Reading Between the Wines

Anna Hart has had more than her fair share of loss, including her mother, her siblings, her foster mom and dad and her childhood friend Jenny, so it comes as no surprise that she decides to solve violent crimes against children as a detective. After yet another devastating blow, Anna heads back to her hometown of Mendocino, CA to recuperate and touch base with her longtime friends including Will F...

When magazine journalist Monique Grant is summoned to the home of Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo to discuss a charitable donation, she has no idea that the former starlet has selected her to pen her memoir. Evelyn warns her that she will hate her before their time together ends, but also predicts that it will make Monique very rich. We are taken on a jaunt through movie history in chapters divided b...

If you’ve ever wondered how real reality shows actually are, this is the book for you. Join the 5 stars of ‘Goal Diggers’, Brett, Kelly, Stephanie, Jen and Lauren, their families and the show runners to see all the drama in front of and behind the cameras. The book begins with the death of one of the stars and the clock winds back to let us see how everything careened so horribly off track. We are...

Anders Caldwell has writing in his blood, so he decides to pursue his story-telling ways through a podcast about a tiny island off the coast of Maryland called Frick Island. The 94 residents on the island only come and go via Bob Dan’s boat, and there is no cell tower or internet, so Anders can take the liberty of sharing all of the islanders’ quirks with the outside world without fear of reprisal...

Maggie Holt had been to Bainberry Manor 25 years before, when she was only five years old. In fact she had lived there for 20 days before the ghosts, and tales of fathers killing daughters on the premises drove her family away and inspired her father to write a telling novel of their harrowing ordeal. Now, Maggie has inherited the old mansion and, against her mother’s wishes, she’s headed back to...

When Georgia Ford stomps into her brothers’ bar in California in a wedding dress with no groom in sight, it is fair to say she’s having a terrible day. Coming home to wine country was supposed to stabilize her in her hour of crisis, but instead she finds her parents’ marriage (and their biodynamic winery) on the brink of collapse. Will they sell out to the mega-brand Murray Grant, and will its fou...

Have you ever dreamt of being a travel journalist with a swanky magazine that would fly you around the globe to document your exploits? Poppy, our novel’s heroine, did! She even achieved her lofty goal but found herself unfulfilled by her life. When she considers the last time she was truly happy, Alex, Poppy’s former travel buddy, enters our story. While these two went to the same college and are...

Our wine mystery keeps traveling the world to Dubai, Hong Kong, Bordeaux and Portugal uncovering motives and phylloxera intrigue. Malcolm, Corvina and Brian uncover a remedy developed for a phylloxera outbreak before the outbreak breaks out. Tres suspicious! There are also shadowy investors buying patents for this remedy that would have no value until those nasty little aphids are put into action...

When flying winemaker Corvina Guerra visits a vineyard in Italy that is burning its vines due to a phylloxera outbreak among its roots, she makes it her mission to figure out how the aphids got there and investigate just how far the infestation had traveled worldwide. As an outbreak could contaminate her family’s vineyard and end her own career, she is determined to figure things out. Corvina part...

Addie should have listened to her mentor  that told her never to make a deal with a spirit after dark in Villons, France,. We follow the story of Addie LaRue through 300 years of being perpetually 23 years old and forgotten by every person she encounters. She experiences some of the best and worst of the last three centuries in Europe and North America unremembered, until the owner of The Las...

In our story and our wine choice, prepare to have your biases challenged and your heart opened. Lydia is a bookshop owner in Acapulco, MX; when a new customer, Javier, begins frequenting her shop, Lydia charms him with her love of books and becomes the ‘queen of his soul’ (not his heart…that is reserved for his wife). When Lydia’s husband writes an exposé revealing Javier to be the new cartel jefe...

Dawn’s life had always been about transitions, as an Egyptologist and later as a death doula, she helped bring understanding and purpose to the slow slide from life to death. Her passion for ancient relics was interrupted by her own mother’s untimely passing and her taking custody of her younger brother and soon thereafter the birth of her daughter, Merit. 15 years later, she is sent on a quest by...

This episode was recorded before the current climate with Russia and the Ukraine.  We struggled with if we should release this episode and decided that given the storyline of the book, we should move forward .   Over the last couple of years, many of us can relate to the idea of house arrest, but Count Alexander Rustov was imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow for 32 years for an an...

