Days meant swimming and sun, nights meant ghost stories and campfires. Best of all, Whispering Pines meant time with Celia, her favorite aunt. Through the years, Celia would remain Renee's most steadfast confidant, but trips to Whispering Pines would fade to memories. Raising kids alone and a demanding career consumed Renee's life.Now Celia is gone and Renee’s career is in shambles. Promising herself she’ll look for a new job in January, Renee is determined to make the most of her unexpected time off. But when mysterious events begin to swirl around her kids, her worries compound.A spontaneous trip, meant to lessen the growing pressures and soothe Renee's battered pride, could turn out to be so much more when she finds herself alone on a moonlit beach, half-a-world away, with a handsome stranger.How can Renee keep her family safe as she works to rebuild their lives? Does she dare take another chance at love?Celia's final gift may provide answers, but there are risks. Renee wishes she could seek comfort and advice from her dear aunt, but Celia's recent death has left a void. Why can't things be simple, the way they were when she spent summers at Whispering Pines?Whispering Pines, the first book in Kimberly Diede’s uplifting Celia’s Gifts series, will introduce you to a special place and a remarkable family.Discover how Celia’s legacy can live on if her family is willing to seize the opportunities she leaves to each of them.

    Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century; it’s the kind of place where children twirl sparklers across the lawn during cocktail hour. Mabel falls in love with midnight skinny-dipping, the wet dog smell that lingers near the yachts, and the moneyed laughter that carries across the still lake while fireworks burst overhead. Before she knows it, she has everything she’s ever wanted: friendship, a boyfriend, access to wealth, and, most of all, for the first time in her life, the sense that she belongs.But as Mabel becomes an insider, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact - and what they might do to anyone who threatens them. Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family’s dark secrets and make Ev’s world her own.

    . . or so she thinks. It was a broken heart on her 16th, a car accident on her 21st, pneumonia on her 30th, and a fall down a flight of stairs on her 35th. There were Ohio blizzards on her 38th, 39th, and 40th; and six days before her 45th, she lost the love of her life to a heart attack. Numbing grief stole that birthday and a couple more to follow and, on the morning of her 48th birthday, she received the call she’d dreaded ever since losing her mom so many years ago…she was diagnosed with stage-3 ovarian cancer. The doctors didn’t hold out a lot of hope, but Liv survived and maintained her faith. Months of surgeries and chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed.But now, as her 50th birthday creeps up the icy Ohio path toward her, her hair has grown back, her energy level is up, and she is officially cancer free. It makes her nervous. After everything she’s gone through, Liv hates the idea of driving on icy roads and returning to work as an O.R. nurse in a local Cincinnati hospital.Her best friend Hallie knows just the thing to break Liv out of the winter doldrums, while providing a safe haven of warmth, sunshine, and a time to regroup: a holiday in the Florida sunshine!

    Peter Byerly isn't sure what drew him into this particular bookshop. Nine months earlier, the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, had left him shattered. The young antiquarian bookseller relocated from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, Peter is shocked when a portrait of Amanda tumbles out of its pages. Of course, it isn't really her. The watercolor is clearly Victorian. Yet the resemblance is uncanny, and Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture's origins. As he follows the trail back first to the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare's time, Peter communes with Amanda's spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.

    She particularly enjoys studying the fossils and formations in the magnificent cave near her father's house. The cave seems plenty safe--until the day a mysterious intruder steals the rope she uses to climb out.Rafe Kincaid is a man used to being in control--of himself, his brothers, and his family's ranch. The last thing he expects is to find a woman trapped in the cavern on his land--or to be forced to kiss her!Rafe is more intrigued by Julia than any woman he's ever known. But when their developing relationship threatens a reconciliation with his brothers, will Rafe have to choose between his family and this new love that could heal his troubled heart and secure his happiness?