FORTHCOMING BOOKS
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THE SENTINEL HEART TRILOGY is a series of novels about Jessie Gibbs, a contemporary young musician, and Lemuel Sanders, a Civil War ghost.
Book I: STONES RIVER (Fall 2025), chronicles the love affair of Jessie and Lem and her resolve to help him complete an unfinished mission, even though it will mean losing him to the afterlife.
Book II, SOLDIER’S JOY (Spring 2026), tells the story of Jessie’s romance with Lem’s great-great-great nephew, Avery Gowan, a recent Iraq War veteran. They fall in love after Lem has passed into the next world. Or has he?
Book III, BRIGHT CANAAN (Fall 2026), is about the five women in whose lives Lemuel Sanders plays a pivotal role: his mother, Ruby, left forever in suspense about the fate of her beloved son; his sister, Polly, who becomes a military hospital nurse to search for her brother; his 19th century sweetheart, Louisa Rabb, whom the war has left with a broken heart and few marital hopes, with so many men dead or maimed; his 21st century lover, Jessie Gibbs, whose life was transformed by her quest to help Lem fulfill his goal; and his great-great niece, Sally Gowan, an amateur genealogist, who has long been troubled by not knowing what happened to her Civil War relative.
One of these women will help Lem find eternal peace at last.
UNHOLY SPIRIT (publication date TBD), a novel of supernatural suspense for the #MeToo era, is about two women fighting demonic possession: Bernadette O'Quinn, 20, haunting the mansion where her married lover hid her dead body in 1926; and, in 1968, Sister Gisela (Gigi) Krauss, 33, a nun in the convent school that now occupies the mansion. Gigi fears that her own rage against men, the result of a traumatic sexual assault in her teens, has roused the vengeful demon inhabiting Bernadette's spirit, causing the deaths of three male visitors to the school. When Father Trovato, an elderly Italian exorcist, is brought in to rid the convent of its diabolical presence, Gigi assists him in the ritual, which becomes a battle to save not only Bernadette’s soul but Gigi’s as well, as the demon tries to lure her into its power.
INVENTED LIVES (publication date TBD), a novel, is the story of an unbalanced friendship that careens into disaster. Reggie Stallworth, 27, has come home to western Massachusetts to recover after losing her mother, lover and job. She meets the dazzling Clarissa Dawson, 35, at an animal shelter, where Clarissa matches Reggie up with Rufus, a shy Lab mix who becomes her canine soulmate. Clarissa urges Reggie to get out of herself, which leads her to a new love with Aidan Lynch, an Irishman with a lilting voice and a way with dogs. But gradually the women’s relationship becomes strained by Clarissa’s jealousy of Aidan and by Reggie’s realization that Clarissa lies compulsively. The crisis comes when Reggie discovers Clarissa’s most shocking deception and confronts her with it. Clarissa strikes back: first she claims to have had sex with Aidan, mentioning something she could only know if she'd seen him naked. Then she disappears, taking Rufus with her.
ASK THE ANIMALS: How Shelter Dogs Helped Me Make Peace with Life's Biggest Questions (publication date TBD) is a memoir of my transformative experience volunteering in an overstressed, underfunded urban animal shelter. The title comes from the verse in the Book of Job that begins: "Ask the animals, and they will teach you." The memoir’s major theme is how the shelter dogs helped me find my purpose in life, and how they gave me a model for becoming a better human being: in the way they live in the present, without fretting about the future or regretting the past; in their readiness to love, regardless of achievements, worldly position, attractiveness; in their ever-new enthusiasm for the basic gifts of life; and in their ability, even after cruelty and abuse, to forgive and trust again.