Lisa J Lickel

Ivy's aunt is missing, and Ivy vows to find her ...after she gets out of this kidnapping mess. Home in Apple Grove after a shortened honeymoon, Ivy is confronted with her first quandary of married life: admit to her husband that she picked up a piece of garbage that turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of an international smuggling ring, or toss the evidence? While seeking advice from her mom, retired criminal studies professor Geneva Preston, Ivy learns her aunt is missing in South America. Ivy wants to help, but her new husband convinces her to let the authorities handle the situation while they prepare for their first Apple Fest.Ivy happens upon a robbery and is kidnapped by desperados demanding a response to the terrible plight of itinerant coffee workers. During her captivity she meets a man who claims to be her long-absent uncle. Can she trust him and his plot to find her Aunt Chris after they're rescued?Smugglers, itinerant coffee workers, fair trade labeling practices, Apple Fest, and more drama with Ivy's former fianc Stanley are the latest wrinkles in Ivy and Adam's life. When they get to settle down to enjoy their new marriage is anyone's guess.

When you are loved, you have everything to lose...Lily Masters was born with a deformity that shaped her life. When she, white and rural-raised, and Cam Taylor, a biracial army medic and literary professor who left his work under a cloud of suspicion, meet, fall in love, and get engaged, Lily decides it's time to take control of her body in order to feel whole. She schedules plastic reconstructive surgery in Texas and leaves Cam and her nephew Kenny, also of mixed heritage, who they're planning to adopt, back home in Wisconsin to wait. The nightmare begins when Cam can't get a response about Lily's condition from the hospital and both his friend Matt the newspaper editor and his sister Georgia send him a horrifying news story about murder and mayhem at the Southern Shore Medical Center in Houston where Lily is supposedly under the knife. But whose knife? A terrifying ring of human organ black marketers harvest organs from unwilling victims to meet the demand for transplants as the procedures become less risky and the race to create engineered organs fails. In Lily's case, she's not only the victim of black marketers, she's a target for revenge. The international terrorist family, the Limms, want payback for the loss of a favored son when Lily helped expose their international sex-trafficking operation. Her plastic surgery was the only success when she wakes without kidneys. "You'll never see the face of your lover again," Old Man Limm promises. "And your body will slowly rot in its own poison." As their friends and family gather around them, Cam and Lily wonder about their future together and whether being whole is a solitary or communal endeavor.

In the turmoil of 2011, an American college administrator and a German socio-economics expert attempt to rectify the past to save their children and preserve the fragile world in crisis.Rachel Michels made a poor choice which resulted in her biggest blessing, her daughter, Maeve. When the father of that blessing returns decades later, she knows he wants something she'd taken from him. Rachel has lived in near seclusion and mistrust, fearful of losing the one person who's kept her life from coming unglued.Professor Gervas Friedemann returns to Wisconsin, seeking a missing ancient artifact, along with help for his oldest daughter who is suffering from a rare genetic blood disorder. With the European Union at stake, blackmail could negatively impact a crucial vote in the German Parliament unless Gervas recovers an irreplaceable relic he left in the United States on a lecture tour a lifetime ago. He knows who took the piece of history he once flaunted--the woman who had stolen his soul. He only hopes she still has the ring