Akron Public Library

Lochiel Ogle was born with a red-wine birthmark and it put her life in jeopardy from the moment she entered the world. Mountain folks called it "the mark of the devil," and for all the evil that has plagued her nineteen-year existence, Lochiel is ready to believe that is true. And the evil surely took control of the mind of the boy who stole her as an infant, bringing her home for his mother to raise.

This is the story of a family who found, marked, and paved their way into America's eastern frontier. Unfolding in the voices of three generations of mountaineer storytellers specializing in keeping listeners on the edges of their seats, this is fiction that plunks us down right into the thick of pioneer life. Using his own family stories as his inspiration, Robert Morgan has crafted a riveting folk history alive with adventure. Morgan's three gifted...

Hiding out in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, Beth Venable, a witness to a major mob hit who even the FBI can't protect, dreams of a new life with Ryal Walker, the man she's always wanted, but must survive her old one first.

In Strickland County, a forgotten stretch of land in southern Appalachia, there isn't a lot of anything to go around. But when eighteen-year-old Harlowe Compton's brother is killed by the Praters, the family who controls everything from the mines to the law to the opioid trade, he wonders if the future will ever hold more than loss. With Tennessee, Harlowe feels for the first time that something good might happen, that he might have found the rarest...

Curley Hines has lost his father, mother, and brother to coal mining, and now he lives with his grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Wonder Gap, Kentucky--but when the mining company prepares to destroy their mountain he must use the words his grandfather has taught him to save Red Hawk Mountain, even if it means losing the life he loves.

"Frigid February air has settled into the bones of the Blue Ridge Mountains, making for a slow foxhunting season, though 'Sister' Jane Arnold's enthusiasm is not so easily deterred. With the winter chill come tweed coats, blazing fireplaces, and perhaps another to share the warmth with, as the bold hunting scarlets worn by the men in Sister Jane's hunting club make the hearts of women flutter--until someone's heart stops entirely. Harry Dunbar, a...

Sabrina Fairfax was raised in an elegant house with servants catering to her every desire. With her father's unexpected death, she finds herself impoverished and alone in London. Among his papers, however, she discovers a deed to a piece of land in the Colonies and seizes it as her best, and perhaps only, hope.

Every year at Christmas a rich man rides a train through Appalachia and throws gifts to the poor children who are waiting, in order to repay a debt he owes the people who live there.