Midnight On The Mississippi

Midnight on the Mississippi begins the new Secrets of the South Mysteries from bestselling author Mary Ellis. These complex crime dramas follow an investigator's quest to make the world a better place...solving one case at a time. New Orleans—Hunter Galen, a stock and securities broker, suspects his business partner, James Nowak, may be involved in embezzling their clients' money, but he's reluctant to jeopardize their friendship based on suspicion alone. After James turns up dead, Hunter realizes his unwillingness to confront a problem may have cost James his life. Nicki Price, a newly minted PI, intends to solve the stockbroker's murder, recover the missing millions from the client accounts, and establish herself in the career she adores. As she ferrets out fraud and deception at Galen Investments, Hunter's fiancée, Ashley Menard, rubs Nicki the wrong way. Nicki doesn't trust the ostentatious woman with an agenda longer than the Mississippi River. Ashley seems to be hiding something, but is Nicki's growing attraction to Hunter—a suspected murderer—her true reason for disliking Ashley? As they encounter sophisticated shell games, blackmail, and murder, Nicki and Hunter's only option is to turn to God as they search for answers, elude lethal danger, and perhaps discover love along the way.

A former prosecutor's hilarious tales of the ne'er-do-wells and knuckleheads he helped bring to justice

Washington Post 2017 KidsPost Summer Book Club selection! New York Public Library Best Books for Kids! "Jackson pulls no punches in the characters’ heated discussions and keeps dialogue raw and real..." —Bulletin "Jackson’s debut does an excellent job dramatizing the injustice that was epidemic in the pre–civil rights South and capturing the sounds and sensibilities of that time and place. Her sympathetic characters and their stories will make this thoughtful book especially good for classroom use." —Booklist "A powerful story." —Kirkus "This nuanced coming-of-age story by a debut author is deftly delivered, with engaging characters set against a richly contextualized backdrop of life for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. It’s also an authentic work of historical fiction...about a pivotal incident in the civil rights movement." —Horn Book "An unflinching and sensitively-told coming-of-age story from the perspective of a smart and thoughtful young girl in 1950s Mississippi." —SLJ “Midnight Without a Moon offers readers an unflinching bird's eye view of 1955 Mississippi. Young Rose Lee has one foot steeped in the segregated South and the other in the new world where Negroes and girls are expecting more, doing more, and willing to risk all to live lives of their own choosing. Bravo to Jackson, for a magnificent piece of writing!” —Sharon G. Flake, Coretta Scott King Award winning author of Unstoppable Octobia May and The Skin I'm In “Rose shines bright in the darkness -- brave, beautiful, and full of hard-won hope. She'll be an inspiration to every reader who meets her, as she has been to me.” –Caroline Starr Rose, author of May B and Blue Birds —

From an acclaimed short-story writer, a blazingly intelligent and humorous debut novel that is set in New Orleans and tells the story of two strangers whose paths first cross on the remarkable banks of the Mississippi. Cleo, a Canadian on holiday in New Orleans, is sitting alone in the French Quarter late one night, dreamily watching the river’s lazy progress. Suddenly, a woman clad in full evening dress, from rhinestone tiara to high heels, takes a running leap off the wharf into the Mississippi. Cleo watches, astonished, then turns and runs, mistakenly assuming the jumper is dead — a suicide. But Madeline, it turns out, is not bent on suicide. She is irresistibly drawn to water, as is Cleo, who was conceived during the great flood in Florence in 1966. Perhaps it is this shared obsession with the murky depths that fuels Cleo’s determination to find Madeline. She pounds the quaint streets of New Orleans, city of cheap bourbon, rich turtle soup, the scent of magnolias and A Streetcar Named Desire. Spelling Mississippi is filled with all the bristling energy of Fall on Your Knees. Told with great humour and affection, it is a seductive, liberating story about ties that bind and those that simply restrain, and a lesson not in spelling but forgiveness.

As a federal prosecutor in Mississippi for over thirty years, John Hailman worked with federal agents, lawyers, judges, and criminals of every stripe. In From Midnight to Guntown, he recounts amazing trials and bad guy antics from the darkly humorous to the needlessly tragic. In addition to bank robbers--generally the dumbest criminals--Hailman describes scam artists, hit men, protected witnesses, colorful informants, corrupt officials, bad guys with funny nicknames, over-the-top investigators, and those defendants who had a certain roguish charm. Several of his defendants and victims have since had whole books written about them: Dickie Scruggs, Emmett Till, Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort, and Paddy Mitchell, leader of the most successful bank robbery gang of the twentieth century. But Hailman delivers the inside story no one else can. He also recounts his scary experiences after 9/11 when he prosecuted terrorism cases.

Howlin’ Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires. Born Chester Burnett in 1910, the Wolf survived a grim childhood and hardscrabble youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi. He began his career playing and singing with the first Delta blues stars for two decades in perilous juke joints. He was present at the birth of rock ’n’ roll in Memphis, where Sam Phillips–who also discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis–called Wolf his “greatest discovery.” He helped develop the sound of electric blues and vied with rival Muddy Waters for the title of king of Chicago blues. He ended his career performing and recording with the world’s most famous rock stars. His passion for music kept him performing–despite devastating physical problems–right up to his death in 1976. There’s never been a comprehensive biography of the Wolf until now. Moanin’ at Midnight is full of startling information about his mysterious early years, surprising and entertaining stories about his decades at the top, and never-before-seen photographs. It strips away all the myths to reveal–at long last–the real-life triumphs and tragedies of this blues titan.

A Gothic thriller and captivating love story set in Civil War Mississippi Seventeen-year-old Violet Dancey has been left at home in Mississippi with a laudanum-addicted stepmother and love-crazed stepsister while her father fights in the war—a war that has already claimed her twin brother. When she comes across a severely injured Union soldier lying in an abandoned lodge deep in the woods, things begin to change. Thomas is the enemy—one of the men who might have killed her own brother—and yet she’s drawn to him. But Violet isn’t Thomas’s only visitor. Someone has been tending to his wounds—keeping him alive—and it becomes chillingly clear that this care hasn’t been out of compassion. Against the dangers of war and threatening powers of voodoo, Violet fights to protect her home, her family, and the man she’s begun to love. “An exciting story—juicy, romantic and at times quite chilling.” —BookPage “An atmospheric story in which darkness houses mysteries, [with] rich imagery and imaginative subplots.” —Kirkus Reviews “Compelling. . . . There’s a languid ease to the prose that invites readers to become fully immersed.” —The Bulletin

The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.