A startling tale of illicit passion, transgression, and retribution, set in the very heart of middle America. "A deeply chilling, disturbing, beautifully written novel. Shocking, stunningly written... Faulkner himself would have admired and respected DANCING ON GLASS]... Its events should linger in the reader's mind long after it has been read." -Los Angeles Daily News Bader Von Vechten's marriage to Katherine Craig unites the leading families of Linwood, Iowa, and promises to heal the wounds of three generations. But when Bader commences a love affair with a beautiful young man, Katherine...

This powerful novel of love and adultery recounts the story of Clodine Wheeler and the small Midwestern town where she was born and raised. As Clodine tells of her upbringing, courtship, and marriage, her narrative circles ever closer to the troubling secret and shocking death that stand at its center. It is a tale of passion and domestic violence - and their incalculable consequences. No one knows exactly when Lilly Duke, wife of a convicted killer, arrived to seek refuge in a cabin on the shore of Harmony Lake, but her arrival changes Clodine's life forever. At first Lilly finds no friends...

Los Angeles Times Bestseller. International Association of Crime Writers Hammett Prize Nominee. "Vivid and] intense SMITHEREENS has brooding, ominous atmosphere, sexual awakening, loss of innocence, murder. It could be described as a gothic coming-of-age novel, but it's far too good to lend itself to any label. Susan Taylor Chehak is a meticulous writer, an evocative stylist whose mastery is evident on every page." -The Boston Globe Set in the heartland of America, this novel pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life...

Four critically acclaimed novels...A master of the Midwestern gothic... If you haven't discovered Susan Taylor Chehak: Welcome to Rampage Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. Once again Chehak has mined her Midwestern roots and produced a highly charged novel where the questions of the present and the past are inextricably bound up with the secrets of the past. In this novel, Chehak sets her story in a small...

"A woman hosts her free-spirit sister, who has returned home to deal with a family crisis. Another copes with her husband's violent death while his mistress, who witnessed it, collects all the sympathy. A husband and wife, both on their second marriage, confront what makes them need to be with someone. In these 17 stories, Chehak delivers a passel of perspectives from the wiser sides of love and death. Her protagonists are largely in the second half of life; they have reached maturity and yet they are no less hungry for understanding. Generally, they do not react to specific problems in their...

"It begins like a storm-with that pensive heavy stillness of dead air pressing in, with a soft rustle of the wind just barely stirring in the trees, a bruising over of the summer sky, a somber gray and yellow horizon glittery with lightning, bloated full of thunder, swept by sheets of rain-it begins when old man Krejci bumps his head. And then-like that same storm spent, blown past to leave the ground and the air around feeling new and fresh and washed crisp clean-the next morning when Meena peeks into her father's sun-spilled bedroom to find that he has not moved, but is still lying on the...