The Sweetheart deal is the heartrending story of how people move on in the wake of devastating loss -- and of what happens when the chance for love unexpectedly appears again.

"On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me the reason your husband had to die." ​ Anna Greenan finds the cryptic lyric shoved against her front door. Each day of Christmas brings Anna a new stanza with a new clue. Will this mysterious Christmas carol lead Anna to uncover her husband's murderer or will these notes lead to her demise?

After losing her husband, Derrick, in what appears to have been a random street crime, thirtysomething Emma has built a new life with widower Tom, who is kind, and successful. Emma is finally able to feel safe again, both in her relationship with Tom and in the home they've made together on the Connecticut shore. Then one day a homicide detective shows up at Emma and Tom's door asking questions. Though Emma had been cleared of her husband's murder,...

When Juliet Cole's husband of 15 years is murdered before her eyes, she thinks it was a random shooting. Devastated and traumatized, she answers hours of questioning, then returns home to break the tragic news to her boys. But a threatening voicemail takes this from a random shooting to a planned, deliberate attack. Juliet realizes that she and her children are in danger too, unless she meets the killer's demands.

Married to a handsome and successful plastic surgeon, Susie B. Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten thought she had the perfect life. But when her husband is found murdered in a sleazy apartment with a cheap call girl, Susie is left scratching her head. Pegged as a suspect and ridiculed by her husband's family, she turns to her tough-as-nails Grandma Ethel for help.

Luna, an imaginative tabby, understands that sometimes change is necessary. When her owner, Annika, moved back to her small New England hometown six months ago along with her sixteen-year-old twins, Luna knew it was for the best. Ever since Annika's husband, Peter, died suddenly, the family has been floundering. Luna also knows something the others don't know: Peter's spirit is still with them, and Luna believes there is something he needs her help...

If any place on God's earth was designed to help one heal, it is Meadowland. Surely here, at her brother-in-law's Kentucky farm, Rose and her daughters can recover from the events of the recent past -- the loss of her husband during the 1918 influenza epidemic, her struggle with tuberculosis that required a stay at a sanatorium, and her girls' experience in an orphanage during her illness. Dirk Meadows may have opened his home to his late brother's...

This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing.

Grandma Mazur is a widow...again. This time her marriage lasted a whole 45 minutes. The unlucky groom was one Jimmy Rosolli, local gangster, lothario (senior division) and heart attack waiting to happen...well, the waiting's over. It's a sad day, but if she can't have Jimmy, at least Grandma can have all the attention she wants as the dutiful widow. But some kinds of attention are not welcomed, particularly when Jimmy's former "business partners"...

"Paris 1943, Lana Antanov is on her way to see her husband, Frederic with news that she is pregnant. As she arrives at the convent where Frederic teaches piano, she watches in horror as Gestapo officers execute Frederic for hiding a Jewish girl in the piano. Lana is overcome with grief. That evening, she loses the baby. A few months later, Lana is approached by a member of the resistance to serve as a spy on the French Riviera. Lana is a "White Russian,"...