Roxie, who has always approached life as a circus, is drawn unwillingly into a passionate romance with a gorgeous Italian professor, Stefano. Her physical response to Stefano taps into lost memories, causing her to literally run from him. Roxie, a quirky and colorful Cubana, senses danger in visions and smells that resurface of a rotting summerhouse behind her Florida home. With his nurturing and passionate love, Stefano helps her to face the “broken piece” inside her.
Sara unveils part of her that no one but her instructors know. She is an extraordinarily talented concert violinist. Normally trapped in the demanding life of an ob-gyn (scripted for her by her Vietnamese immigrant parents), she is temporarily freed. She performs for others for the first time, and experiences unprecedented joy. However, the coping mechanism she used to handle the pressure of her job threatens to destroy her new life.
Georgia, a grieving widow, processes her life without Ben and without her violin career that ended early because of arthritis. Looking for a new passion in life, she finds that satisfaction comes to her in “giving back” to those around her the lessons and knowledge she has learned through her successes and mistakes in La Dolce Vita. Just as her perspective is changing, she reunites with her first love, Arturo, and must make a decision about the direction of her future life.
Though ages have passed since the rebirth called the Renaissance, Florence still inspires change by breathing out its creative mix of energy, beauty, and courage. Where Michelangelo “set free” the David by sculpting a block of marble, each “crazy lady” finds her exterior “Oakwood” self burnished away by new experiences, revealing a new self. This burnishing is not a gentle process, but exuberant Italians help them through it with their all-embracing agape, or unconditional love. Though they do not know it, each of them hungers for agape’s healing power. They discover in it a balm that binds them together and puts them on the road to recovery, the road that is “The Only Way to Paradise.”
Pieces of Paris
Annalisse and Dennis seem to be living the American dream until Annalisse's secret past and the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome threaten to destroy her family.
This skillfully crafted novel explores the long-term effects of personal tragedy in haunting flashbacks of Annalisse's former life — flashbacks that are interwoven with a passionate romance and reveal a person entirely different from the woman Dennis thought he married.
But as each revelation increases the emotional gulf between them, Dennis's investigation of a toxic waster incident ignites the wrath of a former political ally and an industrial firm that will go to any lengths to cover up a shocking crime.
Can Annalisse reconcile her past and present before it's too late? And can Dennis find a way to save his family and the town they've called home?
GENEALOGICAL MYSTERIES
Cankered Roots - New Edition
Couple a a spunky young widow with an even spunkier, rifle-toting grandmother and you have RootSearch, Inc., a genealogy business that frequently turns up murder! Alexandra Campbell (spunky widow) thinks that as they do genealogy for a living, it is high time she finds out her family secret. Something went wrong in her family during her adolescence, changing her mother from a Chicago North Shore matron into an alcoholic and a doting father into a workaholic. The moment she graduated from High School, she was sent to the Sorbonne in Paris with a generous bank account and instructions not to return.
It is now fifteen years since she has seen her parents, and she intends to lay the ghost that has separated her family for good. However, as usual in Alex's unpredictable life, things do not go as planned. After an acrimonious fight with her once beloved father, she leaves with only a wallet-sized photograph of a woman she knows nothing about.
That night, Alex's father is killed. Bewildered and grieved that her family can never be whole again, she soon finds out that she is the chief suspect in the murder. With the unflappable Briggie (rifle toting grandmother, Johannah Brigamina Poulson) at her side, she uses all her new genealogical skills, and (with the help of Briggie's deer rifle) discovers a secret so bizarre that she finally understands why her parents wanted her far away and safe.
Join Alex and Briggie in the first of their hair-raising adventures!
Of Deadly Descent - New Edition
Where do You Start Looking for a Missing Ancestor
Without a Name
With Descendants You Share an Inheritance?
At their last known address—The Argonne Forest, France, 1919.
In their previous adventure, Alexandra Campbell and her business partner, Brighamina Poulson, discovered a branch of Alex’s family that was previously unknown. Because of wicked deeds in days gone by, a soldier in World War I who should have been part of Alex’s family was lost. In fact, he was so lost, he didn’t even know his own name!
Through a series of coincidences (and we all know there are no coincidences in genealogy!) they track their man from France to Oxford, and even give him a name. However, upon their arrival in Oxford, before they even contact the man’s descendants, a member of the family is pushed under a bus right before their eyes! It soon becomes evident that the death was connected to the coming legacy. Who knew they were coming to Oxford with news of a fortune? What role does the mysterious Frenchman Etienne play in the dastardly doings? And what about Charles Lamb, a very eligible bachelor, also an heir to the estate?
