The Last Summer on Edisto
A Gullah Geechee Heirs' Property Romance

About this book:

When high-powered Atlanta attorney Maya Smalls returns to Edisto Island to settle her family's heirs' property crisis, she brings a $3.2 million developer's offer and a briefcase full of legal strategy. Waiting for her is Tariq Washington—her childhood cousin turned environmental planner, who knows every tidal creek and family grave on the forty-two acres, and who refuses to let the land become another gated community. With forty-three scattered heirs, a looming tax foreclosure, and only thirty days before the courthouse auction, Maya and Tariq wage a battle of wills on the screened porch of The Yard, where the smell of simmering butter beans mingles with the weight of three generations' choices.

But the Lowcountry has a way of unraveling even the tightest legal arguments. As Maya navigates genealogical charts and partition laws, she finds herself pulled back into the rhythm of crabbing at Point of Pines, supper under the Angel Oak, and the Gullah cadence she thought she'd left behind. Tariq isn't just fighting for soil—he's offering her a way home she didn't know she'd lost. And Aunt Sarah, the family's iron-backed matriarch, insists that no contract gets signed until every cousin has eaten at the same table.

Set against the luminous beauty of the Sea Islands, *The Last Summer on Edisto* is a love story rooted in the urgent, real-world fight to protect Black land ownership in the Gullah Geechee Corridor. Here, the line between selling out and buying in blurs with every rising tide—and the most valuable asset might not be the waterfront acreage, but the history that holds it together.