Gone but Not Forsaken

Gone but Not Forsaken is the second of a historical fiction trilogy set in America and Europe from 1918-1945. It chronicles post World War I through the end of World War II. In America, it portrays initial abundance, including modern industrialism, where Gilded Age mansions were replaced by soaring skyscrapers through the roaring twenties into the stock market crash and Great Depression. It parallels the birth of Hollywood glitz amidst the storm of the country's depravation, carried through the bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II. In Europe, it chronicles the birth of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. American victory is heralded in the end once again. The novel continues to chronicle the stories of the Champions, the Wagners and the Sterns, along with the intertwining of their lives. It will be followed by book three of the trilogy, spanning 1945-2000.

Gone but Not Forgotten

Gone but Not Forgotten is the first of a historical fiction trilogy set in America and Europe from 1914 to 1918. It chronicles the tale of the Gilded Age of pageantry through the end of the Great War. It is the story of the Champions, the Wagners and the Sterns, an epical saga of their lives, trials, and tribulations. The story opens at an outdoor wedding in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island. The heroines are beautiful twin sisters, Veda and Rose Champion. Veda is the spoiled American debutante with an iron will. Rose is the gentler beauty and is passively strong.

Hans Wagner, the male protagonist, is a German immigrant who comes to America with the quest to live his dream. His best Jewish friend, Rudolph Stern, also arrives from Germany to study medicine. The toils of the Great War halt the hopes of both while ushering in a series of tragedies for the Champion family, including the sinking of the Lusitania, the death of the twins’ brother, Marius Champion, on the battlefields of France, and the vicious murder of their grandparents in Verdon.

The novel will be followed by two others, spanning 1918–2000. The trilogy is a portrait of the most significant events in the twentieth century.

Gone But Not Betrayed

Gone But Not Betrayed caps the epic ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’ trilogy, chronicling three intertwined families across the breathtaking upheavals of the 20th century’s second half.

Picking up in 1945’s ashes, this majestic saga ushers us into the postwar hope, tragedy, and turbulence that reinvented the modern world order. As the Champions, Wagners and Sterns journey from the Holocaust’s horrors to Israel’s birth, through Hollywood’s Golden Age, Vietnam turmoil and beyond, Hans Wagner quietly amasses an empire in America’s corridors of power. But shadowy forces conspire to imperil everything he holds dear.

At the story’s heart are identical twins Veda and Rose, whose paths diverge into legend after the war. While Veda’s dynasty embodies the glittering pinnacle of American success, Rose’s quiet courage leaves an indelible impact from Auschwitz to Israel’s Six Day War. Though oceans apart, each sister’s light has transformed innumerable lives. Despite the riches and fame fortune brings them, this indestructible bond remains unchanged.

Spanning the nostalgic charm of postwar suburbia to the encroaching millennium’s anxious technologies, Gone But Not Betrayed fuses intimate personal dramas with the pivotal events reshaping global civilization. As new generations inherit unresolved darkness and light, every hard-won revelation immerses us deeply into the unbroken chain linking past to future.

Furs and Fevers

Don’t mistake this for dry history! Lynn MacKaben Brown’s Furs and Fevers offers the reader a view into a long lost and mostly forgotten world—a world where Indigenous tribes interact with French-Canadian trappers and traders, while their way of life is unravelling under the pressure of American expansion into Indiana. The characters are historical, and their interactions follow the historical records available thanks to Brown’s exhaustive research.

The author has a gift for placing believable and compelling words in the mouths of those long dead and weaving it all into a story that keeps the reader entranced. Along the way, without noticing, that reader receives an education into the systems and politics of Indiana and the frontier in the early part of the 19th century.

There is plenty within these pages to challenge you, and controversial actions that leap out of their hoary context and force you to contend with your contemporary judgements and worldview. The past has dilemmas that can still cause debate today.

“Furs and Fevers is a compelling, enjoyable, and highly enlightening read that I envy you the initial discovery experience that is now, sadly in my rear-view mirror. Savor it!”

