National Network for Equitable Library Service

The fifth in the series picks up where the fourth book left off by continuing the diary of Josephine Baptiste. As more details about Josephine's past come to light, the African heritage of modern-day Johnnie Wise is further explained.

Revealing the roots of Johnnie Wise's family tree, the author takes readers to Nigeria where a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, preparing to marry a much older man, escapes with her young lover on a Dutch slave ship bound for America where she becomes Josephine Baptiste.

Set in 1950s New Orleans, Little Black Girl Lost is a powerful tale filled with sex, greed, and the explosive political and social climates of an America long gone. Fifteen-year-old beauty Johnnie Wise lives her life devoted to God. But her innocence is shattered when her mother, who has been a prostitute for years, sells Johnnie's body to lecherous insurance man Earl Shamus.

Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown are a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959's country music charts. The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.

In 1895 Texas, Karel Skala enters the world while his mother dies in childbirth. Fifteen years later, guilt-stricken Karel puts his family's fortunes on the line in a horse race against a powerful Spanish patriarch.

Photographer Dylan Cooper, returning home after the war, discovers that his wife Grace, believing that he had been killed, has vanished and, building a quiet life in a small fishing village, is only reconnected with his true love twenty years later.

James presents a dramatic slave narrative set on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation. Ever since she was a small child, Lilith has been closely watched by a contingent of fellow slaves--calling themselves the Night Women--who have long planned a revolt. Though she does not yet know it, Lilith is the key to their carefully laid plans.

Handsome rancher Drake Kincaid faces a dilemma. He must take a bride before his rapidly approaching 30th birthday, or he will lose his ranch to his conniving uncle. Steamed, he vows to marry the least appropriate woman he can find.

Desperate to keep his vast estates in the family, the Duke of Belcraven chooses his illegitimate daughter, Beth Armitage, as bride for Lucien de Vaux, his only heir. Although both are intelligent and independent, Beth believes in women's rights, and Lucien is known as a rake. It will take more than satin and jewels to turn their union into a fairytale romance.

Charlotte Randolph is a beautiful, privileged southern woman who, through the circumstance of war, is coerced to spy for the Confederacy. But with a corral of tall, handsome Union troopers occupying her estate, she feels the lines between enemy and ally, friend and foe, lover and captor beginning to blur.