Fulfilling all the high expectations set by her well-received Crazy Ladies, Michael Lee West's She Flew the Coop brilliantly interweaves dark calamity with comedy to depict everyday life in tiny Limoges, Louisiana, in 1952. Told through the voices of its richly eccentric characters, She Flew the Coop is an entrancing picture of Limoges's gossipmongering citizens and a beautifully rendered picture of small-town life, filled with wry humor and humanity.

The 2013 collection of stories and poems from Milang's "Lakeliners" Writers' Group. Written By Chris Bagley, Shirley Chaplin, Danielle Kerr, Stuart Jones, Greta Mansveld and Lee West

"It's not every day that I bake a dozen Red Velvet cakes, learn my boyfriend may have a love child, and I witness a murder."
After Charleston pastry chef, Teeny Templeton, witnesses a murder, she discovers that her lawyer-boyfriend, Coop O'Malley, has been keeping secrets: the victim's ten-year-old daughter may be his child. As more lies explode, Teeny finds herself trapped in Bonaventure, Georgia, a zany"little Savannah," where she must deal with her commitment phobia, gather DNA from a ten-year old child genius, outwit a stalker, decode an encrypted diary, and fend off advances of an ex-beau, a handsome plastic surgeon who's crazy-in-love with her. Teeny's life gets maddeningly complicated by a series of not-so-teeny troubles: an uneasy love triangle, a gossip-mongering tarantula breeder, an wise-cracking Southern Belle with early Alzheimer's, Coop's loveable Chihuahua-toting granny, and clues that point to the illegal trafficking of human organs. But when a suspect is arrested, the bodies keep piling up and Teeny doesn't know who to trust. As the murderers close in, Teeny unearths a revelation that becomes a game-changer and flips her world upside-down.

""Gone with a Handsomer Man" is fun, funny, and fabulous "---Janet Evanovich

Take one out-of-work pastry chef . . .

Teeny Templeton believes that her life is finally on track. She's getting married, she's baking her own wedding cake, and she's leaving her troubled past behind. And then? She finds her fiance playing naked badminton with a couple of gorgeous, skanky chicks.

Add a whole lot of trouble . . .

Needless to say, the wedding is off. Adding insult to injury, her fiance slaps a restraining order on her. When he's found dead a few days later, all fingers point to Teeny.

And stir like crazy

Her only hope is through an old boyfriend-turned-lawyer, the guy who broke her heart a decade ago. But dredging up the past brings more than skeletons out of the closet, and Teeny doesn't know who she can trust. With evidence mounting and the heat turning up, Teeny must also figure out where to live, how to support herself, how to clear her name, and how to protect her heart.

Michael Lee West has written a delicious new mystery with an unforgettable heroine.

Reeling from the loss of her mother, plagued with a bad case of writer's block (and don't even talk about those extra twenty pounds), Renata DeChavannes feels as though everything is just plain wrong. And that was before the tabloids caught her sweetheart, filmmaker Ferg Lauderdale, sharing an intimate squeeze with Hollywood's hottest young tamale.

But the granddaughter of the formidable Honora DeChavannes possesses more hell than belle in her backbone--and she's about to reclaim it. Heading south to Honora's home on the Gulf Coast, Renata is determined to stop feeling like a wilted gardenia and emerge as the unstoppable kudzu her beloved grandmother proudly proclaimed she would be. But for that to happen Renata's got to face some not-so-genteel ghosts from her past, discover the truth about the mother she desperately misses, and make peace with the first man who abandoned her and broke her heart: her handsome and distant father.

Michael Lee West's indomitable G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised in the South) are back -- enduring rough times with all the grace and outrageous flair expected of true Southern heroines.

Bitsy Wentworth -- fleeing yet another relationship nightmare in a "borrowed" red Corvette, with her baby daughter and a recently acquired "demon child" -- has an APB out on her for attempted murder (she broke her ex-husband's nose with a frozen slab of ribs that she purchased at the Piggly Wiggly). Her mama, Dorothy, is writing letters to First Ladies from inside the Central State Asylum, while Aunt Clancy Jane has completed her inevitable progression from hippie to local Crazy Cat Lady. Three generations of unforgettable Crystal Falls, Tennessee, women -- and the men they attract, enrage, and confound -- are courageously plowing through tumultuous lives of compound disaster . . . and hoping the chaos the next wrong step leads to won't be insurmountable.

Religious leaders require tremendous skill in emotional intelligence, yet their training very rarely addresses how to develop the practical skills needed-from self-awareness to resilience. Emotional Intelligence Religious Leaders draws on the latest research in business, psychology, and theology to offer religious leaders the information and tools they need to increase their emotional intelligence and enhance their relationships, communication and conflict management skills, spirituality, and overall well-being. The book offers both a deep understanding of how to develop emotional intelligence and also prescriptive insights about how to practice it that will be helpful for religious leaders in many settings, including congregational ministry, lay ministry, spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, and more.

Acclaim for Michael Lee West

American Pie

"Colorful, larger-than-life characters strut and stew with zest across an equally colorful terrain..."
--Kirkus Review

"American Pie is delicious, literary treat...Well worth reading for both the humor and poignancy it portrays."
--The Nashville Tennessean

"West is a major talent, and American Pie serves as proof...West's writing is a 'Discovery Channel' for and about people."
--Nashville Life

She Flew The Coop

"The author of the acclaimed Crazy Ladies has captured the color, eccentricities and tragicomedy that the best Southern writers do so well."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Funny, irreverent."
--New York Times Book Review

"West has created characters who are so teeming with life you would have to stand back to create some breathing room if you met them."
--Washington Post Book World

Crazy Ladies

"Not since Flannery O'Connor's first book has a debt by a young Southerner been so filled with wry humor and humanity, so precisely right in its idioms, and so distinctive in its voices."
--St. Petersburg Times

Religious leaders require tremendous skill in emotional intelligence, yet their training very rarely addresses how to develop the practical skills needed-from self-awareness to resilience. Emotional Intelligence Religious Leaders draws on the latest research in business, psychology, and theology to offer religious leaders the information and tools they need to increase their emotional intelligence and enhance their relationships, communication and conflict management skills, spirituality, and overall well-being. The book offers both a deep understanding of how to develop emotional intelligence and also prescriptive insights about how to practice it that will be helpful for religious leaders in many settings, including congregational ministry, lay ministry, spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, and more.