Sensible, levelheaded Tracy Brock knows exactly what she wants in a boy, and transfer student Jimbo Maxwell isn't it. After all, why should she be interested in a likeable if somewhat ignorant Alabama country boy with a Southern drawl thicker than sorghum molasses, when her boyfriend Anthony Pierce has everything a girl could ask for-with the possible exception of a personality? But Jimbo is crucial to the success of the Elmore High School football team, so Tracy agrees to tutor him in order to help him maintain the grades necessary for athletic eligibility. During their tutoring sessions,...

Eager to escape London following the scandal of her husband's death, Lady Fieldhurst accepts an invitation to spend the summer in rural Yorkshire as the guest of Sir Gerald and Lady Hollingshead. She soon discovers, however, that country life is not the panacea she had hoped for: tension reigns and tempers flare at Hollingshead Place, due in large part to Lady Hollingshead's ambitions for her daughter, a lovely young lady destined for a brilliant marriage in spite of her love for a penniless curate. When a dinner party ends with the death of the vicar--a kindly old soul whose only sin appears...

When magistrate Patrick Colquhoun orders a habitual thief and ne'er-do-well transported to Botany Bay, he doesn't realize a fourteen-year-old boy has been left behind to follow in his father's footsteps-not until young John Pickett is hauled into Bow Street for stealing an apple from the produce market at Covent Garden. Feeling to some extent responsible for the boy, Mr. Colquhoun prevails upon Elias Granger, a prosperous coal merchant, to take him on as an apprentice. For the next five years, John Pickett hauls coal in exchange for room and board. The work is dirty and hard, but the drudgery...