Ashton Lee (Rob Kuehine) signs THE READING CIRCLE

Having dodged a bullet when Cherico's city council granted her a one-year reprieve in which to prove that her library was a vital town institution, spunky librarian Maura Beth Mayhew is dismayed to learn that her nemesis, councilman Sparks, still has another round of ammo left in his chamber. Determined to divert library funds to pay for an industrial park that will bear his name, Sparks plants a ringer to spy on the regular meetings of the library's burgeoning Cherry Cola Book Club. But Mayhew discovers she has an unimpeachable insider of her own when Sparks' former secretary joins the group. While romantic entanglements otherwise distract most of the club members and prey upon Mayhew herself, it takes an act of God to bring the standoff between the librarian and the politician to a head. The challenges of keeping any library anywhere open and effectively serving its patrons is a problem facing most communities. Lee (The Cherry Cola Book Club, 2013) brings these salient topics to light in an unpredictably entertaining series.

About:

Ashton Lee was born in historic Natchez, Mississippi, into a large, extended Southern family which gave him much fodder for his fiction later in life. His father, who wrote under the pen name of R. Keene Lee right after WWII, was an editor and writer in New York of what is now called pulp fiction. As a result, Ashton inherited a love of reading and writing early on and did all the things aspiring authors are supposed to do, including majoring in English when he attended The University of the South, affectionately known as Sewanee. While there, he studied Creative Writing under Andrew Lytle, then editor of the Sewanee Review, and a member of the Southern Agrarians in the 1920s.

Ashton lives in Oxford, MS, enjoying the amenities of a university town that many writers have called home.