Southern Helle

Perfect house. Perfect daughter. Perfect husband, if you don't look too closely.She has a crown from the society ladies, a five-carat Hartford diamond, and a rule book she has followed to the letter since she was old enough to know what a good marriage was supposed to look like.Then a sheriff's deputy hands her divorce papers on her own veranda, and she has forty-eight hours to get out.David Hartford didn't just leave her. He erased her. Not the house, not the cars, not a single account carries her name - twenty years of marriage and there is no legal proof she was ever there at all. Her father-in-law informs her she won't see a dime of Hartford money. Her husband's pregnant paralegal is already redecorating. And the committee women who once called Kate their queen have quietly handed her crown to someone else.With nowhere to sleep but a storage unit full of the designer wardrobe she's now selling off piece by piece, Kate does the one thing nobody in that family ever expected.She starts digging.What she finds is so much worse than an affair. Boxes of confidential client files, hidden where no one was ever supposed to look. Settlements skimmed from dying people. A woman who dies mysteriously tied to a note about tying up loose ends. And at the bottom of all of it, a private account holding a fortune that isn't his - opened under Kate's name.They didn't keep her name off everything because she didn't matter. They kept it clean so that when the whole thing finally burned, she'd be the one holding the match.Now Kate has a criminal defense attorney with a grudge against men like the Hartfords, a phone full of photographs, and absolutely nothing left to lose. Every hour she stays is an hour they can still make her the one who goes to prison for it - and David has never once had to face a consequence in his life.He spent twenty years underestimating her. He should have known better.Kate Hartford is done being a polite, Southern belle. And Hell hath no fury like an angry Southern woman.Southern Helle is a Southern suspense novel with a mouth on it: sharp, funny, and furious, about betrayal, money, and what a woman is capable of once she has nothing left to protect. Equal parts revenge story and reinvention story, served with sweet tea and a spine of steel.