The Kitchen House on Jones Street

About this book:

In the shadow of Savannah's live oaks, Clara Vance guards a legacy simmering in cast iron. Her supper club, *The Hearth*, occupies a 170-year-old kitchen house where enslaved masons pressed their thumbprints into brick and three generations of women turned survival cooking into art. But when Julian Sterling—Atlanta developer, preservationist's nightmare, and a man who knows his grandmother's pickled peaches—buys the crumbling mansion next door, he brings blueprints, a structural engineer's damning report, and an ultimatum: let him tear down her garden wall to shore up a shared foundation, or watch the city condemn her chimney.

Clara has fought health inspectors, tax liens, and the relentless rot of coastal humidity. She isn't about to surrender her hearth to a man in a linen jacket, no matter how fluently he speaks the language of lime mortar and Lowcountry lore. Yet as hurricane season bears down and the fault lines beneath Jones Street begin to shift, their battle over bricks and easements deepens into something far more dangerous: a recognition that they are the only two people who understand what it means to keep a kitchen alive.

Steeped in the scent of woodsmoke, benne seed, and salt air, *The Kitchen House on Jones Street* is a feast of a novel—where every cornbread crust hides a secret, every handshake carries a lien, and the line between preserving history and selling it out runs straight through the heart of a woman who knows that some things are worth burning for.