When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. Orphaned while onboard a ship from Ireland to America, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded...

Though Magnus MacLeish and Lark MacDougall grew up on the same castle grounds, Magnus is now laird of the great house and the Isle of Kerrera. Lark is just the keeper of his bee-- and the woman who could provide an elixir to help his ailing wife conceive and bear him an heir. But when his wife dies suddenly, Magnus and Lark find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of accusation, expelled from their beloved island, and sold as indentured servants across...

Two fifteen-year-old girls--one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.

"In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position...

Astrid, indentured to the royal class and long-time surrogate for Princess Renya's punishments, impetuously decides to risk her life and compete in a cutthroat race in order to win her family's freedom.

Seventeen-year-old musician Xue faces a lifetime of servitude until Duke Meng offers her freedom in exchange for serving as a musician in residence, but Xue soon discovers the Duke is a celestial ruler with ulterior motives and she must unlock her past to prevent an impending war in the Six Realms.

"1914, Fiji: 25-year-old police sergeant Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise. After a promising start to his career in his native India and in Hong Kong, he got sent to work in Fiji as punishment for a professional mistake he's too embarrassed to talk about. Lonely and humiliated, Akal longs for the day he can finally solve a big case and win the inspector-general's favor, thereby redeeming himself and being permitted to...

"In fifty years, Myrra will be free. Until then, she's a contract worker. Ever since she was five, her life and labor have belonged to the highest bidder on her contract--butchers, laundries, and now the powerful, secretive Carlyles. But when one night finds the Carlyles dead, Myrra is suddenly free a lot sooner than she anticipated--and at a cost she never could have imagined. Burdened with the Carlyles' orphaned daughter and the terrible secret...

In 1853, four Scandinavian indentured laborers in Russian Alaska steal a canoe and begin to paddle south toward the mouth of the Columbia River, twelve thousand miles away. A tense, shrewdly modulated sea adventure in which a quartet of indentured Scandinavians attempt escape from Russian America (1853 Alaska) in a stolen canoe, a Pacific journey far more rugged "than the plain arithmetic of its miles." Of the four, only one is seaworthy at the start,...

In 1826, Ann Miller travels to Pittsburgh with her widowed father and two young sisters, only to find that a mysterious man has pursued them all the way from Ohio. Is Ann's father just a circuit minister, or is he hiding something that may endanger them all? Will Hanby indentures with a Pittsburgh saddle maker, only to suffer years of abuse. When Ann Miller comes to stay next door, her compassion lights a long-dark part of his soul. Through his encounters...