Halia Watkins has her hands full cooking, hosting, and keeping her boisterous young cousin from getting too sassy with the customers at Mahalia's Sweet Tea, the finest soul food restaurant in Prince George's County, Maryland. Having fast-talking entrepreneur Marcus Rand turn up in her kitchen is annoying; finding his dead body face-down on her ceramic tile after hours is far worse. To keep Sweet Tea out of the sordid spotlight, Halia will have to...

"Mahalia's Sweet Tea is known for serving the best soul food in Prince George's County, Maryland. But owner Halia also likes to indulge in some O la carte detective work. Can she solve the murder of a former omean girlo when a high school reunion takes a deadly turn? When the organizing committee for her upcoming high school reunion desperately needs a caterer, Halia agrees to help out. Soon she's serving up her signature macaroni and cheese and famous...

"Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, can cook like nobody's business but can't mind her tongue. It is 1962, and these three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step that forever changes a town and the way women --mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends -- view one another"--Page 4 of...

Popular, generous, forty-something widow Jessie Tucker decides to make herself indispensable to recently widowed Hubert Wiggins but is disappointed when he is not everything she dreamed he would be and instead turns her attentions to a much younger man. Jessie Tucker is beloved throughout Lexington, Alabama, for her kind heart and endless generosity. But the widow feels it's past time she rewarded herself-- especially when upstanding Hubert Wiggins...

"In grocery store aisles and kitchens across the country, smiling images of 'Aunt Jemima' and other historical and fictional black cooks can be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare...

"Heartwarming and seductive series follows four very different women risking second chances deep in the sultry heart of New Orleans"-- "Sometimes you go in search of a new beginning. Other times, it finds you. Tonya Martin enjoys her job as a chef for a Wall Street bank, her East Harlem walk-up, and the freedom to live and love by her own rules -- right up until the day she finds herself downsized. But a spontaneous trip to New Orleans opens up a...

"A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this...