Ocean State Libraries

Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

The summer after her first year of college, Isobel "Belly" Conklin is faced with a choice between Jeremiah and Conrad Fisher, brothers she has always loved, when Jeremiah proposes marriage and Conrad confesses that he still loves her.

Lilly Martin is racing from an oncoming blizzard when she skids into a hiker. Taking the injured man to a remote cabin, she discovers he is the handsome but shady Ben Tierney, with whom she flirted during the previous summer. Five women have recently disappeared from the area, and Ben is the primary suspect; but as the storm intensifies and the roads become impassable, Lilly finds herself with nowhere to go and only Ben to keep her company.

"One enchanted summer, two couples begin a friendship that will last more than twenty years and transform their lives. A chance meeting on the Isle of Palms, one of Charleston's most stunning barrier islands, brings former sweethearts, Adam Stanley and Eve Landers together again. Their respective spouses, Eliza and Carl, fight sparks of jealousy flaring from their imagined rekindling of old flames. As Adam and Eve get caught up on their lives, their...

"Every August, four women would gather together to spend a week at the beach, renting a new house each year. The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay of every summer thereafter. Their only criteria was oceanfront and isolation, their only desire to strengthen their far-flung friendships. They called themselves the Girls of August. But when one of the Girls dies tragically, the...

"When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. But the wheels are in motion. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date (just three months away!) and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah's mother Veronica, about having the wedding at the family's beach house on Cape Cod. Ruby has always known exactly what she wants, but as the wedding date approaches, she finds herself grappling...

When Cara Rutledge rents out her quaint beach house on Isle of Palms to Heather Wyatt for the entire summer, it's a win-win by any standard: Cara's generating income necessary to keep husband Brett's ecotourism boat business afloat, and anxiety-prone Heather, an young artist who's been given a commission to paint birds on postage stamps, has a quiet space in which to work and tend to her pet canaries uninterrupted. It isn't long, however, before both...

"At Cara Rutledge's home on Isle of Palms, everything is comfortingly the same, yet rife with painful memories. Only through reconnecting with family, friends, and the rhythms of the lowcountry can Cara release the hold of the past and open herself to the possibility of a new love, career, and hope for the future. Meanwhile, her niece Linnea, a recent college graduate who doesn't know where her life will take her, leaves her historic home in Charleston,...

"PI Mac Reilly, the star of TV's Mac Reilly's Malibu Mysteries, and his fianceé, Sunny Alvarez, are looking forward to spending June at Chez La Violette, a villa they've rented in St. Tropez. Sunny arrives first, only to discover that they've been scammed, along with a number of others who thought they were renting a fancy house on the French Riviera, among them Belinda Lord, the estranged wife of a Russian mobster, and widower Billy Bashford, a...

In the summer of 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanished from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. The loss devastated the family. Sixty-four years later, Emily's sister Lucy writes the story of that harrowing summer in a notebook that she bequeaths, along with the lake house and a hefty investment portfolio, to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers a chance to give her own daughters a stable home she never...