The Parlor Girl's Guide

Scarlett O'Hara meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

A hard-edged country girl enlists the living and the dead to guide her past family tragedy and forge her escape from a secluded Southern brothel. After her father’s murder and mother’s abonnement, a merciless landowner forces Molly Lingo to work in a rural Alabama hunting lodge that doubles as an exclusive whorehouse. Molly, the feisty tough teenage daughter of a hand-to-mouth tobacco farmer, employs a mysterious specter and a troubled gambler, “Cotton” Arnold, to assist her in breaking away from the unrelenting grip of the sharecropper culture. Set at the beginning of the Jazz Age’s promising sweep across America, Molly’s story depicts both the shocking brutality of the landlord class and a young woman’s determination not to be treated as a second-class citizen. This energetic historical fiction offers supernatural thrills and the poignant transformation of a metaphysical coming-of-age tale.

After twenty-five years peddling bulldozers around the globe, STEVE McCONDICHIE exited the corporate world to pursue his true purpose-telling thrilling tales about our meandering jour- neys through life. A rebel since kindergarten, Steve always gives the underdog antihero ample opportunities for redemption. A believer in the power of kinship, he enjoys examining how family shapes the individual and their choices. The Parlor Girl's Guide is his second novel. Lying for a Living, his debut novel, was published in 2017. A well-traveled native Southerner, he works as a real estate novelist and lives in Newnan, Georgia, and Amelia Island, Florida, with his lovely wife, Donna, their four children, and five grandchildren.