Virginia Books: The Best Books Set in the Old Dominion State

Book Summary

Struggling novelist and divorced mom of two, Finlay Donovan, is BARELY holding things together. Each day has new challenges, like her ex-husband firing the nanny with no warning right before she has an important meeting.

Money is running out, and her next novel is way behind schedule. While meeting with her agent and attempting to buy more time, she receives a mysterious envelope with an offer of quick cash in exchange for a job.

Desperation and intrigue lead her to follow up with the number on the note, and before she knows what’s happening, she’s kind of agreed to be a contract killer for a woman with a truly terrible husband. Whoops.

Book Summary

Set in the volatile year of 1968 in southern Virginia, this novel centers on Jack Lee, a white lawyer in Freeman County, Virginia, and Desiree DuBose, a Black civil rights attorney from Chicago. Together, they defend Jerome Washington, a Black gardener wrongfully accused of murdering his wealthy white employers.

As Jack confronts his own biases and the town’s racism, he and Desiree forge a tense but determined partnership amid mounting threats, legal roadblocks, and personal tragedies, including attacks on their safety and Jack’s sister’s death.

Against a system rigged for conviction, they uncover deceit, corrupt motives, and surprising evidence that challenge the initial assumptions about the crime.

Book Summary

Fifteen years ago, Lucy watched her father be sentenced to life in prison for the murder of three people. She was only seventeen years old at the time, and she knew all three victims. The townspeople quickly turned against Lucy, and she hasn’t been back since.

But now, Lucy is back in Virginia, finally ready to talk to her. She can’t help but wonder if there was more to the story of what happened that night. Her old boyfriend, Ford, is also back in North Hampton Beach to prepare his family’s home for sale. He’s not excited to find Lucy digging into the past, but as they spend time together, he also starts to question the past.

Book Summary

This remarkable non-fiction account of a group of Black female mathematicians, known as “human computers.” They enabled some of America’s most outstanding space achievements, like launching the first unmanned rockets, followed by astronauts.

While brilliant Black women were initially relegated to teaching math in segregated public schools, many of these women suddenly found new opportunities open to them when the aeronautics industry suffered labor shortages during WWII. As a result, NASA was in dire need of anyone who possessed high-level math skills. This book interweaves the stories of four African American women who answered the call over three decades. These women participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes from WWII through the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race.

Book Summary

Naomi Witt didn’t plan to get stranded in a small Virginia town with no money, no car, and a surprise 11-year-old niece she didn’t know existed, but life’s got a wicked sense of humor. Fleeing her wedding, she came to rescue her estranged twin sister, only to find herself duped and left holding the bag (and the kid).

Enter Knox Morgan, a grumpy local with a hero complex buried under a mile of beard and attitude. Knox wants nothing to do with Naomi’s chaos, but somehow keeps showing up to fix her messes, while insisting he doesn’t care.

Between small-town gossip, a meddling cast of neighbors, and one surly but irresistible handyman, Naomi just might find that the life she never planned could be exactly what she needs.

Book Summary

As the light-skinned daughter of a plantation owner and a slave, Pheby escaped much of the brutality of slavery as a child. Her white father even promised her freedom for her 18th birthday. However, instead of freedom, she is sent to Devil’s Half-Acre by her father’s wife. This jail is where slaves are broken, tortured, and sold every day.

Within the jail, Pheby was groomed to be the personal mistress of slave trader Rubin Lapier. She becomes his sex slave, “wife,” and the mother of his children. Eventually, she faces the ultimate sacrifice to protect her heart as she fights for freedom.

Book Summary

Georgie has been a personal assistant for a long time, which means everyone else’s needs have been prioritized over her own for years. However, when she has to leave LA and return to her hometown, she must confront the fact that she’s never actually been sure about her own needs or what she wants in life. 

When she comes across a diary she wrote as a teenager, she discovers that the ideas within it can be used as a guidebook to create a new version of adult Georgie. But this plan hits a snag when she runs into an unexpected roommate. Levi was once the small town’s troublemaker, but now he’s a grouchy hermit. Grouchiness aside, he begins to help Georgie with her journey, and if the duo can get past their past, maybe Georgie’s true desire can be found right beside her.

