The letter that arrived from Sam's mother was postmarked Santa Fe, penned in her mother's handwriting, and disclosed details only Johanna Adams could know. There was just one catch: Johanna Adams had been dead for thirty-four years. The mind-blowing missive could have been an entry from Sam's latest book of bizarre anecdotes, American Weird—or an elaborate hoax. Either way, it instantly rekindled Sam's impossible wish that her mother hadn't really died in a plane crash when Sam was a child. Fueled by her journalistic instincts—and a daughter's need for closure—Sam touches down among Santa Fe's tourists and crystal gazers, jewelry shops and fast-food stands. But only when she summons the courage to knock on the door of Room 409 at the La Fonda Hotel does her surreal, mother-seeking adventure take off with no turning back.

What’s a nice Southern Jewish girl like Emma Fine doing married to an angry but beautiful and incredibly sexy black artist like Jesse Tree? Emma Tree’s marriage is falling apart. Jesse’s obsession with Skytop, the old inn he’s renovating, pulls him further away from her, and the distance forces Emma into some uneasy questions about their relationship and about herself. She packs her bags and travels home to Louisiana, to a family she loves but barely knows. And the answers she finds along the way help solve the puzzles that have haunted her all her life. Before Emma’s mother Helen died, she made her husband Jake Fine promise to look after the baby should anything happen to Helen. After her death, Jake left his Baltimore home to travel to West Cypress, Louisiana, where a new wife was waiting. For Rosalie Norris, Emma was a dream come true. Emma is a right and precocious child, but by the time she’s a teenager, she has outgrown the old-fashioned provincialism of West Cypress and Rosalie’s stiflingly overprotective and obsessive love. While teaching in California, Emma meets and eventually marries Jesse Tree. Theirs is a passionate and loving relationship despite the vast differences between them. It’s a secret Emma must keep from her family, but it’s nothing compared to the secrets they’ve kept hidden from Emma all these years. Sarah Shankman has written a hauntingly touching and darkly funny novel about the long-time coming of age of a 30-year-old woman in search of the truth about who she is, where she comes from, and where she’s going. It’s a story about the secrets of the past and how they determine the future, and a love story about two people from completely different worlds who meet, fall in love, collide, and crash—sending off sparks that neither of them, nor the readers who come to love them, will ever forget. QUOTES “In Keeping Secrets Sarah Shankman has created a character as wise and wonderfully funny as Fear of Flying’s Isadora Wing. This is a brilliant book, beautifully written, which reinforces with a spellbinding story what I’ve always known about Southern women: Keep your eye on them. They’ll blindside you with their bravery and slamdunk your heart.” Pat Conroy The Prince of Tides “Holly Golightly, turn in your jersey. Here comes Emma Tree. Keeping Secrets is a wonderment, a subtle earthy, joyous, darkling journey through a bright country, in which a fragmented and most appealing Southern girl sets out to discover herself and finds a woman of enormous richness, complexity, and wholeness. In Impersonal Attractions, Sarah Shankman showed us she has a near-perfect ear and eye for the contemporary dilemma. In Keeping Secrets, she proves—magnificently—that she also has the heart for it.” Anne Rivers Siddons Heartbreak Hotel

Things get weirder than a peanut butter and banana sandwich when crime reporter Samantha Adams visits Elvis's birthplace in this Southern mystery. Crime reporter Samantha Adams is working on a book called American Weird when her boyfriend, Harry, invites her to a barbecue cookoff in Tupelo, Mississippi. It's hard to turn down a drive to Elvis's birthplace in a genuine pink Cadillac. And as Harry points out, the King's birthplace "ought to be lousy with weird." As they soon discover, lousy is right—and weird is just the beginning. Also visiting Tupelo is Mary Ann McClanahan. After killing her worthless husband, Carlin, she discovered he was already married to a woman in Tupelo who'll collect his life insurance—unless she does something about it. Meanwhile, the cookoff heats up when a contestant is zapped by his own electric smoker, and Samantha's dog has to be rescued by a Biker for Jesus at the Elvis Memorial McDonald's. But when...

