The Verdi Series

Angela DeLancy has tended the same garden plot in Cookeville, Tennessee for thirty years. She knows which tomatoes will set before they do, which neighbors will ask before they take, and exactly how far she’ll bend before she breaks. What she doesn’t know is how to feel about Verdi, the garden robot her husband bought her without asking — or why her grandmother’s irreplaceable Cherokee Purple tomato line is suddenly, quietly, starting to fail.

When a man in a good jacket starts going farm to farm, asking neighbors to sign their water into a pool that will not be theirs, Angela finds herself in the middle of something bigger than a bad harvest. The community she’s built — the farmers’ market regulars, the neighbors who leave baskets on each other’s porches, the heirloom seeds passed hand to hand across three generations — is the target. And the one paying closest attention is the machine she never asked for.

The harvest saved Angela DeLancy’s farm. It didn’t save Cookeville.

A year later, the co-op is thriving, the heirloom seed line is spreading hand to hand across town, and Angela finally has room to breathe — until a rosebush her grandmother planted decades ago starts dying from something that shouldn’t exist. AgriTech withdrew, but it didn’t disappear, and the quiet campaign it’s running this time doesn’t come with lawyers or land deals. It comes as doubt, whispered door to door, aimed at the very trust Angela spent a lifetime building.

Her grandson Eli is old enough now to carry real weight — maybe more than he’s ready for — and when a crisis hits mid-season with Angela sidelined, he has to decide what kind of steward he’s going to be without her standing behind him. Meanwhile, a discovery buried in the seeds themselves reveals that what AgriTech took from Cookeville wasn’t a fluke. It was a pattern. And Cookeville may not be the only town living inside it.

Seeds of Resistance is the second novel in the Verdi Series: a warm, wry, quietly unsettling story about what it costs to keep growing something worth protecting — and the peculiar, watchful presence that keeps noticing what everyone else misses.

She won the battle for her farm. Keeping it is going to cost her more than the fight did.

Angela DeLancy never set out to be anyone’s spokesman. But a bill moving through the Tennessee legislature would strip away the one legal protection standing between her family’s land and the company that has already tried twice to take it — and stopping it means saying so out loud, on the record, in a marble hearing room in Nashville.

Winning there turns out to be the easy part. A federal rider follows, written to undo the win nationwide. An article names her farm as the headquarters of a network it calls a threat to the country’s food supply. Then a quiet, reasonable man sits down at her kitchen table with an offer that makes all of it disappear — if she’ll take her name off the letterhead and her voice off the record.

Eli has grown into the fight beside her, but Angela’s body, worn down by two years of it, is running out of road. Whatever she decides, she’ll have to say it where everyone can hear.

Harvest of Reconciliation brings Angela’s story full circle: a novel about the cost of staying visible when disappearing would be so much easier — and the steady, watchful presence that’s stood beside this family through every season of the fight.