Medicine Stick Books in Order

Medicine Stick begins with one of Barbara Bartholomew's strongest recurring ideas, that a place can disappear from the map and still keep hold of the people who belonged to it. In these books, the old Oklahoma town of Medicine Stick has gone under water to make a lake, but its stories, loves, and wrongs are nowhere near finished.

The first novel, Wrong Face in the Mirror, introduces Hart Benson, a young woman who does not trust the life she appears to be living because her clearest memories belong to someone else. She remembers Stacia Larkin, a woman who vanished before Medicine Stick was flooded. That setup gives the series its signature tension. Is Hart losing her grip on reality, or is she carrying a truth the world around her would rather call impossible?

From there the books stay close to questions of identity, memory, and belief. Hart's relationship with Alistair should be a safe harbor, but Wakening the Past shows how hard it is to build a future when one person's past keeps arriving in impossible ways. Dreams, missing people, prison histories, and old fears all work against the idea that love alone can tidy things up.

Bobbi and the Bootlegger adds another angle by focusing on Bobbi Lawrence, whose recovered memories pull her toward a man she loved in another life. That gives the series more of its particular blend, part reincarnation story, part time-slip romance, part mystery rooted in a vanished town. The bootlegger era and older Medicine Stick history give the later books a slightly rougher edge than the first novel's more intimate identity puzzle.

The setting does a lot of the work. A flooded town is already a ghost story, even before Bartholomew adds literal memory carryover and impossible recognition. Water, absence, and half-buried history shape the atmosphere. People are living in the present, but the ground beneath them, and in this case the water above the old ground, keeps saying otherwise.

If you like stories where romance has to survive confusion, disbelief, and the long reach of the past, Medicine Stick is one of Bartholomew's most distinctive series.