While a series permits a writer to develop a set of characters over a period of time, a standalone novel represents the only opportunity these people have to live and breathe and tell their stories. Even if some of them reappear (and my standalones do have the occasional link and overlap), their book must have a sense of completeness, must contain an entire universe within its pages.
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Back to the Garden
A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life—with potentially fatal consequences…
The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California—and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities within their walls.
And now, just as the turmoil seems buried and the Estate prepares to move into a new future, construction work unearths a grim relic of the estate’s history: a skull, hidden away some fifty years ago.
Lockdown
Career Day at Guadalupe Middle School: a day given to innocent hopes and youthful dreams. A day no one in attendance will ever forget.
A year ago, Principal Linda McDonald arrived at Guadalupe determined to overturn the school’s reputation for truancy, gang violence, and neglect. One of her initiatives is Career Day—bringing together children, teachers, and community presenters in a celebration of the future. But there are some in attendance who reject McDonald’s bright vision…
Califia’s Daughters
(2004)
Laurie’s first non-mystery, a paperback original novel of the near future.
Keeping Watch
(2003)
(Nominated for the Barry Award)
The “ghost” of Folly island, Allen Carmichael, is a man with a few ghosts of his own, which accompany him as he performs his rescues of abused children and their mothers. Only his ghosts don’t tell him when one day he meets a child who may not be the innocent victim he appears.
Folly
(2001)
(Macavity Award Winner, A Booksense Choice)
The book that nearly emptied Random House, New York, as half the staff came perilously near to deciding that if Rae Newborn could go to an island and rebuild an old house, why couldn’t they? After all, they didn’t begin with her problems, did they?
A Darker Place
(1999)
(Published in the UK as The Birth of a New Moon)
Professor Anne Waverley’s sabbaticals from her university are a bit different: They take her into potentially disastrous religious movements, and into potentially devastating relationships.