Southern High

After the dead body of a beloved Cottonwood resident is found tangled up in an electric fence, Sheriff Kenni Lowry has a hunch that somethin' ain't right. Her investigation heats up with a fierce cook-off competition, a euchre game where the intel is sweeter than the brownies, and a decades-old family recipe that may just be the proof in the pudding. The icing on the cake is that Kenni is fighting an attraction to her recently sworn-in deputy sheriff, and election season is hot on her tail.

The Southern Fault Line explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement. Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South.

Two women of different generations—one scarred by an abusive teen marriage and the other by an alcoholic husband—come together to grapple with their inner demons and confront their untold stories. When author Shannon Irwin meets Grace Ferrall and agrees to interview the younger woman and...