"A lifelong vow. A Catholic priest with questions. A penitent woman with a secret past. A jealous friend. The fourth in this lover's knot? God.
Robert Souza, a blue-collar Portuguese boy raised by a poor widowed mother, gave up on marriage when he sat at his kitchen table and signed the application papers for the seminary. For a brief time, before his ordination, he strayed and considered marrying Shannon. But he strongly desired the union with God.
Now, six years later, a priest at St. Justin Martyr, Rob once again faces the forbidden desire of his own heart when Jessica, a victim of a brutal assault, comes for counseling. Along with Rob's best friend, Lawrence—a priest with an artistic temperament and trials of his own—Rob and Jessica are forced to make choices they don't intend against the backdrop of a Greek chorus of gossiping priests and church politics riddled with suspicion and engaged in the battle for souls."
"'I am no witch, nor adulteress, thief, nor murderer. They say I have lost my reason, but I know only that my heart is shattered, and in crying it aloud, now I must pay the cost . . . '
After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that be. Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn't until a new Boston doctor, the dashing Daniel Greenleaf, comes to her backward Cape Cod village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John's Wort, long walks—and reading.
Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just twenty years before. Now, after demanding her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself.
A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on the author's own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother."
"Veronika Layne is a sassy, tattooed forty-something (okay, forty-nine) newspaper reporter who never saw herself working for a big corporation. When her small town weekly paper is swallowed up by Singh Media Group, that's exactly what happens. Further complicating her job, a sexy new reporter has been hired from the competing paper, and while he's terribly attractive, he remains the competition. But the fantasies won't stop and her best friend and fellow reporter Aiden is even starting to notice. Stuck writing fluff pieces that might as well be ads, Veronika can't resist digging into rumors that a local real estate developer is destroying Native American burial grounds. Warned away at every turn by her editor, who is not a supporter of investigative journalism nor a fan of social justice pieces, Veronika worries that her story will never see the light of day. And who knows what trouble these fantasies of a midlife romance with her competitor will cause her—especially with Aiden? This is the first in the three-book Hot off the Press series."
"Based on her research into her grandfather's past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.
In 1859, women have few rights, even to their own children. When her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha—bereaved and scared—flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naïve woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York's street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there. When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them."
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