The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer's career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track -- until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the "lucky" associates. She's offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she'd get her old job back. In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan...

A mining engineer returns to Aberfoyle coal mine, where the workings had played out ten years before, to find the mine foreman and his family living in a cottage deep in the mine where a rich new vein has been found. But some inimical force is bent upon stopping the foreman and his friend from reviving the works

Shae-Lynn's sister, Shannon, who she thought was killed by their abusive father, arrives on her doorstep being pursued by a Russian thug, a lawyer, and a desperate housewife, causing a ruckus in their small Pennsylvania mining town

Bound to keep a promise to her dead uncle, Is travels to the mysterious north country to find two missing boys, one of them a prince, and to discover why so many children in London are disappearing.

"There's something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it's not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives. The six couldn't be more different. Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch. Kelly, the bookworm next door. James, a cynical burnout. Casey,...

B.J. Hoff's unforgettable characters from A Distant Music reunite for an even more gripping, dramatic episode in The Mountain Song Legacy. When Maggie MacAuley returns to the small coal town of her childhood, she has no intention of staying. Her life is in Chicago now. There's nothing to keep her in Skingle Creek... ...nothing but the discovery that a man who has lived most of his life for the children of Skingle Creek is no longer the hero of Maggie's...

"The ... Elemental Masters series moves to America for the first time in a rich retelling of The Queen of the Copper Mountain, set against the backdrop of Tennessee coal country ... Anna May Jones is the daughter of a coal miner, but a sickly constitution has kept her confined to the house for most of her life. Hoping to improve her daughter's health--and lessen the burden on their family--Anna's mother sends her to live with her Aunt Jinny, a witchy-woman...

On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years--a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of a cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated...