Showing results by narrator "Laurie Klein" in All Categories

An inhuman branding by her drunken husband leaves a scarred and bitter Maggie O'Neill. She gradually mellows through the concern of a firm but gentle stranger from Virginia but remains an aggressive 19th century feminist in the young Idaho Territory.

After two hellish years on the rim of the Arctic, Philip Weyman stumbles back toward civilization, half-starved and half-crazy. He stumbles onto Josephine Adare, a beautiful woman living alone in the wilderness. She asks for his help, “I need you to pose as my husband to help me save my home from a band of outlaws and cutthroats.” She persuades him to stay and fight for her. But he has no idea he will be joining a battle with the silent strength of the Cree Nation as his ally. Nor does he realize, the final battle will require every ounce of his strength and will...

It's Christmastime in Skary, Indiana, but the holiday season has been hijacked by maverick director Lois Stepaphanopolis as she attempts to bring her horror-ific vision of A Christmas Carol to life. But the holly-decked path from page to stage is a thorny one, as Lois attempts to rally her skeptical cast, including new father Wolfe Boone, and then she learns that her reluctant marketing director, Alfred Tennison, is truly a Christmas Scrooge.

When a wealthy woman is found battered and abandoned, her womanizing embezzler of a husband mysteriously vanishes. His sister arrives from the East to avenge his reputation, and Carson City's spunky and beloved Judith Kingston, wife of Judge Hollis A. Kingston, finds herself caught up in a hurricane of intrigue and innuendo. Will she stay safe in the eye of the storm until justice is served?

Kansas is deeply split by the national conflict. Jonathan Ware and his wife are deeply troubled that their sons have enlisted on opposing sides of the conflict. The Wares and the other homestead families are subject to raids by renegades from both sides. When Jonathan Ware and Bishop Jardine are killed, the women are left without protection. Earlier Christy Ware and her father had discovered a hidden valley, opening out from an underground river.

Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.

A legend on the frontier, only Ross could guide the wagon train that was taking them across the vast, unmapped continent. Born white, but raised as a mighty Sioux warrior, his desire for the golden-haired Marlette had taken him from his Indian people and left his soul divided. Now together, Ross and Marlette faced the unknown terrors of this great trek west...and a stirring destiny that would test the love and courage of both...

All Abigail had to still her fears of the unknown were love, and trust in Ross Gallagher, the handsome, reckless Irishman who had snatched her from her New England family to make her his wife. But Abigail was soon to learn how frail even this man's strength and spirit were in the face of the dangers and terrors of the West. As a captive of a Sioux chieftain, Abigail was fated to experience a living hell.

Pinocchio is a naughty, disobedient wooden puppet that longs to grow up and become a real boy, but as long as he misbehaves and disappoints his father, old Gepetto, he is doomed and his dream will never be realized.

Martina Swan's business and marriage is falling apart. She grabs up her child and seeks to find her husband as armed outlaws chase her looking for their stolen treasure. She's determined to bring her man home as she faces one shock after another. Can she forgive and love again? A full and satisfying read from a woman's point of view in the old west.

The discovery of a long-dead body in an abandoned refrigerator sends Ogeechee, Georgia, police officer Trudy Roundtree into the small town's past, where she uncovers rivalries, jealousy, and murder. When the body is identified as a young woman who was last seen more than 30 years earlier, shortly after a wedding shower in her honor, Trudy digs into secrets thought long buried.

Twenty-year-old Halsey and 24-year-old Gertrude, nephew and niece of Rachel Inness, a well-to-do middle-aged spinster, talk Rachel into renting a large country house for the summer. Mysterious happenings occur the first night they are there, something or someone falls down the stairs in the middle of the night. A man is dead at the foot of the circular staircase. Now the question arises as to who he is and why was he in the house.

For 16-year-old Hattie Rood, Mr. Lincoln's War has brought nothing but death and hardship. She has lost one brother to a Yankee sharpshooter, another is away fighting with the Confederate army, and her aging father is barely able to keep the family tobacco farm going. One hot August night in 1864, Hattie's life takes another dramatic turn when rebel bushwhackers bring a wounded Jesse James to the Rood farmhouse, to recover or die.

Jonathan and Ellen Ware have immigrated to the area from their farm in Illinois with 13-year-old Christy Ware and her two older brothers. The Wares are only one of the families that will soon be caught up in the burning issue of slavery with raids from the Border Ruffians out of Missouri and John Brown's small army devoted to ending slavery and helping runaways to escape to the north.

In a land where justice was found in the barrel of a gun and the line between outlaw and citizen was thinly drawn, two women struggled, fought, and won. Rebecca, the elder, beautiful and defiant, found herself in the majestic mountains of Utah, forced to marry a brutal polygamist. All she wanted was to become a physician - and a free woman. Katie, younger, innocent, passionate, risked her life so her sister might have a chance for freedom. She risked all to establish a sprawling sheep ranch and prove that a woman could do it all - on her own.

Danielle Alexander's life has suddenly turned upside down. On a wagon train to California to join her fiance, her father falls terminally ill. Add to that a motherless newborn half-breed baby boy dropped literally into her arms by a wise, ancient Indian chief, who wants her to be the baby's mother "just until" her fiance comes to rescue her. Throw in, for good measure, a heady attraction to a handsome stranger named Joel Riley now making his fortune in the untamed west....

The first book in a new series by the author of the Heroines of the Golden West series. Alena is a confident entrepreneur in a man's world who meets a rancher with a tragic secret in his past. They're both about to find their inner peace, their calling, and romance in Old California.

“I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn’t give myself.” So said Edna Pontellier to her friend one summer as they sat beside the sea. It was the summer she learned to swim, fell in love, and awoke to the reality of her empty role in a loveless marriage. But she was a good wife. Edna dutifully returned home to the prison of her well-ordered life in New Orleans. Although close friends offered advice, the search for herself was a journey she must make alone. And in the end, Edna found herself returning to the sea where it all began.

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather''s career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

A cool New England background mingled with the passion of hot Cherokee blood to challenge the savage land - that was Deborah Leigh, a copper-haired beauty, gently reared. To all appearances she was white. But she could never forget, never betray her Indian ancestry. She was swept away from her family’s gracious home in Georgia onto the Cherokee Trail of Tears – the migration of a whole tribe driven from their lands to travel west beyond the Mississippi. The Cherokee blood in Deborah rebelled against the government that oppressed them.