The Peach Keeper

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.

The thirty-year-old Willa Jackson has the unpleasant distinction of coming from a wealthy Southern family that experienced financial disaster several years ago. Constructed by Willa's great-great-grandfather at the height of Walls of Water, the Blue Ridge Madam was once the most opulent residence in the town and has long stood as a lone symbol of scandal and bad luck. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. Not an easy assignment in a community where the lines between the haves and have-nots are clearly defined by decades of history.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Perhaps now that the turbulent past has finally come to an end, something amazing and fresh might emerge from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept mysteries concerning the unsettling remnants have also surfaced, ostensibly preceded by a string of unexpected odd happenings around the community.

Willa and Paxton are now forced to face the terrible betrayals and dangerous passions that once bound their families. They are also forced to uncover truths about the long-dead that have defied death and transcended time to touch the hearts and souls of the living. All of this is bound together by a full-blooded mystery and an unlikely friendship.

Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.