Home again in Atlanta after years on the Left Coast, crime reporter Samantha Adams finds that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Beau, the boy who broke her heart eons earlier, is more handsome than ever and is now the Medical Examiner.In the South, good manners (and keen protective instincts) prevent folks from saying what they mean, particularly about extramarital "slippin' and slidin'." And backwoods sheriffs still rule their fiefdoms with a strong hand and steady aim.Sam finds herself deep in the kudzu once more when a lawyer, a family acquaintance, goes missing, then turns up dead. When the sheriff rules it an accident, Sam and Beau team up to deliver their own unique brand of justice.

Amateur sleuth Samantha Adams journeys to the unlikely place of Hot Springs, Arkansas, partly to celebrate with an old friend who just won the lottery, and partly to recover from being jilted by her boyfriend. But a kidnapping with a million-dollar ransom demand diverts Sam's attentions straight into the arms of a killer.

"Yes, ma'am," "No, ma'am," elbows off the table, and thank you notes, all examples of the good manners that Southern mothers drill into their young. But the characters in these mostly Southern stories by Sarah Shankman know the deeper meaning of the term. Good manners are words and actions that put others at ease; bad manners don't. And bad manners, like bad children, must be punished.A bride left at the altar, as in "All You Need Is Love," is entitled to be in a killer mood for years. And the wife in "Wish You Were Here," both two-timed and targeted for murder by her fat doctor hubbie, can't be blamed for taking matters into her own hands on a steamy July day. Two women, friends since childhood—who could fault the one for harboring a long-festering hate for the other's damning betrayal in the collection's title story? And three deadly tales set in New Orleans, where the silver is always kept both polished and sharpened, are perfect examples of novelist Rita Mae Brown's...

Sunshine, the brilliant blue Pacific, and the Golden Gate Bridge overhung with fog. The perfect backdrop for romance? Well…in San Francisco, good weather is easy to find; straight men are not. A San Francisco woman needs stamina, patience, cunning, and a plentiful supply of humor. Annie Tannenbaum—beautiful, blonde, divorced but hardly defeated—turns the relentless pursuit of Mr. Right to profit. She’s already gotten an advance on Meeting Cute, her book describing how perfect couples get together, for which she’s busy collecting data from the “personals” column, not to mention looking for responses to the personal ad she’s placed for herself.Annie and her best friend Samantha—who looks as if she belongs on the cover of Vogue—love to commiserate over lunch, over dinner, over a forbidden dessert in the city’s trendy watering holes. But Samantha is hot on the trail of a very different kind of man as well. As the leading crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she is following the gruesome path of the sadistic rapist and murderer who is terrorizing women in San Francisco. The pursuit of love and the hunt for a killer become strangely intertwined as Samantha and Annie work together to trap the most frightening sex murderer since Thomas Harris’ The Red Dragon. They get close—perhaps too close—to finding him.“Impersonal Attractions is slick, smart-mouthed, totally contemporary, and utterly beguiling. Sarah Shankman has a magic eye and ear for the urban idiom, a devilish sense of suspense, and a welcome gift for the absurd.”Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Fox’s Earth and The House Next Door“Dynamite! A whirlwind thriller—more than just a page-turner. The pages turn themselves! [Impersonal Attractions] reads like the Grand Prix. Way to go, Sarah Shankman!”William Diehl, author of Chameleon and Sharky’s Machine

The fourth suspenseful mystery starring ace crime reporter Sam Adams--from the author of First Kill All the Lawyers. Sam has just turned 40, and the last thing she wants to do is cover the Miss America Pageant. But in Atlantic City Sam discovers what's beautiful and what's deadly when an obnoxious pageant judge mysteriously disappears.