Sara Jenkins is comfortably ensconced in New Orleans, her new home, where she’s started a business selling antiques and reclaimed bits and pieces. She has separated herself from her past in Sweet Bay, Alabama…until her grandmother Mags’s will takes her back home, where she learns she’s inherited The Hideaway.

The Hideaway, once a renowned southern bed and breakfast, and later Sara’s childhood home, is now the dilapidated home of folks who came for a visit but then stayed.

Sara sees potential in The Hideaway’s good bones, enticing her to stay at least long enough to bring it up to date. But the longer she’s there, the more she learns of a past she never knew her grandmother possessed.

Slowly, secrets wrapped up in The Hideaway, Mags’s life, and even the double helix of Sara’s own […]

The first thing you’ll notice in Charles Martin’s The Water Keeper is the font used in the untitled prologue. It’s sans serif, and our eyes are accustomed to serif. But, don’t despair, serif returns in Chapter One.

The protagonist, Murphy Shepherd, lives alone on an island, where he tends an abandoned church. We quickly learn he’s a rescuer of lost souls–not necessarily spiritually lost, but physically lost or threatened.

What starts as a nautical journey down the Intracoastal Waterway as a trip to honor his mentor’s wishes for the disposal of his ashes quickly morphs into something else entirely. Murphy encounters an eclectic cast of characters that includes a woman desperate to find her daughter, an old man dying of cancer, an orphan searching for her identity, and a stray dog (books are always better when […]