The Whole Crimson Season

Frankie Konar packs a go-bag for everything now. A week of clothes, the good knife roll, four hundred dollars she doesn't tell anyone about. She parks nose-out, always aimed back toward the interstate, toward gone. A person should always be able to leave. That isn't pessimism. That's just having luggage.

But her grandfather's heart is failing, and this may be his last cranberry harvest, and he has one final wish: to leave seventy-five years of hard-won marsh to family that stays. Not to the cooperative circling like a buyer. Not to the granddaughter everyone in Redwing Marsh remembers running at twenty-two. So when the whole town has already decided the kind thing is to let the place die quietly, Frankie does the only sensible thing a woman built from stubbornness and fear can do.

She invents a partner. Steady, rooted, real. The kind of man who proves she's finally put down roots.

The only trouble is finding someone willing to play along—and the only volunteer is Theo Halvorsen. Gruff, maddening second son of the rival marsh across the flowage, keeper of a drowning crop and a father who never trusted him. A Konar and a Halvorsen, engaged. Scandalous enough to crack a sixty-year feud wide open. Reckless enough to save two families' land. Strictly business. A genuinely terrible idea.

Maren Holt writes small-town romance with dirt under its nails and ache in its bones—red-winged blackbirds and killing frost, wintergreen mints and a brass whistle worn smooth by an old man's thumb. Here is a story about the difference between faking a warm house and finally living in one, about being someone's convenient stand-in versus being truly chosen.

Somewhere between the harvest-moon dance and the first hard freeze, two people who've spent their whole lives halfway out the door start to wonder what it would feel like to stay.

Fall for the marsh. Grab your copy today.