The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it. - AW Book Review

Coming together in an unlikely friendship, to solve a mystery involving both families, Willa and Paxton must meet head-on the obsessions and heartbreaking betrayals that severed their family ties, exposing truths of the past that go beyond the grave. The Peach Keeper is the representation of the unshakable bond of not only friendship but the bond of womanhood, enduring in good times and bad, from one generation to the next. i really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to reading more of Allen's works- Lori Kaufman