When Lillian got a letter out of the blue from her high school friend Madison, she never imagined she’d end up nannying for Madison’s 10-year old step-kids Bessie and Roland, twins who spontaneously combust when emotionally agitated. While the kids aren’t harmed in the process, everything they touch is destroyed. Madison’s husband Jasper has high political aspirations, so Lillian and the kids are...

Paul Stewart, a Scottish food writer heads to Tuscany to tame his writer’s block and get re-inspired by Tuscany’s food and wine. What could go wrong? When your rental car company sets you up to take the fall for a car theft, plenty! Paul’s newfound friend from the plane ride sets him up with another rental company, but all they have available is a bulldozer which Paul drives through Tuscany, chang...

What if your entire life’s circumstances pushed against society’s norms and you found yourself willingly becoming a wife one day a week while other women took turns with your husband on other nights? This is the situation Thursday finds herself in with Seth- her given name is also her day as Seth’s wife: Thursday. She talks about Monday and Tuesday as unnamed characters in this plot until she find...

Widow Astrid Strick and her adult children Elliot, Porter and Nicky figure out together how to grow into who they are while living in the fish bowl of a small town. When Astrid sees Barbara Baker get fatally hit by a school bus, she still carries the anger and shame of a secret (or lie) Barbara told years ago about her son kissing a boy. See the Stricks navigate single parenthood, infidelity, soci...

Have you ever wanted a do-over on your life choices? We meet Nora on one of the worst days of her life as she goes to see her childhood librarian, Mrs. Elm, who introduces her to the midnight library where each book contains the life she could have lived if she had made different decisions. Nora doesn’t just read about these lives, she actually lives them until she finds they are wrong for her and...

Imagine being celebrated at an award ceremony at a California winery and having your mom and your boyfriend not show up, only to find out they both died in a plane crash on their way. This is the plight of Natalie Harper, who inherits both her mom’s run-down bookshop and care of her grandfather as a result of the tragedy. It seems all is lost, but the shop’s handyman Pete ‘Peach’ Galloway and his...

When Alice married into the Van Cleave family, an Appalachian coal mining dynasty, and moved to Baileysville, KY from England she had no idea she would become a Packhorse Librarian. The 1930s were a tough time to be a woman in America and living in the hills and hollers didn’t make it any easier. Marjorie, Izzy, Sophia and Beth; these are the friends that spread books and hope to their rural commu...

This engaging thriller begins when brand-new parents Ann and Marco are invited next door to celebrate their next-door neighbor Graham’s birthday, keeping a baby monitor on to hear their sleeping child after their babysitter cancels. When baby Cora comes up missing, secrets come spilling out of a broadening cast of characters revealing that nothing is as it seems when voyeurism, adultery, childhood...

Who would have thought that a house showing on New Year’s Eve could end in such chaos? When a realtor, a bank president, a pregnant couple, a kindly old lady and a house-flipping duo end up in a hostage situation after a nearby bank robbery goes awry, detectives have a hard time figuring out exactly what happened and how the stories of these people intertwine. Some characters are hidden away in a...

Welcome to Crosby, Maine, home of Olive and Henry Kitteridge and all their neighbors who fill the pages of this collection of 13 short stories. Olive Kitteridge reads much like J.D. Salinger’s 9 Stories , where the point isn’t to weave these stories into a tapestry, but to see the threads that tie them loosely together. We get to spend a day in the lives of many Crosby residents dealing with infid...

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey, is the perfect book to shake off the stupor of our shared year of unexpected pivots. As we crawl out of this season, we are gathering strength to be brave and take the hill, and McConaughey is all about going all in, but he wants us to stop and ask, 'What’s your hill?' first. Greenlights are about going and doing the thing, but they are also about timing and fa...

When Olivia moves from New York to L.A. to start her own law firm, she unwittingly embarks on a torte love affair with Senator Max Powell. Their shared love of dessert brings them together, but will his knowledge of her past tear them apart? We pair this cake driven story with a 2015 Quinta de la Rosa LBV Port, a lovely dessert wine created with good old-fashioned foot-treading and fortified to 19...