Brian Hogan, direct descendent of Dominique Rousseau.

“Lynn enthusiastically embraces the concept of history as a story. She combines bulldog determination to unearth truth with her interpretation of events. Then she re-creates the multicultural, time-honored role of tribal historian/storyteller. And who doesn’t love a good story?”

Sigmund Brouwer, author of The Last Temple.

From Infamy to Hope

Told in the compelling voice of Rachel Moore, a housemaid in 17th century Puritan Boston and featuring that colony’s two most powerful figures in Governor John Winthrop and his courageous opponent Anne Hutchinson, From Infamy to Hope is the story of the religious persecution of a servant girl made pregnant by rape. Convicted of fornication, she is sentenced to wear a black W for “whore” on her gown. Over the opposition of Hutchinson, the colony heads into war with the Pequot Indians. Rachel masquerades as a boy soldier, hoping to recover her baby who was sold to the Pequots by her alcoholic father to satisfy a debt.

She is at the war’s final battle when the colonial army burns down the Pequot’s fortified village in Mystic, Connecticut. Will she find her baby among the ashes?

Although Hutchinson was ultimately excommunicated and banished, a statue in her honor now stands before the State House in Boston, and a parkway bears her name in New York near where she died in another Indian war. Her descendants include F.D.R., the Bushes, as well as Mitt Romney. The present day Pequots now run Foxwood Casino near the site of the massacre in Connecticut.

Flatlands

Flatlands is believable and complex. This story ranks with the classic depictions of the marvel that was the Old West, that great, vanished moment in history; within its strong atmosphere of reality, fiction intertwines with known facts of the time. This novel is a study in the strength of interaction between individuals of the same family or group, and explores stress and loyalty in the face of hostile odds.

Flatlands rewards the reader with rich insight into character and situation. Its individual tune interrupts shock and sorrow with irresistible laughter. A gripping original.

Fiercely Loyal

Brother and sister, Sean and Colleen Callaghan share a relationship of love, loyalty, and perseverance. Their early childhood in a dysfunctional orphanage run by sisters focused on corporal punishment created a bond that carries them through a hard scrapple existence. Living through tough times in the Big Apple while concurrently 20^th century history plays out, Sean and Colleen are challenged at every step.

Sean grows from petty thief to booze-running during Prohibition, to waterfront dock boss. Colleen starts out running a speakeasy that transitions into an upscale restaurant catering to the well-heeled New York crowd, politicians, and Sean’s less-than-legit pals. The Callaghans’ saga spans pre-WWI to post WWII and is a true New York City story with colorful characters from waterfront toughs, bootleggers, slick gangsters, Nazi spies, and seductive women. When Sean is accused of murder and found guilty, the bond shared by the siblings is brought to its greatest test. The Callaghans are so fiercely loyal to each other their story will break your heart and keep you turning pages.

El Duelo (The Duel)

There comes a time when you must put things in writing before they are forgotten and lost forever. That even applies today in spite of the highly advanced society we live in. In this rural community on the river banks of the Rio Grande in the early 1900s when illiteracy predominated, the history and identity of its residents were preserved by story-telling. These “cuentos” often left much to the imagination but still were very entertaining, vivid and memorable (not to be confused with tall-tales).

One of the very first stories that I remember hearing was that of a bigger-than-life character who happened to be my grandfather, Don Juan. We were all fascinated by how this man was able to win the admiration and respect of his neighbours at least enough to have stories told about him. Although they were all survivors, they were also all interdependent, and looked for an orientation that could make them believe in themselves.

In spite of the many and varied challenges they confronted, many like Don Juan provided a perspective of right and wrong, of commitment to family, of surviving untold suffering, but also of purpose to continue. This story provides a sampling of how this rural community in “El Capote” ranch sought its own destiny from the bare essentials that the river lands could provide. Don Juan may not have been a legend, but he was a pilar of strength, faith and loyalty to a way of life many had no choice but to embrace.

