Coming April 2009
Windless Summer - In the small Washington town of Rocket—a summer playground for windsurfers and tourists—a windless season ignites fear, as businesses struggle and residents move away. Rocket’s motel, run by a lonely widower named Tom Jemmett, is hard hit. Swirling around Tom are lives much like his own, townspeople yearning for wind, but also for hope, connection, even love. Charlene, a young mail clerk, helps care for Tom’s troubled daughter while a secret gnaws at her heart…Lauren, the town vet, has fallen for Tom, who barely notices…and newspaper editor Hap is hatching a foolish plan to save his dying town.
Just as time is running out, something like a miracle strikes Tom’s run-down motel. Guests who stay in Room 6 begin experiencing sudden acts of fate, both terrible and great. And now, the world is descending on Tom and the struggling town. But while Rocket shows new signs of life, the truth about Tom’s motel and the death of his wife—as well as the secret hopes and fears of those around him—are exposed, leaving no life unchanged, no heart untouched, and no miracle too wondrous to believe.
Mineral Spirits is a contemporary western novel, a murder mystery set in Montana's Mineral County, which stretches narrow and remote along the Idaho border. Beneath this scenic paradise Sheriff Kip Edelson encounters drug-dealing, incest and grinding poverty, as well as murder. When ten-year-old Gray Dausman discovers a skeleton on the banks of the Clark Fork River, Edelson embarks on an Odyssey through Mineral County.
The sheriff not only discovers that the young Gray has a missing mother, but he also stumbles upon a drug ring that results in a shootout, sparking desperate behavior from local residents.
As Edelson's search for the corpse's identity becomes obsessive, his own marriage is falling apart. And he is unable to turn his back on Gray.
...a spell-binding, high-country thriller. " Kirkus Reviews (starred)
...a first-rate page-turner from start to finish." The Denver Post
Tight and emotionally satisfying..." Publisher's Weekly
Sharfeddin’s exquisite use of language and detail... this book examines themes of love, hope, and aloneness-versus-loneliness..." Forward Magazine
Blackbelly is a contemporary western that suspesfully traces the consequences of a crime of bigotry. It is the story of an unjustly accused sheep rancher's struggle to reclaim his life, and that of a woman close to him, from perils imposed by a domineering father and the culture of a remote Idaho town, gritty but proudly independent Sweetwater.
Chas McPherson and his father are shepherds--one of beasts, the other of souls. The hard-crusted, hard-drinking younger McPherson, a misunderstood loner, raises a breed of sheep known as Blackbellies. The father, dying of Parkinson's, is tended by a newly hired nurse with a past, Mattie Holden. The father had been a fire-and-brimstone pastor whose uncanny ability to detect and then reveal the townspeople's sins kept them in dread of him. When the home of Sweetwater's lone Muslim family is burned to the ground, those past fears and grudges contribute to the town turning against the younger McPherson as the suspected arsonist.
Sheriff Kip Edelson methodically and conscientiously investigates the arson accusation, and a subsequent one of murder. At the McPherson ranch, Mattie is haunted by a sense that the incapacitated, now-mute father can see into the secrets of her past. She and Chas draw closer together as mutual emotional needs slowly replace initial antipathy. Surprising developments in town and at the ranch gradually bring them to a reckoning with the once-fierce father and to a journey to forgiveness.
[Sharfeddin's] eye for detail and her unsentimental compassion for her characters and their stunted lives will entrance readers. Stark terrain beautifully rendered." Kirkus Reviews (starred)
A superbly crafted first novel about an unlikely romance...both characters are wonderfully drawn." Library Journal (starred)