Whittlespoon, proprietress of The Crossroads Café Biscuit witches, Mama called them. She'd heard the term as a girl. She'd inherited that talent. My mother could cast spells on total strangers simply by setting a plate of her biscuits in front of them. --Tal MacBride Welcome back to the Crossroads Cove where new loves, old feuds, and poignant mysteries will challenge siblings Tal, Gabby, and Gus MacBride to fight for the home they lost and to discover just how important their family once was, and still is, to the proud people of the Appalachian highlands. Tallulah MacBride hasn't been back to North Carolina since their parents' tragic deaths, twenty years ago. But now, Tal heads to cousin Delta Whittlespoon's famous Crossroads Café in the mountains above Asheville, hoping to find a safe hiding place for her young daughter, Eve. What she finds is Cousin Delta gone, the café in a biscuit crisis, and a Scotsman, who refuses to believe she's passing through instead of "running from." He believes she needs a knight in shining flannel. When a pair of sinister private eyes show up, Tal's troubles are just beginning. For Tal's brother and sister--Gabby, the Pickle Queen, and Gus, the Kitchen Charmer--the next part of the journey will lead down forgotten roads and into beautiful but haunted legacies.

Pickles are mentioned in the Bible. Cleopatra ate them as a beauty regimen. Shakespeare put them in his plays. Mason designed jars for bottling them. So did Ball. Did Mason and Ball fight over the King of the Pickle Jars title? I don't know. I did know this much: I used pickles to keep fear, pride, and my love of Jay Wakefield behind a door I would not risk opening again. Even now. Wakefields take what they want. MacBrides never surrender. For nearly a hundred years, a battle of wills between these two deeply-rooted Appalachian families has ended in defeat and heartache--most often, for MacBrides. Now the MacBride name is barely more than a legend, and it's up to Gabby MacBride to deal with the pain of her childhood memories and also the challenge of a MacBride legacy she's only beginning to understand. That will mean coming to terms with her bittersweet love for Jay Wakefield, the lonely rich boy who became her soul mate when they were kids, before the dark demands of his own legacy forced him to betray her.

She's destined to love Gus MacBride--if she survives her first year in the Crossroads Cove. A thread of hope is all she needs. Damaged, confused, alone. Cathy Deen Mitternich recognizes her old self in the fragile survivor huddled in the sheep barn's storage room at Rainbow Goddess Farm. Former art teacher Lucy Parmenter may be beyond even the tough-love magic of the farm, a live-in counseling center for abused women. Afraid to set a foot outside, drugged on medication, and filled with despair, Lucy needs the big biscuit magic of the Crossroad Cafe's Delta Whittlespoon. Together, Cathy and Delta search for a lifeline that represents Lucy's best hope of holding on. Their search ends in Lucy's new home at the barn. When Lucy discovers the magic there, neither she nor Cathy will ever be the same.

The battle is on their doorstep and in their souls. These old mountains are smart, Lucy. They're alive. They can be gentle like mamas; oh, sure, they'll croon and they'll kiss you and they'll whisper while you sleep, and you'll learn what all the old rocks are saying, all these ancient ghosts, all their starshine wisdom. But these old mountains, sometimes they know you can't hear them any other way but to get smacked up along the head. You watch out, Lucy P, for you got the Charm, like us Netties do. You're a guardian of these mountains, and they're a guardian of you. They will warn you any how they have to. They will slap the near life out of a Charmer. They're doing it to make you and Gus listen. To make you ready. Delta Whittlespoon, the legendary biscuit maker and owner of The Crossroads Café, tried to warn Lucy Parmenter and Gus MacBride. Even their mystical North Carolina mountains can't block the turmoil of the outside world. As fear and ignorance threaten their community and everyone they love, the star-crossed couple must overcome brutal challenges and personal demons to forge an alliance that may be the only hope of Good triumphing over Evil.