Lutheran Ladies Circle
Wise, surprising, unforgettable characters

Melody Markett's Crash Course on Life
​Book 4
​How does a woman of the night become a Lutheran Lady?
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As a young orphaned teen, Mel Steuben found a questionable, but  opportune way to survive during wartime—but tragic changes nudged her to bury that lifestyle. Over the years, she’s built her identity as a keeper of confidences, a church woman, and a master mortician. Known as the Funeral Queen, she attends a Circle meeting to do what she does best—herd the opinionated women in planning a funeral service for their most eccentric member.

Unfortunately, Kick Carter, a college student and relative of the deceased, would rather do anything else than discuss a useless ceremony or expose her hidden guilt in her aunt’s death.
As Steuben and the Lutheran ladies assist in end-of-life details, their good intentions create chaos for the twenty-year-old who is twisting her nights out of control. Steuben has seen and lived this before. Now she must decide which is more important: unburying her closely-guarded past or opening her carefully built life to the messiness of people. And it’s beginning to look like Kick Carter may turn out to be the most challenging thing that’s happened to Mel Steuben yet.
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If you enjoyed Thanks for Leaving, you’ll love Melody Markett’s Crash Course on Life. Colorful. Humorous and alive. The journey sweeps you into joy and heartbreak, reminding you that wisdom appears in the midst of tragedy and connections grow when we’re lost.

Thanks For Leaving
Book 3
A funny blunt journey of owning one's past.​
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Ula’s looking for pieces of her past, and the trail began on a southern railway over sixty years ago. This time, a guilt-laden, leopard-haired gal has decided to be her friend and seatmate. The twenty-five-year-old is also running away, her remorse trailing all the way back to Texas. The two discover they have stories in common and secrets to share.

But Ula can’t explain the force driving her to collect the pieces of her past–particularly a memento hidden during WWII by a man most people think is a figment of her imagination.
With the strange Texas gal’s help, she may be able to find it…

After all, both women already know the first rule of change:
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You have to leave to start the journey.

Through the Knothole
Book 2
Change: the knothole of normal
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They’re Back, but this time….Kay McCabe is about to lose her house. As a single mom, it’s taken her years to create a safe, cozy home. But when two old Lutheran women need a place to stay, she’s pretty sure she’s about to lose even more.

When Kay’s job falls off an economic cliff, her knee-jerk solutions of renting rooms to the Lutherans and working in a bar, plug up life even more. Now she’s stuck in a new job she hates. Exhausted, she comes home to a couple of comical old church women who barely restrain their opinions, especially about her romantic interest. It’s like living with her mother again—actually two mothers.

She’s lost her privacy. Lost her humor. Lost her faith in others. And God isn’t answering his email.
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Now Kay must decide: to try to get life back to normal—or squeeze through a knothole toward the new and unknown.

Plucking One String
Book 1
A comic disregard for change
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Vera Henley can’t change the past—and doesn’t want to. She’s pulled the strings of every event at Shaded Valley Lutheran—until now. The shock of widowhood, a new pastor, and thowing out annual traditions have become tangled threads of humor and heartache.

Suddenly, the old custodian knows more about what’s happening around church than Vera does. The new, young pastor is altering time-honored Christmas and Easter celebrations, and the fashionable Lorena Ard is trying to become the new queen bee.

​Worst of all, the other peppery church women are enjoying these fresh twists. Vera will do what she’s always done with change—fix it. But change can’t be fixed.