Book Summary

Libby’s husband has been gone so long that she fears he’s in a Union prison camp. She barely has time to worry about this during the day because she’s running a grain mill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife. The Confederate Army is requisitioning everything they produce. The Shenandoah Valley around them keeps changing hands from North to South and back again, and each day, she fears waking to a battle at her front door.

One day, she finds a gravely injured Union soldier at her neighbor’s house. While Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade should be her enemy, she’s aware that he’s also human. But is saving him worthy of the risk? She could be charged with treason. On the flip side, maybe she could trade him for her husband?

Book Summary

Paisley is a salvage expert and historian, which means she’s often visiting abandoned buildings. But she still didn’t expect to find a body as she crawled through an old store with an attached home.

The discovery sends her on an expedition through history that links this murder to the one that led the previous owners to abandon the building in the first place. But it’s clear someone doesn’t want her to solve this mystery.

Book Summary

Carrie Buck came from a poor family in Virginia and was only 6 years old when she became a ward of the state. With no formal education and no family to support her, she spends her youth dreaming of a future different from the one she knows in her exploitive foster family. As a young woman in 1927, she finds herself at the center of an extraordinary legal battle at the forefront of the American eugenics conversation.

Nearly a century later, Jessa Gidney is trying to balance her high-powered legal career with her desire for a meaningful marriage and her dreams of having children. At a career turning point, Jessa learns into her family’s history of activism by taking on pro bono work at a nearby ICE detention center. There, she meets a young mother named Isobel fighting to stay with her daughter. An unsettling revelation about Isobel’s health leads Jessa to discover a disturbing pattern of medical malpractice within the detention facility that has shocking ties to her own family’s history.

Book Summary

Sallie Kincaid’s father, Duke, was the biggest man in their small Virginia town at the turn of the 20th century – both literally and figuratively. Sallie was Daddy’s little girl. She has few memories of her mother, who died when she was young. By the time she is 8 years old, her father has remarried and has a new son, Eddie. But this shy, timid son is nothing like Duke. Sallie takes it upon herself to teach Eddie to be more like their outgoing, daredevil father. But an accident occurs, and Sallie is cast out.

Nine years later, Sallie has returned to her hometown to reclaim her place in the family. But the world is a very different place now that Prohibition is the law of the land. After confronting the secrets and scandals she left behind, she finds her own calling as a bootlegger.

Book Summary

Randolph and Buddy Lee are both ex-cons, but have very different lives. Randolph left his past behind and started a successful lawn care business. He has a loving wife and owns a lovely small home. Buddy Lee is a barely functioning alcoholic living in a run-down trailer.

Besides both being ex-cons, the only thing they have in common is that their sons married each other, and both dads handled that poorly.

When both sons are brutally murdered, the men meet because of their shared goal – finding out what really happened to their boys.

Book Summary

Olympia returns to her small Virginia hometown after a year on the road, intending just a quick visit to settle her divorce and visit her late daughter’s grave. But her sister’s engagement throws everything off course and brings her face‑to‑face with her estranged husband, Spencer, who, like her, is still raw from their shared grief.

What was meant to be a brief stay turns into a journey of confronting pain, mending fractured relationships, and unearthing hidden family secrets. As Olympia and Spencer circle each other, the emotional weight of loss, aging parents, and unresolved guilt threatens to pull them apart—or draw them closer.

Book Summary

A former child star, Cilla has found a more satisfying career restoring homes. Her next project is restoring a dilapidated famous that used to belong to her grandmother – a legendary actress who died of an overdose there three decades ago.

As Cilla plunges into this new renovation, she barely has time to notice the charming neighbor, graphic novelist Ford Sawyer. She’s determined not to carry on the family tradition of ill-fated romances.

As she works on restoring the property, she uncovers family secrets, hidden mysteries, and even potential danger. After discovering a stack of unsigned letters in the attic that evidence a mysterious romance in her grandmother’s life, Cilla is violently assaulted. Now Cilla and Ford and trying to sort out who targeted Cilla and why before she also cut down in the prime of her life.

Book Summary

Martha “Patsy” Jefferson was the oldest daughter of our founding father and eventual third president, Thomas Jefferson.

