The Pirate Queen — Patricia Hickman

TREASURE IS FOUND IN THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACES.

The envy of all her friends, wife and mother Saphora Warren is the model of southern gentility and accomplishment. She lives in a beautiful Lake Norman home, and has raised three capable adult children. But she's also married to a successful, yet philandering plastic surgeon. It is for that reason that, after hosting a garden party for Southern Living magazine, Saphora packs her bags to escape the trappings of the picturesque-but-vacant life. Her planned destination is a neglected family bungalow on the Outer Banks.

Saphora's departure, though, is interrupted by her husband Bender's early arrival home and his words that change her life forever: I'm dying.

Against her desires, Saphora agrees to take care of Bender, who instructs her to take him to fight his illness in their coastal home in Oriental -- the same house to which she had planned her get-away. When her idyllic escape is overrun by her grown children, grandchildren, townspeople, relatives, and a precocious neighbor child, Saphora's escape to paradise is anything but the life she had imagined.