Briggie is lost without her deer rifle and can’t keep up on the box scores of her Kansas City Royals baseball team. She doesn’t think much of Oxford, either, and is worried about the effect of this center of secular wisdom on Alex. She is even more worried about Charles Lamb.
Tangled Roots - New Edition
Who's Telling the Truth?
Holly Weston, a teenager locked down in drug rehab, claims she's never used drugs, but that her incarceration is all a plot by her parents. Why? To establish her mental incompetency so she won't discover that they've embezzled the fortune she is about to inherit. Her grandmother, a slightly dotty widow, claims that her father was murdered when she was nineteen, after which she dyed her hair platinum, went to Hollywood, and met Clark Gable (and her husband). Holly's mother, a rigid, disapproving figure, tells Alex and Briggie both her her mother and daughter are lying, forbidding them to dig any further among the family's roots.
What in the world are Alex and Briggie up to now? Holly's counselor has hired them to do a genogram or psychological pedigree, to find where the family secrets are hiding. She is convinced Holly's mother is frightened for Holly. Why does Mrs. Weston refuse to acknowledge her father's murder? What is she so afraid of the RootSearch, Inc. team discovering about her family?
What does the family history have to do with: another murder, Holly's disappearance, and the strange trio of middle-aged men who are following Briggie and Alex and her mother?
Alex accepted this case in order to be back with her mother for a while, now that she has emerged from her rehabilitation. A fifteen year estrangement has rendered them strangers, and she feels it her duty to try to mend the rift. Her mother proves to be "pluck to the backbone" as Alex's British suitor, Charles, says. The four of them soon become mired in Holly's unexpectedly tangled roots, with surprising off-shoots surfacing all over the country. Encountering both danger and new friends, they also take responsibility for a slew of eccentric pets. Amidst the action, Alex's love life takes a turn that both baffles and scares her.
Join our genealogical sleuths as they strive, as always, to find out the real truth that is at the "root" of this family's dysfunction and fear, enabling it to take the first steps to healing.
Poisoned Pedigree - New Edition
What would you do if you were told you had “Bad Blood”?
Hire a genealogist, of course! Kerry McNee, a famous balladeer of Scots-Irish folk music wishes to marry and have a family, but has a superstitious fear of the words an old lady in her Ozarks hometown once whispered: “You should never have children, Kerry. You will pass the ba
d blood to your children.”
Kerry hires Alexandra Campbell and Brighamina Poulson (RootSearch, Inc.) to look into this mystery for her in the wilds of Southwest Missouri. She never dreams she is putting them into mortal danger from individuals who will kill rather than reveal the many secrets that have been held for generations.
No sooner do Alex and Briggie begin their investigation, than violence begins with the murder of the “Keeper,” a woman who knows the past of every resident of the town of Trotter’s Bridge. The genealogists call in reinforcements—Alex’s fiance, Charles, Briggie’s elderly swain, Richard—while Kerry and her psychologist, Daniel, (a former flame of Alex’s who is determined not to let her go) decide to join the hunt for the killer as well.
The danger only escalates, along with major trouble in Alex’s relationships with Charles and Daniel. She is unable to untangle her personal life, as murder has never stalked these genealogists so closely, nor been so nearly successful as it is in the woods and caves of this town that time forgot.
The Hidden Branch - New Edition
Heirs, Heirs, Heirs – Which one of these Armenians is the killer?
Could it be Vazden Mardian, II—the World Class surfing champion, with the piratical eye and the tattoo of an ancient Armenian coin on his arm? The coins belonging to the murder victim were the motive for his murder.
Or was it Henry Arkesian—the fanatical professor with an indefatigable lust for anything pertaining to his heritage? He was angry that the victim was leaving his ancient Armenian artifacts to a museum.
Or, perhaps, Gorgeous George, Henry’s brother—an Orange County Estate lawyer with a penchant for Ferraris and expensive real estate who is forever in debt?
Alex endeavors to keep her mind on the case so that the murderer will not benefit from his crime against Paul Mardian, the billionaire inventor of the pop-top can. Feelings run high amid this passionate, attractive family who live the style of the Orange County, California wealthy. However, while trying to find the perpetrator, she almost loses her life (again), and faces a crossroads in her personal life with a due amount of angst.
Rescuing Rosalind (Three Original Ladies and Their Gentlemen) Page 17