This is an American cozy, with dogs. Sally Kelleher, a grumpy heroine, and her four irrepressible baby-boomer friends are vacationing together in Sally's small Midwestern hometown. Her elderly mentor has just died and Sally believes the death was no accident. She is attracted to a younger man who is also the chief suspect, somebody is trying to kill her and she is nearing menopause. Who wouldn't be grumpy? Things are never what they seem in a small prairie town, where long suppressed rage erupts and kills. If Sally and her coterie of indomitable women do not discover the murderer, she will be...

The friendship between Lena Kaiser, a sodbusters daughter, and Gustie Roemer, an educated Easterner, is unlikely in any other circumstance but post-frontier Charity, South Dakota. Gustie is considered an outsider, and Lena is too proud to share her problems (which include a hard-drinking husband) with anyone else.

On the nearby Sioux reservation, Gustie also finds love and family with two Dakotah women: Dorcas Many Roads, an old medicine woman, and her adopted granddaughter, Jordis, who bears the scars of the white mans education.

When Lenas husband is arrested for murdering his father and...

Fervent Charity continues the story of the friendship of five women who have nothing in common but the ground they walk on and the vicissitudes of post-frontier prairie life.

Lena, a young mother living on the edge of heartbreak. Her sister-in-law, Mary, more beautiful than loved. Alvinia, midwife to the county and mother of ten. Gustie and Jordis, trying to make a home together but finding their place on either the reservation or in Charity precarious.

The women come together in the face of natural hardships-childbirth, disastrous weather, and disease-and the unnatural malevolence of...