No stranger to the Essence best-seller list, RM Johnson creates seductive portraits of contemporary life and love. Best friends since childhood, Pete and Wayne are as close as brothers, sharing a prospering orthopedic practice. Though they've always been competitive about women, things escalate when alluring Carla steps into the picture. As she passes between them, lifelong bonds of friendship and family begin to fray.

"Three best friends from the streets found success--in very different ways. But with a crisis detonating around them, their bond could also destroy everything they care about." --

In the summer of 1979, Andy and Tom are two fourteen-year-old boys -best friends, expert cave explorers, and crack shots with their Springfield M-6 Scout rifles. In rural southern Indiana, they are blissfully unaware of the local labor strife surrounding the Borden Casket Company. The fact that Andy's dad is a manager and Tom's dad is a union laborer has no bearing on their fun and adventure. But, in the building summer heat, violence quickly erupts--including...

Kurt Holland moves to Bridgeport, Ohio so his younger brother Sam will have more opportunities, maybe even a scholarship to college. When Sam gets in trouble for fighting at school, Kurt meets Sam's English teacher. Emily Springer is passionate about helping all of her students succeed, and goes to bat in Sam's defense. When she meets Kurt, Emily questions her no-dating policy when it comes to her students' parents, since Kurt isn't technically Sam's...

"In 1996, the unnamed narrator in Teddy Wayne's Apartment is attending the MFA program at Columbia on his father's dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, the narrator offers his spare bedroom - rent-free - to Billy, a handsome, talented classmate from a working-class family in the Midwest, who is attending Columbia on scholarship. As the semester progresses, the narrator's rapport...

"When the young William Wyeth leaves St. Louis for a fur-trapping expedition, he nearly loses his life and quickly discovers the depth of loyalty among the men who must depend on one another to survive. While convalescing, he falls in love with proud Alene, a young widow who may or may not wait for him. And on a wildly risky expedition into Crow territory, Wyeth finds himself unwittingly at the center of a deadly boundary dispute among Native American...

Thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel Jr. spends most of his time helping his family run the town's drive-in movie theater, reading ten-cent comics, and playing with his dog Nub. Life in East Texas circa 1958 is not very exciting until Stanley discovers a stash of old, crumbling love letters in a pile of burnt rubble behind the drive-in. As Stanley reads through the letters, he finds himself in the middle of a town mystery and discovering the secrets...

Best friends and the most daunting of bachelors, Charlie Harrington, a handsome philanthropist, has such high expectations for his perfect bride that no mortal need apply, Adam Weiss, a forty-something celebrity lawyer, prefers his women very young, very voluptuous, and very short-term, and for Gray Hawk, a gifted artist with a knack for attracting troubled relationships, the idea of family he can't imagine (particularly the family of the woman he's...