I love the paradox of historical fiction – letting my imagination loose while enlightening the reader about real events.
Telling a Thumper
A blind teenager helps a misplaced ghost unravel his dark past only to discover the chilling truth about his own missing father.
It’s 1970, and Colin, blind since birth, is leaving for college — still devastated by the strange disappearance of his father four years before. He also harbors two present-day burdens: a simmering resentment about his mother’s new marriage, and the mysterious arrival of Pete, a peculiar ghost who has revealed himself only to Colin.
Meticulous and old fashioned, Pete appeared shortly after Colin and his mother moved into his new stepfather’s house. The ghost — clearly from another era — understands nothing about his past nor his curious connection to Colin. With help from his opinionated cousin Katie, Colin slowly unlocks the spirit’s darkest secrets, unmasks the hypocrisy of those he loves, and finally discovers the chilling truth about his own missing father.
Entwined in a knot of clever lies with a paranormal punch to the gut, Telling a Thumper keeps raising the stakes while blurring the moral line between vengeance and justice.
When Courage Comes
A world at war. Two siblings separated by 6,000 miles. The enemy soldier who changes their lives forever.
It’s 1943 in Huntsville, Texas. Stephan, a German army conscript, is imprisoned in one of the first POW camps hastily built in America. The hostile community fiercely opposes enemy prisoners on American soil, but Stephan’s greatest threat lurks inside the camp – where Nazis demand his loyalty to a cause he despises. Does he ignore his conscience or risk death?
Stephan arrives in Huntsville after his surrender in North Africa where he saves the life of his American interrogator Captain Ralph Bauer. They part ways, with a shaken Ralph discovering a family heirloom that belongs to Stephan. His obsession with finding the prisoner and returning the keepsake puts both men on a collision course for Huntsville, where Ralph’s sister lives.
Passion for a prisoner is the last thing on Rose Bauer’s mind when Stephan is assigned to a work detail on her family’s cotton farm. They soon risk the unthinkable – in the dark about each other’s connection to Ralph. Rose also carries a shadowy secret that ups the ante in this tense and deeply moving story about a part of World War II few have discovered. When Courage Comes explodes against this rare backdrop, blurs the line between sworn enemies, and delivers hope in the midst of hypocrisy.