When Iola Anne Poole, an old-timer on Hatteras Island, passes away in her bed at ninety-one, the struggling young mother in her rental cottage, Tandi Jo Reese, finds eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes, one for each year, spanning from Iola's youth to her last days. Hidden in the boxes is the story of a lifetime, written on random bits of paper.

Monkey has a big box, which he tells Cake has a cat inside, but only when the box is closed; Cake suggest that maybe it is a dinosaur instead, and the two friends puzzle over how they can solve the problem of finding out what is in the box, if it is always empty when opened.

"In this second thrilling installment of the Gunnie Rose series, Lizbeth Rose is hired onto a new crew for a seemingly easy protection job, transporting a crate into Dixie, just about the last part of the former United States of America she wants to visit. But what seemed like a straight-forward job turns into a massacre as the crate is stolen. Up against a wall in Dixie, where social norms have stepped back into the last century, Lizbeth has to go...

Scribbles the cat and Ink the mouse are friends and fellow artists, but when Ink receives a box of cheese they squabble over who will get to make something from the box until Scribbles finds a solution.