Not Exactly Stealin', the first in the series, is a dark comedy about ancestor worship, rare Southern antiquities, and good old-fashioned greed. It focuses on a 130-year-old diary of a black freedwoman, and features five female characters: Dale Ralston, one-time set designer for the New York fashion industry now married to a corrupt state politician; Rannie Ralston, Dale's sister-in-law, a hard-charging lawyer; Moira, Dale's other sister-in-law, a dreamy, overgrown child who lives in the haze of history; Mary Canty Ralston, Dale's mother-in-law, an avaricious lush; and, Tamzie, their maid who...

After learning of a large inheritance, Todd moves his wife, small child, and adolescent stepdaughter, Alice, from their cramped SOHO apartment to the wisteria-draped Georgian town of Congreve. The heir to a small-town banking fortune, Todd knows all too well the dangerous snare of greed, but the promise of the good life is too much for the struggling artist to resist. However, when the pressures of an industry he doesn't understand become too much for him to bear, he finds comfort in liquid escape. Barely thirteen, Alice does her best to understand the dark flashes of violence creeping into...