Launch Party: When Cicadas Cry with Caroline Cleveland

We’re hosting a very special launch party for When Cicadas Cry by Caroline Cleveland, and you’re invited! Your ticket includes the book, in-store treats during our author Meet & Greet, AND 10% off your check at Frothy Beard next door that evening. Make a night of it, bring your friends and enjoy some books and brew! (Store receipt required for the 10% off at Frothy Beard.)

In this stunning debut by a South Carolina attorney, Zach Stander, a lawyer with a past, and Addie Stone, his indomitable detective and lover, find themselves entangled in secrets, lies, and murder in a small Southern town.

A high-profile murder case–A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not only a murder case, but a powder keg. A haunting cold case–Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander’s case? A killer who’s watching–Stander takes on Jenkins’s defense, but he’s up against a formidable solicitor with powerful allies. Worse, his client is hiding a bombshell secret. When Addie Stone reopens the cold case, she discovers more long-buried secrets in this small town. Would someone kill again to keep them?

Ideal for fans of mystery, suspense, and thrillers in the vein of Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls and Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark, as well as for readers who followed the high-profile Murdaugh murder trial, held in the same small town as in When Cicadas Cry.

GET YOUR TIX HERE – JUST $18.99

Caroline Cleveland credits growing up in the rural South and its quieter way of life for her lifelong passion for books and storytelling. As an adolescent, she devoured classics like Old Yeller and The Yearling, discovered Agatha Christie and Steven King in her teenage years, and, later, was mesmerized reading thrillers by authors including John Grisham, Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter and Mary Kubica.

Her dedication to the written word led her to law school at the University of South Carolina, where she earned her degree in 1991. She is certified by the South Carolina Supreme Court as a specialist in labor and employment law and is the founding partner of Cleveland & Conley, LLC.

Caroline draws on her rich and varied life experience working in the law for her writing. She elaborates, “Law school students are warned the first day that the law is a jealous mistress, and there is a reason for that. But I have always made time to read for pleasure. Eventually, it dawned on me that I, too, have entertaining and powerful stories to tell. As a writer, I gravitate toward mystery and suspense, as I cannot resist a character who has a dark secret or is wrestling with inner demons. I have lived in the South all my life, so my stories inevitably come from a Southern perspective, featuring deceptively peaceful small towns and strong, complex characters who rely on their Southern sense of values.”