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Kate Mahoney, the sleuthing principal of rough and tumble Saguaro Elementary, is back again. One hectic morning, Kate answers her office phone. In a voice that is sickeningly familiar, a man tells her that he will kill one of her students if she does not do exactly as he tells her. She does not and in turn, two of her sixth-graders, prissy Gladys and her nemesis and would-be boyfriend, Louis, disappear. Kate’s dreams catapult her back twenty years in time when she was Sister Katherine in the Congregation of the Celtic Cross. No gentle dreams, they are dominated by Mother Phillipa Manning, who issues directives from the grave, or whereever deceased Mother Provincials reside after death, to help in Kate’s search for the missing children.

Set in Tucson, Arizona, Provincial Justice is a tale of greed, lust and, of course, murder. In another life, Kate Mahoney, was Sister Katherine in the Congregation of the Celtic Cross, under the stern direction of Mother Provincial. Now she is the principal of Saguaro Elementary, an inner-city school where the custodian wears rubber gloves on his early morning rounds to clear the playground of used needles and condoms. When Julie Mason, the district Superintendent, is found dead in the first-grade classroom of Elijah Stewart, the teacher becomes the prime suspect. Though Kate imagines there are plenty of people who would like to see Julie Mason dead, or at least out of the business of education, she is certain that Elijah is not one of them and sets out to prove it.

Jim Dockery was born of contradiction. His father, General Alfred Dockery, was Richmond County’s most prominent opponent of secession and most vocal advocate for black suffrage. Yet he was also the owner of the county’s grandest plantation with one of its largest concentrations of slaves. Though he opposed the war, General Dockery sent six sons to fight for the Confederacy. Jim, the youngest of Alfred’s soldier sons, follows a Civil War path that takes him through some of the war’s bloodiest conflicts, and into the North’s deadliest prisons. He daily risks his life for a cause of which he is uncertain, his real cause being to one day get back home.

Angela Moretti is a 19 year old American WAFS ferry pilot, bringing Lend-Lease P-39 Aircobra fighters to Alaska for Russian pilots to fly into battle. Angela lives with a terrible pain in her soul. Her kid bother has been executed by the Nazi SS. No one understands her thirst for revenge except Katya Leonova, a Red Air Force fighter pilot her own age, whose own family was murdered by the Nazis. Their shared tragedies will bring these two women together in friendship, with quirk of fate sending them together into battle over Russia. Concealing Angela’s true identity, the women will fight the Nazi invaders over Kursk, in the greatest land and air battle in history, and learn through an unexpected ally that forgiveness triumphs over hate and revenge.

The Seven Years War rages and the British frigate Renown returns to sea and the many lives she’s ferried turn upside down in this second book of the award-winning series. Abraham, an English shipwright, and his wife Yvette confront childlessness and poverty in mid-1700s London until help comes from his old friend, Captain Shirley. Unspeakable acts change Shirley’s life and transform Abraham, at a dear cost. Off the coast of France, Captain Mackenzie sails the frigate Renown into action, but the politics of Lord Fortrose force him into an unbearable assignment. The Siege of Havana tests his skills, but will it vindicate him? In this compelling story, historical and fictional characters’ morality and villainy collide with the final unexpected revelations rocking their destinies.

It’s the dark days of World War II. The Norwegian resistance had been fighting a quiet battle against their Nazi occupiers by sending vital information back to the allies. But when they start taking a more aggressive role the occupiers decide they must be eliminated. The liberty ship John Ireland, after surviving the dangerous North Atlantic and Arctic trip to Murmansk, is chosen to become part of the effort to rescue Norwegian civilians and carry them to safety in England before the Nazi’s can carry out the order to wipe them out. Based on a real, but little-known mission during World War II.

Patrick MacPherson is not the man she claims to be… Newport Rhode Island: 1765 The Seven Years War is over but unrest in the American colonies is just heating up. Maintaining her disguise as a young man, Patricia is finding success as Patrick MacPherson. Formerly a surgeon’s mate in His Majesty’s Navy, Patrick has lately been employed aboard the colonial merchant schooner Andromeda, smuggling foreign molasses into Rhode Island. Late October, amidst riots against the newly imposed Stamp Act, she leaves Newport bound for the West Indies on her first run as Andromeda’s master. In Havana, a chance meeting with a former enemy presents unexpected opportunities, while an encounter with a British frigate and an old lover threatens her liberty — and her life.

After fifteen years working on the mainland, Kurt Salter returns to his boyhood home on Croatan Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The bustling village of his youth, fueled by a menhaden reduction factory, has faded into an economic torpor after the closing of the plant. All Salter wants is to find some peace of mind and a place to pursue his photography. But the barrier islands have their own capricious history that is heedless of the aspirations of its residents. Kurt begins to find solace and even blunders into a relationship, but he and his new love, Regina, are swept along in island grudges and mischiefs not of their making. When Regina, a novice scuba diver, discovers the body of a murdered waterman floating in Pamlico Bay, she and Kurt become part of the flotsam and jetsam of simmering land feuds that hark back to the Civil War. The couple ally with the feisty quasi-mayor of Backtown, a shadowy black hamlet on the island, in which the murdered waterman lived. The murder leads the trio to the tortuous saga of the drownings of ten watermen from the factory ship, The Last Run, in the Graveyard of the Atlantic during hurricane Gladys in 1968. It will require the efforts of the whole village, including Backtown, to confront the tragedy of 1968 and bring the island back to life.

Ellen Schmidt finds herself out of step with the world around her. Considered a spinster in her community, her closest friends are the slaves that her family owns. After her father arranges her marriage, she must face a cruel set of circumstances and the beginning of the Civil War, setting her on a path that seems to be out of her control. Strong and independent, Ellen continues in her own unique way to forge a future that can include a paradise of her own.

Julian Blunt, a former sea captain and a despised Catholic, is stunned when Queen Elizabeth proposes that he help carry a betrothal locket to Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Moscow. It means an alliance between England and Russia is brewing, and the queen warns that should the locket fall into the hands of the Pope or his minions, it could mean war. Julian joins the queen’s messenger, the lofty and spirited Jessandra Calcross, in a perilous voyage across the Baltic Sea and into the very heart of Russia. When a papal assassin determined to prevent the royal marriage strikes, Jess turns to Julian as the only man she can trust. Although at odds over religion and station, a slender emotional bond grows. Stalked by the relentless murderer, Julian is soon torn between abandoning his mission so he can better safeguard Jess, and fulfilling his vow to the queen. If he fails the queen he’ll never captain a ship again. But if he and Jess continue on to Moscow, they face a darker peril in the mercurial and sinister Tsar Ivan—a peril that will drive courage and dawning love to the breaking point.