Wishful Sinful
Book One
It’s been two years since Tal Jefferson lost a murder case that cost a man his life. Hiding out in her hometown of Wynnton, Georgia, Tal is fighting the bottle and trying to restore her grandmother’s decrepit Victorian. But when her childhood friend is arrested for stabbing her lover to death, Tal is forced to practice law again. Defending Crystal Walker will make or break Tal - for Crystal was found at the crime scene with the weapon in her hands and has confessed to the crime. Tal, however, doesn’t believe her. In a small town secrets, bubbling just below the surface, can destroy the lives of those who think they’re safe. And Tal is about to uncover every single one she needs to prove Crystal is innocent.
Yes, The River Knows
Tal Jefferson has begun healing and, under the watchful eye of June Atkins, her secretary, staying away from the Bourbon, but her life is thrown into turmoil once again. She and a high school acquaintance discover June’s estranged husband, dead and floating in the Wynnton River. Implicated in the crime, June is trapped in a web of circumstantial evidence that seems impossible to untangle. Fighting for June’s life, Tal must confront both racism and men who will stop at nothing to make sure Tal doesn’t discover the truth.
Unknown Soldier
Book Three
Tal Jefferson is still practicing law, sort of, in the Victorian house she inherited from her grandmother, when the man who saved her life when she was a child sits across from her desk and says he’s going to kill a man. Spark Ellison is a retired soldier, a Vietnam vet, and the man he’s planning to kill served one tour in ‘Nam with Spark. Spark shows Tal a book, written by Burkhart Shue, which says Spark was a coward. The old soldier wants Tal to represent him when he has killed Shue.
Trying to head the man she admires more than most off at the pass, Tal becomes embroiled in the fight between old enemies and older allies who have nothing to lose. When Shue ends up beaten and filled with drugs and booze in the bed of Spark’s pickup, floating down the Wynnton River, Tal fears the worst. Henry, Tal’s childhood friend and county coroner, failing to certify a definite cause of Shue’s death, is protecting his Uncle Earl, another Vietnam vet, from Tal’s digging for the truth. A hooker at a local bar is hiding a major secret, one that involves Spark and his very ill wife, Valoula. The unwanted arrival of Spark’s son Braxton, a bottom-feeder of the first degree, in Wynnton raises more questions. But the biggest secret holder is Tal herself.
Travis Whitlock, famous portraitist and Tal’s erstwhile friend and lover, sends her the finished portrait of none other than herself, posed as Mary Magdalene. The sins she bears are nothing compared to those of her fellow Wynntonites, who have hidden the worst of them for years. And Tal should know. Her grandmother was a master at protecting secrets. For the first time, Tal sees some cracks in her beloved grandmother’s perfection.
Finding Shue’s real killer, despite her client’s insistence that she plead him guilty, is the only way Tal feels she can repay her debt to the old soldier who saved her and Henry. What she learns about Spark, herself, Henry, and Travis changes her life and self-respect forever.
Out of Nowhere
Maddie Allen is a 17 year old survivor of a mass shooting at her high school. Wounded severely, she has spent the past year in rehab and running from the darkness in her life. With the money she received as a settlement from the school board, and from the sale of her family farm after her parents’ deaths, she has been driving aimlessly around the country in the painfully restored Corvette she used to rehab her wounded hand. One stop at a gas station in a small town in Southwest Virginia, however, changes her life drastically. The killer who cannot let one girl live, has found her. Unfortunately for the people in the car pumping gas next to her, they get in his way.
Despite her best efforts to run, Maddie is trapped in the web of kindness of Owen Emery and his mother, Eban. Other townsfolk take her under their wings, as well. But the violence is never far away, and Maddie must finally face down the killer who murdered her friends. In doing so, she discovers strengths she never knew she had, and that she can not only stop running, but she can be loved as well.
Dark Room
Jane Lewis is a famous photographer, hiding from life in rural Virginia. She studies death through the lens of her camera in order to understand what happened to her as a child. In spite of herself, she is drawn out of her quiet life when offered a large sum to shoot a portrait of Grant Winston, famous retired racer now even more famous environmentalist. She finds herself attracted to the man, but reservations linger. Grant, too, is hiding secrets from his past, and neither Jane nor he are truthful with each other.
