Small-town secrets are hard to keep…
When they return to her hometown, Maggie O’Leary’s secrets are right where she left them. There’s a car in the river with a body inside. An old high school flame wants her back. And her son Lane wishes he could make it all go away.
Lane joins the high school football team, only to discover the head Coach Matthew Shear, a decorated Afghanistan war veteran, could be his uncle. And the life they left unraveling back in San Francisco was his mother’s attempt to conceal his real father’s identity.
Maggie’s reappearance with Jude’s son has Matthew reevaluating his life. How can he establish himself as part of Lane’s family when Maggie won’t forgive him for what he did before the war?
Lane thinks he’s above all this small-town drama, but he’s about to be brought down to their level where people look each other in the eye, secrets explode into truth, and love is worth the fight.
A family torn apart by war. A love affair that reaches to the sky. And a secret with the power to redeem or destroy them…
Sutter County, California 1972
John Reno returns from Vietnam a disgraced army helicopter pilot wracked by guilt and grief. Homeless and alone he makes his way from one crop-dusting job to the next until he reaches the woman who can grant him redemption or ensure his damnation.
Swampy Callohan is a young widow barely holding on to her crop-dusting company. She flies her trusty old Stearmans from dawn until dusk, desperate to make it in a man’s world of faster, more efficient ag cat planes, but time, technology, and a family on the brink threaten to destroy her.
When John Reno—the best pilot she’s ever seen— arrives one fateful afternoon, she believes Callohan Dusters can be saved. And maybe her heart will be reborn as well. Reno becomes her saving grace until the day she discovers he harbors a secret that just might shatter her whole world.
Sometimes your past must be plowed before your future can be planted…
Her great-great-grandma came to California in a covered wagon more than a hundred years ago, and her family has farmed in the Sacramento Valley ever since, but a life of farming was the last thing she wanted… until the day fate brings her back to the farm.
Nineteen-year-old Paula Scott leaves California when the almonds are in bloom for college in Reno, Nevada where cocaine, casinos, and her first honest-to-goodness boyfriend will break her farmgirl heart, but her story doesn’t end in the desert with a broken heart.
When life knocks us down, we get back up, we try again, we marry and maybe divorce, but in the midst of our down and dirty, raw and real, painfully ordinary lives, sometimes the extraordinary breaks through, and we see God.
Because God sees us.
Raw and real and loaded with redemption, this story will tug at your heart long after you’ve turned the last page.
They say the truth will set you free… but what if the truth ruins your life?
Jenny McBride has lost her faith and her reason to live in a terrible accident in Colorado Springs, but meeting a girl in trouble in Tennessee just might turn things around.
Ellie Ryan is seventeen and determined to move to Nashville to pursue her dreams of making it as a songwriter, but an unexpected pregnancy shatters her plans and sets her on a course she never imagined.
Shawn Klein has it all. The beautiful girlfriend. The scholarship to play football at Vanderbilt after he graduates high school. At eighteen, he leads worship at his father’s prosperous megachurch. His life is perfect. So why isn’t he happy?
Everything changes when Shawn’s parents bring Ellie into their home to care for her until she gives birth. It’s the life with a real family that Ellie has always dreamed about, and the kind of future Shawn never knew he wanted, until Ellie’s past threatens to destroy everything.
When Jenny arrives in Tennessee to adopt Ellie’s baby, only one thing is certain. A baby will be born, along with a crime of passion, and a desperate struggle to bury the truth.
A young woman finds her loyalties tested beyond limit and her desires torn beyond measure in 1846 California…
After sailing around Cape Horn, and barely surviving the perilous journey, devout Protestant Rachel Tyler, arrives in California just in time for her father’s wedding and the unfolding of the Bear Flag Revolt. Though already engaged to marry a minister in Massachusetts, Rachel’s ambitious father arranges her betrothal to Roman Vasquez, a blue-blooded Catholic son of the gente de razón, the ruling class of California.
Roman, a proud, Spanish soldier is ready to fight and die for his homeland. As the Yankee rebels raise their bear flag in Sonoma square, the last thing Roman wants is an arranged marriage to the American daughter of his enemy Joshua Tyler. But his Uncle Pedro, the Patrón of the family, has other plans.
Neither Rachel nor Roman desire this unlikely engagement that assaults their religious beliefs, but they cannot escape the passion flaming between them as war looms on the horizon and bitter rivals rise up to destroy them amid the breathtaking backdrop of the last days of the Californios.
Until the Day Breaks is the first book in the sweeping saga of California Rising, a tale of love, intrigue, and destiny, where passionate men and women lay the foundation of the Golden State with their very lives.
Rated PG-13 for sexual situations and violence. While this book is a testament to faith in Christ, I have attempted to depict human nature truthfully.
A woman running from God. And the man she desperately loves. Because of the lies she believes.
Taken from her conquered Californio family during the 1846 Mexican-American War to be forced into marriage with a Yankee she despises, proud Spanish beauty, Maria Vasquez, draws a knife, and begins her journey to the far side of the sea. She will flee to Valparaiso, Boston, and finally San Francisco trying to forget the blood on her hands, only to find it is blood that will save her.
Dashing American ship captain, Dominic Mason, will win Maria’s heart, but shatter it when he rejects her for another, setting her on a journey back to San Francisco. There she discovers her heart can never be conquered, it must only be surrendered, not just to the man she loves, but to the God who will never let her go.
Captain Dominic Mason knows how to fulfill his duties. He’s living for God and country, determined to obey the Almighty and help bring California into the Union. Yet death and the devil’s deception will rob him of all he holds dear in San Francisco.
As California rises to statehood amid the madness of the gold rush, men will die for gold and for Maria. Will she ever escape the darkness that enslaves her in San Francisco and discover the everlasting light and love she so longs for?
Far Side of the Sea is the second book in the California Rising trilogy. PG-13 for violence and sexual situations.
A beautiful, half-Indian girl raised by the Californios finds her fate intertwined with an American frontiersman haunted by his past in 1850 California.
As California comes to statehood amidst the madness of the gold rush, Isabella Vasquez must wed a buckskin-clad American who wins her in a card game. Though their union is passionate, Isabella soon finds herself abandoned in a brothel, where she rises to fame as the singer known as the Bluebird. Yet because of her Indian blood, the Bluebird will always be bought and sold in the white man’s world. When more is demanded of the Bluebird than just singing, Isabella flees to Fort Ross in search of her Russian father and her own race of people.
Peter Brondi has battled Indians all his life. The last thing he wants is a half-Indian wife. While taming the West with Kit Carson and John C. Fremont, Peter has fought the Mexican War and lost his beloved fiancée, Maggie, to his half-Indian brother, Paul. To satisfy his father’s dying wish, Peter vows to find his brother and put an end to the hate that’s between them. But when history repeats itself and Paul steals Isabella away, Peter must come to terms with his past and the animosity he holds against all Indians, including his half-brother and the wife he has forsaken. Chasing the Wind is the final story in the sweeping saga of California Rising, a tale of love, betrayal, and the ties that bind brothers together and California to the nation.