Books published by Linda Hughes

Summer Rose Krause tries ­- really she does - but she simply can't manage to stay out of trouble. It's 1965 and at only 21 years old - hailing from a prominent Michigan family, no less - she finds herself in jail for the second time. When the judge renders a sentence of community service in a small, hick town Summer's never heard of, the young woman is certain she's doomed. Little does she know, she's about to stumble straight into a murder case and fall in love with a man who's altogether wrong for her, all in one fell swoop.As Summer becomes entangled in the lives of the sometimes quirky and always fascinating townsfolk, she can't help but delve into the truth behind the murder. Soon, she's steeping in stories about the Roaring Twenties, a speakeasy, the infamous Detroit Purple Gang, and a mysterious gangster moll. The resulting shocking revelations teach Summer a lot over the summer, but will it be enough to get the girl to settle down? Her secrets may run deeper than even she knows.

14 stories of hope, courage, resiliency, and strength from real Atlanta women.

Think you know your heritage? Think again. Dark secrets lurk below the surface of every family tree, as the Sullivan clan discovers in this story about living in the aftermath of generations of deceit. When Red Cross nurse Harriet escapes the trauma of World War II and sequesters herself in her grandfather’s cottage on Mackinac Island, she has no inkling about her heritage. But as one shocking clue after another surfaces – disclosing lies, corruption, madness, and murder – she realizes her family isn’t what, or who, it seems. She’s not the first to hold unspeakable secrets in her soul. Unearthing deceptions from the past gives Harriet the strength to face her fears and her future. Others before her survived their horrific travails, showing that she can, too. Harriet and her loved ones emerge above the fray of their entangled roots, enlightening their lives as never before. Secrets of the Island, the second book in the Secrets trilogy, is a tale of romantic suspense that begs the question: what secrets are buried within your family tree?

Myra says, "This is a book about how to overcome life's worst tragedies and your own dumb-ass decisions."Married to her second cousin, rock-and-roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis, when she was only thirteen years old, her life became a roller coaster of happiness and despair, love and deceit, hopes and shattered dreams. In her own brand of unflinching, down-to-earth, humorous, poignant, Southern storytelling, Myra reveals how she crawled out of the darkness and came to stand in the light of building a new life for herself.Author of Great Balls of Fire, which was made into a movie starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder, this is Myra's story many years later, a testament to the importance of perseverance. Her desire is to show women they are stronger than they know. If she could overcome her own misguided decisions and life's most tragic misfortunes, they can, too.

Those of us who are over sixty are not amused at being compared to aging wine, and certainly not cheese. In this book thirty of us - writers, educators, businesswomen, motivational speakers, mothers, grandmothers, retirees, an artist, a hairdresser, a psychic, a farmer, a psychologist, and a dancer - each share a story about something that changed everything. We think that you - especially if you''re a woman over sixty - will laugh and cry and maybe gasp at these funny, enlightening, and bawdy tales because they''ll remind you of your own life. So read, enjoy, and reminisce. Then, we invite you to join us on Facebook to share what you like to talk about. Let''s do this over-sixty thing together.

Jessie Belle Church hates her old coot of a boss for making her go on a stupid "Ancestry Quest" news assignment. After all, the thirty-year-old newscaster is used to attending art gallery openings with her filthy rich boyfriend, not schlepping through the jungle with a gorilla of a cameraman. But there she is anyway, traipsing through Africa and Europe to follow the ancestry trail left by her DNA. However, when she''s visited each night by a different spirit of her female forebears, reliving the most exciting and terrifying events of their common yet extraordinary lives, Jessie Belle begins to appreciate all that transpired in the past to give her the privileged life that she has today. And, even more shocking, she discovers just how tame and tantalizing that animal of a cameraman can be. She might become the true Jessie Belle, after all.