Four MacGregor generations have passed since the Civil War. Two sisters, granddaughters of Ian MacGregor, form an unlikely relationship with photojournalist Derrick Nolen, and attempt to discover the truth behind a long-lost family history and a legendary treasure.
But beware the heart and mind of those who have lost it and threaten those who would seek to find it. Two family legends intersect at the site of an unrecorded historical accident with opposing force and dire outcomes. A hundred-fifty-year-old canoe may provide an alluring clue that reopens both legends and a clash of wills.
The funniest thing about life is that children can’t wait to grow up and become adults, sharing in all the permissions and wonders of age. Adults pine away at how wonderful it would be to be young again before responsibility set its mortar into their bones. Isn’t that why adults search so ardently for the fountain of youth?
This oddity in reasoning is where the dreams of the young and the old intersect and collaborate on the truest and most innocent of joys. This is where one blanket of dreams unfurls at the edge of another and shares its trinkets and jewels and wishes. This is the intersection where Clifford Wendell lives and where the people of Chance will meet him.
Clifford Wendell isn’t just a dreamer. He is a dreamer extraordinaire! He is an asteroid moving with such speed into the unknown universe of dreams that he draws us into his own gravitational force and takes us along for the ride until he crashes. But not before making the grandest impact on our lives.
The message is innocent enough: an e-mail from a wife who misses her husband serving in Afghanistan, with a family picture attached. The consequences, however, will be dire.
Intercepted by a Taliban infiltrator, Kat Moss’s e-mail allows terrorists to identify her, her son TJ, and her husband, army specialist Adam Moss. While Adam is ambushed and captured in the Hindu Kush, a jihadist cell in Virginia activates and abducts Kat and TJ.
The terrorists’ objective is both simple and sinister. Using Adam and TJ as leverage, the jihadists will use Kat as a Trojan horse to gain access to the President’s children. To save her family, Kat must agree to commit treason—and murder.
Pearls for an Infidel presents a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how vulnerable military families are to terrorist coercion and the ease with which the nation’s enemies can infiltrate the very society they’ve sworn to destroy.
My name is TOBIAS WHEAT. Chaff was my best friend; fourteen when we met; born in different corners of the universe. Our lives should not have been so connected, and now, ten years later, they no longer are, separated by Chaff’s secret life. So secret, in fact, I didn’t find out until now that he stole six million in diamonds from an African smuggling cartel when he was twelve. It’s no secret, they want them back.
Eddie Jewell has spent the last three years in a women’s federal prison for a crime she did not commit. The life she remembers passes in front of her ad nauseam. The walls talk back to her; the guards refuse her complaints, and her tears have dried up in barren deserts of emotion. She is holding onto a secret full of contradiction: guilt and innocence both occupy the latch keeping it safe. FBI Special Agent Randal Hicks keeps picking at the lock. Rogue boyfriend, Ethan Cross, is desperate to steal what’s inside. A criminal enterprise run by Sid Marks will kill for it. Eddie seizes at an opportunity to run away with her secret after receiving a one in a million chance brought to her by US Marshal James Belk of the WITSEC division. Escape seems impossible except for a ninety year old ex police woman, Lizzy Watts. Exposing her secret could get her killed. Keeping it will get others killed.
Can a dream take us on the bumpy road of adventure? Mary Winston would make us believe so, a lawyer awake and a detective asleep! Her adventures weave in and out of the fanciful, the delightful and the nightmarish. The world beneath the limpness of sleep can be an adventure, indeed, intensely challenging reality itself, lifting us body and soul from the pillow and rendering us helpless to the random escapades of the mind.
You dear reader are invited to partake of the enchantment of Mary Winston’s double life as she is kidnapped by Leprechauns, searches for a whispering cat and finds trouble with pirates. Sweet dreams …
