This is about acceptance after pains. Moving on after letting go. Loving still even to the most undeserving.

Pretty on the outside may not mean pretty on the inside. Parke Stockard was certainly sitting pretty. Blessed with good looks and business sense to boot, she should have been content. Instead, Parke makes trouble in her small town. When retired octogenarian schoolteacher Myrtle Clover discovers her body, no one in Bradley is particularly upset. Myrtle decides to show up her police chief son and investigate the crime herself. And, just in time to play detective, she meets a widower newcomer who proves the perfect sidekick.

The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay is a former French aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated English barrister who endeavors to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Darnay's wife. Cover art done by @orangedusk

"Anna Karenina" is the tragedy of married aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing—something that prefigures her own later situation, though with less tolerance for her by others.