The Verrett

A corner of Dauphine Street, New Orleans. Two storeys of brick with an apartment over the bandstand and a kitchen that floods twice a decade. Odile Verrett put four thousand dollars down on it in 1962 and never explained where the money came from, and the room has been in the family and on that corner ever since.

The Verrett is a series of standalone contemporary romances set in and around a working supper club — not a landmark, a business. Payroll on Thursday. The band paid in cash because Odile paid the band in cash. Dark on Mondays for the liquor order and the books. Wednesday is the guaranteed night, the one that has never gone dark in sixty-four years, not even the week she buried her husband. Family meal at four-thirty at the two-top and the four-top pushed together at the end of the bar.

These are warm, loud, competent books about a family that argues about the building in front of the regulars, and about the people who love each other inside a set of house rhythms nobody is allowed to break. Good food, real music, forty seats turned once on a Sunday, and forty years of people who have been coming since before anyone thought to ask them to.

Black romance · all-Black cast · New Orleans · family business · found family · open-door explicit · guaranteed HEA.

Each book is a complete standalone — read in any order. Start with Married on Purpose.