North Carolina -- fiction

Shortly after the death of her husband, a wealthy Southern widow is visited by an impoverished young woman with a small boy. A mistress? A son? Julia Springer can't believe it, only to discover that the whole town has known for years. But she will rise to the occasion when the boy is kidnapped?

This spirited debut novel forms the recipe for the celebration of women, faith, friendship, and delicious Southern food. "Friendship Cake" involves five women of the Hope Springs Community Church in North Carolina as they knead their sorrows and joys into loaves of bread nd their hopes and dreams into pecan pies.

Mattie Rigsbee is seventy-eight. She lives by herself in Listre, North Carolina (near Bethel). She claims she's "slowing down," but she still cuts her own grass and runs the Lottie Moon missions fund drive at Listre Baptist Church. This is the scene into which Edgerton drops Wesley Benfield -- adolescent, illegitimate, and delinquent, with a mouth full of foul language and bad teeth and a craving for good food.

"In this introduction to Neely, North Carolina, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view--with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature."

In an attempt to end his writer’s block after the death of his wife, novelist Ford Newcombe travels with his assistant, Jackie Maxwell, to investigate a mysterious legend of a woman who loved the devil. When they arrive in the small town of Cole Creek, North Carolina, they begin to realize the frightening truth: the story may be true.