A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana.

Young Andi Oliver is an amnesiac and drifter who awoke in a Santa Fe bed and breakfast with a man's belongings tossed about the room. Adopting a name from the initials on her backpack, Andi moves from one waitress job to the next, from Idaho to North Dakota, until she takes a job at Klavan's, a massive pigfarming facility that specializes in the dark art of modern livestock management. As Andi begins to uncover the truth about Klavan's and a slaughterhouse...

Alison Marshall has drifted from one small Florida town to another since high school, working odd jobs, saving hard, and building a nest egg. When she reaches Palmetto Island, she thinks it could be the right place to settle down. She contacts the island's only realtor, and learns that an old beach house is on the market. It's in her budget, and Alison takes it as another sign that she's in the right place. As days turn into weeks, she uncovers a...

"In town, they called her 'Crazy Widow Dinsmore.' But Elly was no stranger to their ridicule--she had been an outsider all her life, growing up in a darkened house under the strict eye of her eccentric grandparents. Now she was all alone, with two little boys to raise, and a third child on the way. Will Parker drifted into Whitney, Georgia, one lazy summer afternoon, hoping to put his lonely past behind him. He yearned for the tenderness he had never...

"November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son's future. Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton, born in the woods to two outlaws, now finds...

Meet Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, two amiable drifters and old pals. Veterans of cowboying, cattle drives, drunken brawls, and a couple of shoot-outs, Scratch and Bo are mostly honest and don't go looking for trouble--it's usually there when they wake up in the morning. Now, in remote Arizona Territory, they're caught up in a battle between two stagecoach lines. The owner of one, a beautiful widow, has gotten both Scratch and Bo hot and bothered,...

An aspiring writer who has become an outcast, loner, and hopeless drunk drifts around America, moving from job-to-job to support his favorite pastimes--women, drinking, and gambling.

In this bold thriller peppered with dark humor and interlocking mystery, an eccentric mountain man is on the run from the authorities, surviving the winter by breaking into empty vacation homes in a remote community. Regularly calling into radio talk shows, where he has acquired the nickname "Buster," to rant about the impending Inversion at the turn of the millennium, he is haunted by visions of being lost at sea, and memories of his former life...

"Bo Creel and Scratch Morton aren't the settling down types. They're lifelong drifters who keep one eye on the horizon, one finger on the trigger, and one foot out the door. Roaming the West is what keeps them young, or so Scratch tells Bo. But when they save the life of Cyrus Keegan--the owner of a matrimonial agency--they receive an unexpected proposal that's hard to resist. Keegan needs to deliver five mail order brides to a mining town in New...

"If anyone can get a shipment of brides to the church on time, its Bo Creel and Scratch Morton. But this time, they'll have to cross hell and high water to escort four marriage-bound beauties to a remote gold mining town in Alaska. The brides-to-be include a dangerously attractive widow, her sweet-hearted niece, and two of their friends. The roadblocks to the altar include a lecherous saloon owner, a lovesick sailor, and a gang of hired guns. And...