After a woman is killed in an arson-homicide, Jessica Nelson, an intern-reporter at the local paper, is assigned to cover the story. When Jessica disappears, China Bayles is determined to find her, before she becomes a headline herself.

Ex-lawyer turned herbalist and amateur sleuth China Bayles attends a chili cookoff where a womanizing judge dies of an allergic reaction to peanuts. And since everyone knows peanuts don't belong in a bowl of Texas chili, China knows something suspicious is afoot...

Eager to open up an herb shop and get closer to the earth, China Bayles leaves behind her career in corporate law and moves to Pecan Springs, Texas, but a close friend's tragic death could end her happy plans.

China Bayles is fit to spit when her husband's troubled ex-wife, Sally, shows up at her herb shop, claiming to be broke with nowhere else to turn. When she invites Sally to stay, China starts receiving menacing calls from an "ex" of Sally's, who seems to have a connection to the murder of her parents nearly a decade ago.

High school football coach Tim Duffy is handsome, charming, and married into a wealthy local family. But now, an anonymous accuser has made shocking allegations of improper behavior-and China Bayles is asked to conduct a discreet investigation. What she uncovers is a perplexing story of forbidden desire, deception, and questionable circumstances surrounding a young woman's death. And the deeper China digs, the more she fears that the town's beloved...

Almost everybody in town disliked Casey Ford. The people of Indigo, Texas, believed that the greedy landowner had decided to sell out the town, destroying it just as the small community was beginning to thrive. When Ford winds up dead at the wrong end of a shotgun, the suspect list is staggering. Fortunately, herbalist China Bayles has quietly decided to investigate and, with the help of her best friend Ruby, is probing where the town fathers dare...

China's herb shop and catering business may be thriving, but she's still reeling from her father's death, and not even remotely interested in her half-brother Miles's investigation into that event. China's husband, on the other hand, has no such qualms. And when fate forces her to get involved as well, China realizes it's time to bring the past to light-or else it will haunt her the rest of her life. But China and McQuaid discover that Miles may have...

Herbalist and ex-lawyer China Bayles is "in a class with lady sleuths V. I. Warshawski and Stephanie Plum."* In Widow's Tears, a haunted house may hold the key to solving the murder of one of China's friends... After losing her husband, five children, housekeeper, and beautiful home in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Rachel Blackwood rebuilt her home, and later died there, having been driven mad with grief. In present-day Texas, Claire, the...

"From Susan Wittig Albert, the New York Times bestselling author of A Plain Vanilla Murder, comes a tightly crafted novel that juxtaposes the disappearance of a rare, remarkably illustrated 18th-century herbal with the true and all-too-human story of its gifted creator, Elizabeth Blackwell. Herbalist China Bayles' latest adventure takes her to the mountains of North Carolina, where her friend Dorothea Harper serves as the director and curator of the...