Girl visits somewhere in the south, and meets a family that doesn’t age

Question

I read a group of books in 2009. They were all dark, scifi thrillers by the same author - can't remember the name but I'm almost sure it was a woman. It only took me a few hours to read each so they were pretty short.

I read about 5 of them but I can only really remember one. A girl visits somewhere in the south (pretty sure its Louisiana) and there is this family that doesn't age (not vampires) that lives on a swamp. One of the sons is supposed to kill her but they end up falling in love and he helps her escape.

I'm pretty sure one of the other books is about time travel. The only thing I really remember about that one is a picture of an hourglass on the cover.

I know this is a long shot but I really want to find these books.

Answer 1

I just looked around and I am 99% sure I'm talking about Locked in Time by Lois Duncan. I was wrong about them falling in love; that must have been another book I was thinking of. But almost everything about the description I read seems to fit to a T.

Seventeen-year-old Nore Robbins is less than thrilled when her father, Chuck, remarries. After all, her mother hasn't even been gone for a year yet, and there's something odd and sinister about his new wife, Lisette. Besides the fact that Lisette Berge is much too young to have teenage children, Nore's stepsister, Josie, has a habit of making strange comments about her family being "stuck where they are" and time "not counting for anything."Josie also has a precocious manner, flirts with boys, and wears too much makeup. She hesitates to pry into the matter. When Nore discovers Lisette's old diaries in the shed—some dating back to the 19th century—she realizes that she and her father are in terrible danger. The question is, can they leave Shadow Grove without meeting the very fate the Berges have worked so hard to bring on them?

Answer 2

I would say this is the The Hourglass Door from the Hourglass Door Trilogy by Lisa Mangum.

Description from Amazon

Abby[']s senior year of high school is textbook perfect: She has a handsome and attentive boyfriend, good friends, good grades, and plans to attend college next year. But when she meets Dante Alexander, a foreign-exchange student from Italy, her life suddenly takes a different turn. He[']s mysterious, and interesting, and unlike anyone she[']s ever met before. Abby can[']t deny the growing attraction she feels for him. Nor can she deny the unusual things that seem to happen when Dante is around. Time behaves differently when they are together traveling too fast or too slow or sometimes seeming to stop altogether. When the band Zero Hour performs at the local hangout, Abby realizes that there[']s something dangerous about the lead singer, Zo, and his band mates, Tony and V. Oddly, the three of them are also from Italy and have a strange relationship to Dante. They also hold a bizarre influence over their audience when performing. And Abby[']s best friend, Valerie, is caught in their snare. Dante tells Abby the truth of his past: he once worked for Leonardo Da Vinci, helping to design and build a time machine. When Dante was falsely implicated as a traitor to his country, he was sent through the machine more than five hundred years into the future as punishment. As the past and the present collide, Abby learns that she holds a special power over the flow of time itself. She and Dante must stop Zo from opening the time machine[']s door and endangering everyone[']s future. More than one life is at stake and Abby[']s choice could change everything.

It seems to include all the elements you talked about, a group that is timeless (doesn't age), time manipulation, and one of them falling for a girl, and a female author.