Books published by publisher MacAdam Cage

This collection of thirty Southern writers gathers some of the finest authors in the country—with stories, essays, and a poem. Demonstrating a range of styles, topics, and themes, these stories display each writer's craftsmanship and talent and together form a testament to the grand literary tradition of the South. Contributing authors are: Marlin Barton Rick Bragg Jill Connor Brown C. Terry Cline, Jr. Pat Conroy Tom Corcoran Beth Ann Fennelly Patricia Foster Tom Franklin William Gay Jim Gilbert W.E.B. Griffin Winston Groom Melinda Haynes Frank Turner Hollon Silas House Suzanne Hudson Douglas Kelley Tom Kelly Barbara Robinette Moss Michael Knight Bev Marshall Jennifer Paddock Judith Richards Richard Shackelford George Singleton Monroe Thompson Sidney Thompson Brad Watson Steve Yarbrough

The magnificent Ghosthead Oak has stood watch over coastal Alabama’s mysterious backwater bays and slow-running rivers, where bull alligators rumble the nerves of lesser creatures and every living thing has the capacity to kill, for five hundred years. Some say the fabled giant tree was once a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. No other tree along the entire coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola can rival its majesty or its power to draw people to it.In silence and with dignity, the Ghosthead has served as sentinel to the widow’s family land for countless generations. It was a childhood friend and a spirit guide in troubled times. Her father is buried in its shade. So why would the widow walk into a biker bar and hire a man to fire his chainsaw and inflict fatal gashes around its trunk, ending in a few minutes what took five centuries to create?The Widow and the Tree is a tale of dark deeds committed with mercy in mind, provoking the reader to ask: Would I have done the same thing? This book is based on a true story.

As husband and wife, Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez couldn’t make it work. But as partners in one of San Francisco’s most tenacious law firms, Daley and Fernandez make one hell of a team. Judgment Day finds the ex-spouses tackling their most difficult case yet. Called in at the last minute to try to stop the execution of Nathan Fineman, a former mob lawyer convicted of murdering three people in the back room of Chinatown’s notorious Golden Dragon Restaurant, Mike and Rosie must race the clock in a desperate attempt to prove their client’s innocence. With only ten days to go and a wealth of forensic evidence pointing overwhelmingly to Fineman’s guilt, their task seems impossible. Complicating matters, Mike must battle his own personal demons when the reputation of his dead father — a San Francisco cop who was one of the first officers at the scene the night of the murders — is called into question. And as the plot hurtles toward its stunning denouement, judgment day is fast approaching not only for Nate Fineman, but for Mike’s father and the law firm of Daley and Fernandez as well.

John Anselm is a former Beirut hostage, a foreign correspondent who went to one war too many. A burnt-out-case, he lives in his family’s ancestral house in Germany, working for a semi-legal and near-broke surveillance firm and wrestling with his own fractured identity and family history. His intelligence work collides with the lives of Con Niemand, an ex-mercenary and professional survivor, and ambitious London journalist Caroline Wishart. They are caught in a nightmare of violence and intrigue that can only end with the uncovering of long-buried secrets. Temple writes of a shadowy world peopled with intense, globetrotting characters who use espionage, double crossings, and political information to gain leverage. In Temple’s world, secrets can be worth more than human life.

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

From up-and-coming author Rae Meadows, an addictive, absorbing novel with a lovable basket-case heroine who becomes obsessed with a murder case. Grace, 35, copyedits other people s writing for a magazine, drinks alone in the same bar every night, and observes the vibrant life of New York City from the sidelines. But when a local co-ed is found dead, and a college student from Grace s Ohio hometown is arrested for the murder, something within her stirs. The newspapers claim that Charles, a college freshman, is a spoiled rich kid who killed because of a rebuffed sexual advance. Yet Grace senses deeper layers to the story and becomes consumed by discovering the truth behind the crime. Through letters and phone conversations, Grace and Charles gradually draw each other out, and her obsession grows. When her father has a stroke and she is called home, Grace continues her investigation of Charles in the place where they both grew up. But living amidst her parents in the house of her youth, dark parts of her childhood resurface including the details surrounding the death of her younger sister twenty-five years earlier. As Grace chases Charles's mystery, she inadvertently chases her own.

Following the national success of Ella Minnow Pea, this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South. A Robert Altmanesque comedy, Welcome to Higby follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. From mousy Carmen Valentine, whose guardian angel, Arnetta, gives her penny-pinching shopping tips, to addled old Hank Grammar, who preaches Jesus to his neighbors' pets, Higby's townsfolk have a knack for getting into -- and trouble getting out of -- outrageous situations. Blessed with an unerring eye for dead-on details, Dunn lovingly traces the eccentric and touching lives of his characters, offering an intelligent yet heartwarming vision of life in small-town America. Welcome to Higby is a Southern comical tale about simple dreams both realized and thwarted by all the complexities of the human heart.

In this claustrophobic tale of urban despair and existential noir, ex-cop Phineas Poe-protagonist of Will Christopher Baer's first novel, Kiss Me, Judas-returns to Denver to find that reality has been rewritten and the laws of reason redrawn. When Phineas is asked by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing officer named Jimmy Sky, he becomes an unwitting participant in a live role-playing game. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and Phineas himself soon loses track of his own various identities. Crossing the lines between traditional noir, fantasy, and edgy realism, Penny Dreadful shares sensibilities with everything from the books of William Gibson and Neal Gaiman to the films Trainspotting and The Matrix and the webgames Doom and Myst.