A corpse washes into Jane’s yard after a heavy rain. Her horses die in mysterious circumstances. The young boy who cared for them disappears, as does his foster mother. Are they also dead? Jane must face the reality of death without the safety of her camera protecting her. Not knowing who to trust, she searches for the child and his foster mom, alone, frightened, but also determined.
Darkroom is a fast-paced thriller about a damaged woman facing her fears to save the ones she loves.
The Girl and the Gunslinger
Ruella McQuaid needs a man to help her hunt the strange, savage beast killing her sheep. Only one man will consider her offer – Killer Cain, a wanted gunslinger who has taken shelter from an icy storm in the small town of Hadeston. Will she accept his terms? For Killer Cain wants a son, without the burden of a wife or domesticity.
The Seekers
Book One.
Elizabeth McFarland, traveling to Ft. Larned, Kansas to join her father and brother, is captured by the Kiowa. Her brother Noble and his half-Comanche best friend, Johnny Two Hats, search for her. Johnny returns to his tribe to seek information about Elizabeth, but ultimately must decide where his loyalties lie. Noble finds heartbreak and a new kind of love during their search. And Elizabeth, through sheer determination, finds a place among the Kiowa that brings her a position she could never hope to have as a white woman in the white world. Which world will each of them choose? The one they know, or the changes they have found?
The Survivors
Book Two
In the first book, The Seekers, Elizabeth McFarland survived capture by the Kiowa and became a healer known to her people as Mythmaker. Her journey continues with the Kiowa. Following the signing of the duplicitous Medicine Lodge Treaty, the tribes are forced to battle for their own survival. Elizabeth, now married to Johnny Two Hats, joins their struggle to save a dying way of life, even as she despairs over the future of their people.
Elizabeth’s journal of her life among the Kiowa makes it clear she has, indeed, become Mythmaker.
The Desperate Land
Book Three
Elizabeth McFarland, now known as Mythmaker, along with her half-Comanche husband, seeks her adopted Kiowa family, from whom they have become separated. The decimation of the buffalo is complete, the tribes are reduced to reservation land and empty government promises. Instead of finding a home with her people, Mythmaker and Johnny Two Hats find their tribes starving and dying.
As Mythmaker searches for a way to help her people, Johnny is drawn to a Kiowa prophet who promises the return of the buffalo. Disbelieving and at odds with her husband, Mythmaker must make a choice.
Ghost of the Plains
Book Four
As a Paiute messiah arises in Nevada, the tribes of the Central Plains are eager to hear and believe his message. Predicting the earth will swallow up all the white people, the Native American dead will rise from their graves and again roam their native lands, and that the buffalo will return, this messiah’s new religion is named the Ghost Dance.
Mythmaker, formerly Elizabeth McFarland, fears the U.S. Army will use force to crush this messianic uprising. Magpie, Mythmaker’s foster son, has returned to the reservation, hoping to find the Ghost Dancers.
Ghosts of the Plains is a story of hope lost and never found, of ghosts sought and never there, of finding solace in the difficult and dying times for the Kiowa, all leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee.
The Unsettling
Book Five
The West is in turmoil as whites who swarmed westward, have become claim jumpers and thieves. Blacks, seeking to build on their post-war freedom, have trekked west to settle and create their own towns. But even they, like the Native Americans, are attacked by whites. At the same time, the Native Americans are fighting a losing battle to make the government give them what was promised.
Mythmaker and Johnny Two Hats have settled down to raise horses. Hunter Peck has found a home in Eureka, a Black township, and hopes for a family of his own. The people Mythmaker loves the most are all swept up in Johnny Two Hat’s fight to keep his ranch and stop the catastrophe that will destroy Eureka.
A Healing Time
Book Six
Heading East, Mythmaker starts at Ft. Larned, where she finds her estranged brother, Noble McFarland. Never having understood her decision to stay with the Kiowa after he risked his life to find and rescue her, he is now married to Rebecca. Hunter Peck, the half-Black, half Native American who survived the massacre in Eureka and saved Mythmaker’s adopted son, is also on the move, searching for answers of his own. Found half-dead and severely frostbitten, he is taken to Ft. Larned by some Kansa Native Americans.
Rebecca nurses Peck, while urging Noble to heal his broken relationship with Mythmaker. Finally together at Ft. Larned, damaged in bodies and spirits, with wounds some thought would never heal, all the people Mythmaker loves come together to reforge their bonds and futures.