Patsy grew up knowing that her father loved her dearly, but sensing that he loved his country even more. After her mother died, Patsy became her father’s protector and constant companion, even traveling with him to Paris when he became the American minister to France. In Paris, during the early days of the Revolution, Patsy learns of her father’s liaison with a young enslaved girl named Sally Hemings, who is the same age as Patsy. Meanwhile, Patsy has fallen in love with her father’s protege and staunch abolitionist, William Short.

Torn between family loyalty, love, and her principles, can Patsy make a life as William’s wife while remaining a devoted daughter? The choices she makes will follow her back to Monticello in Virginia and even to the White House. Time and again, through scandals and tragedies, Pasty will be forced to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to protect her father’s political legacy and that of the country he helped to found.

Book Summary

Beckett Bowry never planned to return to the quiet college town in the Viriginia mountains where she grew up. Her parents were professors in the college town, and she always envisioned herself as a student there. But a tragedy during her senior year ended with two local men dead and her roommate on the run.

Two decades later, Beckett has stayed away from the town and the memories. What she doesn’t know is that her daughter, Delilah, has secretly applied to Wyatt College and earned a full scholarship. As Delilah settles into dorm life, Beckett finds herself tangled in the town’s whisper network and eerie traditions, forced to confront both her past and her fears for her daughter’s safety.

Book Summary

In the first book of this highly recommended series, Blacksmith Meg Langslow is having a hectic summer as she is slated to be maid of honor at three weddings, and the three brides (her mother, her future sister-in-law, and her best friend) all expect a lot of help. She is also concerned that her father, who still loves his ex-wife, Meg’s mother, is spending a lot of time helping her mother get ready for the wedding. 

As Meg’s quirky extended family and other wedding guests start arriving, a very unpleasant guest ends up dead.  As Meg tries to plan the weddings, find peacocks, and schedule multiple dress fittings (which brings her in contact with Michael, the handsome son of the dress store owner), she is also trying to discover the murderer.

Book Summary

In the middle of the 1811 winter social season, Virginia’s planters and their families gathered at the capital for the General Assembly. Just after Christmas, six hundred people packed into the theater for a show.

Newly widowed Sally is in a third-floor box. Cecily is in the colored gallery, happy to briefly escape bad circumstances at home. Stagehand Jack is backstage, hoping to earn a permanent job. Blacksmith Gilbert is on the other side of town, trying to make enough money, first to buy his freedom and then to be able to take his wife to the theater.

In the middle of the performance, the theater catches fire. The decisions by Sally, Cecily, Jack, and Gilbert will impact their futures as well as the lives of countless others.

Based on the true story of a fire in Richmond, Virginia’s theater in 1811, this compelling novel moves from tragedy to redemption as the lives of four people instantly become forever intertwined.

Book Summary

For years, Lara Jean has been writing letters to each of her secret crushes. After pouring her emotions onto the page, she sealed each letter and hid them away in a special box under her bed. They were never meant to be sent, but they somehow found their way into the mail. Now, she must face all of her past crushes who have read her innermost thoughts.

From her first kiss and a cute summer camp boy to her sister’s ex-boyfriend… can anything good come of this embarrassing mix-up?

Book Summary

In 1918, the US Navy allowed women to join as yeomanettes for the first time. Ten thousand women answered the call with various motivations.

Marjory, a German-American, was motivated by a desire to prove her patriotism toward the US. Blanche was a suffragette and wanted to prove that women are equal. But Viv, the shy preacher’s daughter, joined in an attempt to escape the police. The trio finds friendship and sisterhood as yeomanettes, but when Viv’s dark past catches up to her, they find themselves in chaos.

In 1968, Peggy inherits a beach cottage from her estranged aunt, Blanche. Shortly after, she receives mysterious postcards dating from 1918 during Blanche’s service. As Peggy digs into her aunt’s past, it begins to collide with the present.

Book Summary

Amy was a university librarian, but a relationship gone wrong sent her running to her aunt’s house in a historic Virginia mountain town. In the first book of this series, she finds a job managing the underfunded but charming library and wrangling the eccentric patrons.

When Richards inherits a farmhouse from his great-uncle, he’s also determined to get to the bottom of a 1925 murder connected to his family. He enlists Amy’s help in investigating the case. She’s skeptical about his theories until inexplicable new murders plunge the quiet town into chaos.