The ladies of the Darling Dahlias garden club investigate a suspicious car wreck, the news of an escaped convict from the prison farm, and a ghost digging around the cucumber tree.

Texas. 1921: A time of abundance. Elsa Wolcott meets Rafe Martinelli and changes the direction of her life. Her only choice: marriage to a man she barely knows. 1934: Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, must make an agonizing...

As the members of the garden club in Darling, Alabama, prepare to plant roses for their annual Confederate Day celebration, they find themselves distracted by a series of mysteries involving stolen funds, a secret code, and a local resident's odd behavior.

"The eleven o'clock lady has always been one of garden club president Liz Lacy's favorite spring wildflowers. The plant is so named because the white blossoms don't open until the sun shines directly on them and wakes them up. But another Eleven O'Clock Lady is never going to wake up again. Rona Jean Hancock--a telephone switchboard operator who earned her nickname because her shift ended at eleven, when her nightlife was just beginning--has been...

After fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the Joad family finds the conditions in California are almost as bad, as people fight for jobs and their own day-to-day survival.