Best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert sets this cozy mystery in the small West Texas town of Pecan Springs. As the Christmas decorating season approaches, Thyme & Seasons proprietor China Bayles feels overwhelmed. While she tries to balance her new roles of wife and step-mom with the demands of her thriving herbal shop, her business partner-and best friend-Ruby mysteriously disappears. Soon China's cantankerous mistletoe supplier Carl turns up dead....

Best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert is especially beloved for creating herbalist and ex-lawyer China Bayles. In Widow's Tears, China has urgent business to discuss with Ruby, a friend gifted with extrasensory perception. Meeting Ruby at a supposedly haunted house, China soon uncovers a mystery that may be linked to a deadly robbery that very night.

China Bayles investigates the tragic story of a woman in an old photograph. Annie Laurie was a young widow who'd lost both her husband and her child on the same day. She manages to survive through her lace-making business and finds happiness again only to have a suspicious death overshadow her new life. As China delves into Annie's century-old mystery, she realizes that solving it could have unimaginable repercussions in the here and now.

"From Susan Wittig Albert, the New York Times bestselling author of A Plain Vanilla Murder, comes a tightly crafted novel that juxtaposes the disappearance of a rare, remarkably illustrated 18th-century herbal with the true and all-too-human story of its gifted creator, Elizabeth Blackwell. Herbalist China Bayles' latest adventure takes her to the mountains of North Carolina, where her friend Dorothea Harper serves as the director and curator of the...