Disasters at Sea

In October 1851, the bustling harbors of Gloucester, Massachusetts marked the onset of a promising venture as the American fishing fleet set sail towards the bountiful mackerel run in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. However, as they neared the waters off Prince Edward Island, Canada, an unanticipated hurricane engulfed them in a tempest of terror and despair, obliterating over 200 schooners and vessels. The calamity claimed the lives of over 100 seamen, a tragic toll that resonated across the waves.

Disasters at Sea unveils the poignant yet inspiring chronicle of the Prince Edward Island residents, who, propelled by compassion, rallied to extend a lifeline to the beleaguered seamen. Their unwavering aid echoed the noble deeds of the Newfoundland residents during the 9/11 crisis. With hearts brimming with empathy, they embarked on a mission of rescue, recovery, and honor for the fallen, manifesting an enduring maritime bond.

This narrative reflects on the ethos of neighborly duty prevalent in the 19th-century Maritime Canada, highlighting a stark contrast against the seemingly indifferent response of the vessel owners in the aftermath, who appeared to evade accountability for the lost souls and shattered vessels. Disasters at Sea navigates through the haunting whys of fate’s discernment amidst the storm, unearthing the profound human spirit that surges even amidst the darkest squalls, painting a timeless tableau of maritime valor and human resilience.

Deseret: A Defense and a Refuge

In this tale, people scattered throughout the world are woven together in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains. Forty years after Napoleon’s defeat, the development of modern warfare on the Crimean Peninsula sends reverberations across the globe, alerting all of the growth in technology, the precursor of the US Civil War in weapons and tactics, as well as the needs of multitudes of dispossessed and underrepresented. The shrinking planet is growing crowded. The bumping into one another becomes increasingly violent. Women and men stand to be counted, molded of numerous talents and abilities, striving for relief and equality, demanding rights and opportunity. Slavery, reservations, women’s suffrage, polygamy, and Manifest Destiny are swirled into the murky vat of the United States. Protesting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known derisively as Mormons, are challenged over religious freedom. Despite the continued criticism heaped upon them for their unique doctrines, missionary work and its effects spread throughout the nation and the earth.

The 1850s see the homeland of Deseret plowing against Bloody Kansas, Buchannan’s Blunder, Mountain Meadows, the Sevastopol Policy, the Pony Express, and the Transcontinental Telegraph. These ventures combine with similar troubles and shove the nation into the red-hot furnace of civil war.

Daisy

Have you ever wondered what happened to Daisy Buchanan after the Great Gatsby was murdered in his swimming pool on Long Island in the summer of 1922? She and Tom Buchanan fled to Europe where they met almost everybody worth knowing in the roaring twenties: the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, Pablo Picasso, who painted her portrait, Gerald and Sara Murphy, as well as the Prince of Wales.

After years of interviews and with the help of Daisy’s diaries, her daughter, Pamela, has reconstructed Daisy’s life in Paris, in England, and in Spain where Daisy left the privileged life she had known to become involved on the loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War.

Crackers

During the late 1800s, England was a land of boundless potential, and there were those who eagerly sought to exploit it. The days of the aristocracy had faded, and self-made men of wealth breathed new life, energy, and money into the English countryside. Exploration and innovation were the tools that would usher in the next century.

Montgomery, a true English gentleman, was one such man who sought to bring his young family into an era of prosperity. Though Monty chose wisely in business, he chose poorly in those surrounding him. With a new bride, a young son, travel, and an expanding business, Monty enjoyed a happy life – until he could no longer remember it.

One rainy morning, Monty was found abandoned at an unknown manor, badly beaten and unconscious, left in the mud. As he awoke, he could feel the rain on his face and taste the blood in his mouth, but he could no longer recall who he was. Within the house, there were those who would help him and those who would seek to do him harm.

This journey takes Monty into a world where nothing is as it appears. Hypnotism, treachery, romance, and betrayal all lie in his path of discovery. With his memory gone, Monty has lost everything he once had in the world, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to get it back.