Our Latest Novels
An Antebellum Mystery
In the winter of 1846, after attending a performance of Shakespeare in Detroit, young wife Claire Hinman is found stabbed and bludgeoned in a snowy field. The person behind her death has devised a scheme to implicate Claire’s husband, Carl. To avoid arrest, Carl flees to Ohio with his young daughter, Mariel. But the past soon catches up with him.
Claire’s father comes from the East Coast demanding answers, while a mysterious medicine show also begins to close in, for reasons of its own. When Mariel becomes ill, her only hope is a doctor in Detroit. Carl knows he must risk returning to the city he vowed never to set foot in again. There the characters converge, confrontations occur, old wounds are bound up, and a surprising killer is revealed. But will justice be served and the culprit held accountable?
Shun the Heaven
IN THE BLOOD
The trouble with K.C. Brown’s dream of playing alto sax for a local jazz band is that she’s a nineteen-year-old white girl, the band members are middle-aged black men, the year is 1948, and they all live in a racially divided town in Iowa.
To succeed, she and the band must overcome resistance from both sides of the color barrier, and accept that ambition often comes with loss.
In the Blood explores the cultural, sexual, generational, and economic issues in post-World War II America, framed in the context of a friendship and understanding that develops between K.C. and the band’s ailing trombonist, Freddie Ross.
A Killing Snow
When aspiring journalist Mariel Erickson leaves the civilized comforts of Chicago for Goss Valley, a small town on the Dakota prairie, she isn’t prepared for the turmoil she and her husband encounter. As if hostile homesteaders, harsh weather, impoverished Indians, and shady frontier politics aren’t bad enough, Mariel soon finds herself embroiled in Goss Valley’s first murder case.
The facts of the case appear straightforward. In full view of five witnesses, wagon driver Clyde Hartwig beat an Irish immigrant to death with a baseball bat. The victim was known as a decent and hardworking family man. But Mariel hears rumors of his involvement with homemade bombs and Fenian terrorism. Could that have been Hartwig’s motive? On assignment for the town’s fledgling newspaper, Mariel must get the killer’s side of the story before he’s silenced by the hangman’s rope.
Hartwig’s trial, set for early January, promises to be the biggest event to ever happen in the short history of Goss Valley, and the residents eagerly anticipate a fine spectacle. Little does anyone know that a much larger force is about to descend on the town, revealing how capricious life on the prairie can be.
Hammon Falls
When George Hammon’s teenaged wife dies in childbirth in 1914, he flees small-town Iowa for Europe and the horrors of the Great War. Surviving battles, homelessness, and disease, he squanders his days on women and wine, trying to forget his lost love.
But life is not idle in Iowa during his absence, and when a bitter and weary George comes home twenty-two years later, he finds a web of murder, suicide, and shocking revelations. The future of his family rests on one terrible choice…but is he prepared to make it?
Spanning the years 1893 through 2009, “Hammon Falls” weaves a tapestry of estrangement, loss, love, sacrifice, and redemption.
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