Rural Wisconsin, 1907. In the bitter cold, wealthy businessman Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who has answered his advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, but her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, then slowly poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow....

In Wisconsin, fourth-grader Ida B spends happy hours being home-schooled and playing in her family's apple orchard, until her mother begins treatment for breast cancer and her parents must sell part of the orchard and send her to public school.

Chronicles the adventures of eleven-year-old Caddie growing up with her six brothers and sisters on the Wisconsin frontier in the mid-nineteenth century.

Jack Sawyer, a retired homicide detective living in rural Wisconsin, doesn't remember his boyhood journey into the parallel universe called the Territories. Jack is recruited to help find a brutal serial killer who is stalking the region and whose methods resemble those of Albert Fish who committed murders thirty years earlier, but is there an even more malignant force at work?

"From the author of the highly praised Days of Awe: a sweeping, achingly beautiful new novel that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present day Wisconsin, unspooling a story of love, longing, and the ceaseless push and pull of motherhood. Annelise is a dreamer: imagining her future while working at her parents' popular bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, anticipating all the delicious possibilities yet to come. There are rumors that...

"In this exploration of the dark side of social media, and government control and manipulation, the teenagers in a small town are drawn deeper and deeper into a social networking site that promises to grant their every need--regardless of the consequences"--

Lyle Hovde is at the onset of his golden years, living a mostly content life in rural Wisconsin with his wife Peg, daughter Shiloh, and six-year old grandson Isaac. After a troubled adolescence and subsequent estrangement from her parents, Shiloh has finally come home. But while Lyle is thrilled to have his whole family reunited, he's also uneasy: in Shiloh's absence, she has become deeply involved with an extremist church, and the devout pastor courting...

"A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology."—The Wall Street Journal

The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister....

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.
Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to...

"In downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chef Lou Johnson works tirelessly to build her beloved yet struggling restaurant, Luella's, into a success. She cheerfully balances business, friends, and fiance... until fate intervenes. She's just baked her fiance a rich, delectable coconut cake, but when she drops by his apartment with the birthday surprise, she discovers him in the buff-- with an intern. Sardonic British transplant Al writes pseudonymous,...