Daughters of Parrish Oaks

Mississippi. The 1950s and ’60s. Two friends, one white and the other black. Sue Ann spends her pre-adolescent years protecting her best friend, Liz Bess, from prejudice and mistreatment, but she can’t protect her from the untimely death of her mother and their resulting separation as Liz Bess is sent north to school. As a young adult, Sue Ann falls in love with Tate Douglas, a civil rights worker from the North, during the violent summer of 1964. Liz Bess, now Elizabeth, returns to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter for her people.

Dr. Sue Ann Parish is hired as principal of the one-room school in Moose Springs, Alaska. With her teenage daughter she moves to a community of dog mushers, trappers, gold miners, writers, artists, shady characters running from the law, and rugged individualists in general, each one with a story, whether told or hidden. With the challenges of living in a remote bush village come additional problems, including falling in love with the elusive artist Shade Dubois, who hides dangerous secrets of his own.

Betsy Wingate travels to Red Lodge, Montana, seeking refuge in her mother’s log cabin high in the Beartooth Mountains while awaiting the finalization of her divorce. In overwhelming pain and bitterness, Betsy swears off men forever. She has the handsome half-breed from her first look the day he tips his hat to her on the trail, but Betsy is not to be an easy conquest. Hawk must prove he is different from the arrogant, controlling, cheating husband she left. And the lovers have bigger problems to confront.

Dr. Sue Ann Parrish, cherished by two men in her life only to lose both, has remained alone until she admits to loving Custer, the mountain dweller who befriended her in her sorrow and sees her through her greatest challenge, breast cancer. As she fights for her life, her daughter Betsy becomes a ghostwriter for her mother’s autobiography and thus learns the truth about her father. When ghosts from the past arrive and turn her world upside-down, Sue Ann must make a life-changing decision: stay with Custer or marry a man she thought lost to her years before. 

When Angel unexpectedly arrives, bringing with her the shadow of CIA involvement and secret missions to Costa Rica, she and Sue Ann’s son find instant attraction to each other, and Sue Ann is more than pleased. She is unaware of their clandestine search as they put together clues to the disappearance of Angel’s father, the greatest love of Sue Ann’s life. Is he still alive? If so, will he survive the threat posed by the reward hanging over his head?