BOOK TWO ? Sunday Best

Ninety-one cassette tapes. Forty years of Sunday mornings. One voice nobody was meant to hear.

Ruby Lin has directed the choir at First Hartley Baptist since she was twenty-two. Eleven singers, average age sixty-eight, and the same fourteen hymns since 1994. In October, the church turns a hundred and seventy-five years old, and Ruby has been handed the Homecoming program and a job offer in Macon she is supposed to want.

Ash Whitlow has perfect pitch and cannot read a note of music. He runs the garage out on the Macon highway; he has not been inside that church for a service in fourteen years, and he has his reasons.

Then a 1993 Buick dies on the shoulder of the highway, and a shoebox is wedged up in the springs under the back seat. Ninety-one tapes, labeled in a dead woman's handwriting. Forty years of Sunday mornings. Parts nobody ever wrote down, sung by people who are all in the cemetery now. And on tape sixty-one, a hymn that appears in no hymnal on earth.

Ruby can read music and cannot hear it off a tape. Ash can hear anything and cannot read a page. Between them, two nights a week in a garage on the highway, they have until Homecoming. And Ruby has to answer Macon by the same Sunday.

Book two of the Hartley Bend series. Sweet, closed-door, and with a guaranteed happy ending. Each book stands alone.