Hawdon

This novel is about Nemo, a minor character who dies early in Dickens’s Bleak House and is buried in a pauper graveyard in London. It turns out that Nemo, originally Captain Hawdon, has important relationships with the main characters of the novel. Lady Dedlock, mother of Hawdon’s child Esther Summerson, flees from her husband and dies at the gates to this graveyard. Hawdon: A Prequel to Bleak House brings Nemo to life, consistent with the clues laid down by Dickens. Included in this, we follow Captain Hawdon in Afghanistan during the first Afghan war of 1839 to 1842 and then in Ireland during the great famine of the late 1840s. This is a novel about dedication in relationships, the scourge of disease, and anticolonialism in Victorian times.

Gustaf's File #6

Gustaf, a soldier/commander of the German Army is looking back at his role in the war. To him, WWI was a disaster in every way, so he begins to think of what can be done to prevent such a disaster from ever occurring again.

While pondering this, a very good friend happens to come along. This man joins Gustaf, and the two begin to talk about his thoughts and ideas. They soon realize that this discussion needs more time, and they agree to meet at the friend’s lodge at a later date.

They agree to keep their meeting quiet. Unfortunately, their words at the lodge were heard. 

These words were then passed on to those that do not agree with their proposal. 

Guardian Guerrillas

This is the fascinating story of Frank James, Jesse James older brother, as a bushwhacker in Quantrill’s Partisan Rangers during the Civil War. The actions of this brash, Shakespeare quoting young man represents the best and worst of guerrilla warfare in those turbulent and violent times.

After fighting as a Confederate soldier at Wilson’s Creek, captured and paroled, he returned home as a cocky nineteen-year-old barely staying out of jail. He joins Quantrill’s bushwhackers with escapades that are full of daring and bravery, sometimes cruelty, but also with humour.

We follow him through the many skirmishes and battles including the raids on Lawrence Kansas and Centralia Missouri and the critical events that precipitated them, the women’s prison collapse where several bushwhacker relatives were killed or injured and the infamous “General Order Number 11” that forcibly drove out all residents of an area over 2,200 square miles, twice the size of Rhode Island.

The characters in this work include soldiers, generals, politicians, crooks, thieves, farmers, bankers, lovers, wives, and sisters that suffered or caused suffering in this oft untold American history and their post bellum lives that were fraught with danger, excitement, success for some, failure for many, with ironic, karmic twists.

What drove these young men to become Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers? Were they blood thirsty cutthroats or Guardian Guerrillas?

Government Girls

It’s 1942, and best friends Mary and Marge leave their teaching jobs behind in Iowa to move to Washington D.C. to work for the FBI. Excited yet apprehensive, neither of them could anticipate the rapid changes the war will bring into their lives.

Arriving at Union Station, they meet Dotty, a quick-witted woman who left her all-girl band in New York City in search of new opportunities. Despite rampant racism, Dotty manages to find a clerical job with the government, thanks to her prized possession - a typewriter.

The three women band together, renting rooms in a run-down mansion that operates as a restaurant and boarding house. Under the same roof lives Natalie, an eccentric artist trying desperately to sell her screenplays and achieve her Hollywood dreams.

As Mary and Marge begin their demanding fingerprint filing jobs at the FBI, they find themselves growing increasingly vulnerable, but also courageous, in the face of a world ruptured by war. The four women couldn’t be more different, yet they forge an unbreakable bond confronting rapidly shifting social conventions and opportunities for women.

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.