A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year

Welcome to Cokesville, Pennsylvania. This is coal-and-steel country, the sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck--and two inches means a fat one. Where the only way to drown out the moaning of the cooling steel is to turn your radio up. And the best make-out spot in town is next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen captivating interlocking stories, Bathsheba Monk brings to life the fictional American town of Cokesville.

Set in Warrenside, Pennsylvania, Nude Walker is the story of forbidden love seen through the prism of post-industrial America. When Kat Warren-Bineki, the daughter of old industrialists, and Max Asad, the son of Lebanese immigrants, return from Afghanistan, where they both served in the National Guard, the two share a series of intriguing encounters, leading to a romance that will change them forever. Bathseheba Monk writes in a voice as true as it is disarming, depicting the kaleidoscopic tensions between generations and cultures.

Dead Stick by Bathsheba Monk and Joe Taleroski is the latest in a series of riveting Swanson Herbinko page-turners. Centered around a small Massachusetts airport, divorce attorney Herbinko's representation of a wealthy client entangles her in a terrifying and nefarious white slavery racket that caters to moneyed degenerates. Of course Herbinko has to deal with murder and mayhem not only in serving her client, but also in merely surviving. To do so, it takes all of Swanson's intelligence and street savvy, along with the formidable assistance of Dick, her trusty P.I. sidekick, Devil Dog her pet...

Boston society divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko knows better than to mix business with pleasure, but what if this particular pleasure is Hidalgo, a man who knows his way about her BMW as well as he knows his way around her body? And what if the business is finding out who murdered Carlton Stubbs, a Trump-like developer whose wife, Matilda, Swanson is representing in their pending divorce? Dozens of people would love to see Carlton dead including his nurse-Hidalgo's sister Ines-and especially his nearest and dearest relatives all of whom are tapped out financially: art forger son Tucker and his...

Boston society divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko has never been out of Massachusetts, but when she meets Guy de Guy, a Frenchman with sandy blond hair and an adorable soul patch living in Boston's Back Bay, she runs-not walks -in her five inch Jimmy Choos to get her passport. Guy woos Swanson with food and she falls hard, but when she goes to France to help Dick untangle the murder of Michel Meriodoc the head of the French Farmer's Association and chief proponent of gastronomie terroir she finds herself in the middle of an international food fight between Meriodoc's organization and the sellers...

Boston divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko should know better than to fall in love again after her first two loves ended tragically, but when the sun is hot and the water is turquoise blue and there's irresistible magic in the air-in other words if she's at a sea splashed yoga retreat in Tulum, Mexico-she can't help it if she finds herself with not one love interest but two: nice guy Mark Stevens, a fellow yoga practitioner, and the charismatic yoga entrepreneur Hunter Hanna. Swanson falls under Hunter's sway at his hot yoga studio, Savas Hanna, in Boston where she also meets Christine who claims...