Jo-Ann Mapson

"Set against the gorgeous backdrop of California's central coast, Bad Girl Creek is the inspiring story of how friendship and purpose can transform even the most compromised of women, as well as situations. Jo-Ann Mapson chronicles female strength, family complexities, life crises, the use of humor as a curative power, and love in all its many aspects. Bad Girl Creek is a tragicomedy of female friendship in the new American West."--BOOK JACKET.

The story of a California family whose patriarch should have died long ago, felled by the family's inherited heart disease which is killing so many younger members. Instead, grandpa lives it up with women who are after his millions.

Those who do not remember family history are condemned to repeat it...Haunted by a failed marriage, a resentful son left deaf by a bout of meningitis, and the slow death of her artistic aspirations, Margaret Yearwood takes refuge in Blue Dog, New Mexico. There, in the shadow of Shiprock Mountain, and in the unlikely arms of Owen Garrett, she finds the courage to love again, and to be loved. And she comes to realize that even the most primal wounds scar over and that there's nothing so renewable or so healing as passion. This is a bittersweet story of ordinary people who must learn to heal family bonds before they are permanently severed.

Chloe Morgan is a thirty-three-year-old part-time waitress, small-time horse trainer, and full-time thoroughly toughened Western woman living in a corner of the dwindling canyonlands of Southern California. Calloused and wary, Chloe allows herself to love with total abandon and complete faith only her horse and her dog. That is, until a quirk in the weather and a sunrise funeral service cause her to cross the path of Henry Oliver, a sedate professor of folklore at the local college, who, like Chloe, has his reasons for holding back. But once Hank steps inside Chloe's makeshift cabin in the hills, Chloe realizes she must come to terms with her losses and decide between the life of solitude she had always thought was her fate and the love of a man who seems—at first—all wrong.

Chloe Morgan appears on Hank Oliver's doorstep in Cameron, Arizona, pregnant with Hank's child. Hank and Chloe settle into an uneasy domesticity, until Chloe falls in love with Junior Whitebear, a local Navajo artist.

Solomon's Oak is the story of three people who have suffered losses that changed their lives forever: Glory Solomon, a young widow who struggles to hold on to her Central California farm; fourteen-year-old Juniper McGuire, who arrives on Glory's doorstep, pierced, tattooed, angry, and homeless; and Joseph Vigil, a former Albuquerque police officer now disabled and in constant pain, who comes to California to fulfill his dream of photographing the state's giant trees, including the two-hundred-year-old Solomon's Oak on Glory's farm. In this deeply felt, wise, and gritty novel, these three broken souls will find in each other an unexpected comfort, and a second chance to see the miracles of everyday life.

"Skye Elliot is given a choice after her car accident--jail or rehab--and her ex-husband, a bull rider who introduced her to the party scene, gets custody of their four-year-old daughter Gracie. It takes Skye eight months to get clean, but the day she is released, she has one plan: to be a good mother--better, at least, than Skye's own selfish mother and absent dad. Owen Garret hasn't seen his daughter in ten years. He, too, needs to make amends. Newly out of prison, he picks her up from rehab and together they set off to find Gracie, and to forge a relationship that transcends the hurt and anger that have brewed between them for almost a decade. In the meantime, they find Margaret Yearwood, too--Owen's lost love whom he left when he turned himself in for a long-ago crime. Owen's Daughter is a stand-alone novel that brings back characters from Mapson's treasured novel Blue Rodeo, and introduces them to the beloved cast of Solomon's Oak and Finding Casey. With its father-daughter story and characters who overcome personal failings against great odds, Owen's Daughter is a story of love and family that will enchant Mapson fans both old and new"--

The Wilder sisters fall in love with men when they least expect it—and most need it. Rose, the older, more practical one, is a widow who lives in New Mexico and has two ungrateful kids, a bored dog, and a horse with a bad back. Lily, the younger, more daring sister, lives in Southern California, where she has put her career before everything else—including love. Lily and Rose flee to their parents' ranch, for some emotional detox. But the two haven't spoken in five long years, and spending time togther is the last thing they'd planned on. Nor had either anticipated being so actively pusued by lovestruck men. Readers will be in their corner all the way as they rediscover the bonds of sisterhood and slowly open their hearts to love.