In The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, the scene is set in rural Iowa. Robert has been assigned to photograph the beautiful old wooden bridges, a vanishing piece of architecture. A chance need of directions, and Francesca being home alone, with her...

The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte by Ruth Hull Chatlien tells the true story of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, better known as Betsy. She was the daughter of a Baltimore merchant, William Patterson, and was the first wife of Jérôme Bonaparte and sister-in-law of Emperor Napoleon I of...

The Roof Walkers by Keith Henderson takes us to Christmas, 1864, where we meet Irish Canadian Eoin O'Donoghue who has been hired as the personal secretary to the possible head of the Irish Republican Army in New York. When he offers his services to the...

I was quite impressed with Steven Weaver’s The Vault: A Journey of Discovery as I found it an unexpectedly well-written story with distinctive characters, realistic dialogue and a fairly solid plot. While the book is targeted to a younger audience and contains a lot of...

The Bridge Club by H.M. Edwards is a fascinating look into generations of America, and a crime that can haunt families through decades. The Bridge Club meets on Saturdays. They share their lives over the cards, but one of the things they share is a...

The Way Back: A Soldier’s Journey by S.K. Carnes tells the story of John Chapman, a World War I veteran with PTSD and a poet’s soul. He finds work as a farmhand with a dairy farming family who, in their own stalwart, beholden-to-no-one way, help...

I thought this would be a fascinating read and it was. I thought that it must be extremely difficult to tell a story about prehistoric people of whom we have very little knowledge upon which to base dialogue, habits, beliefs, etc. We have theories based...

The Little Bastards is a coming of age novel written by Jim Lindsay. It's set in Willamette, a small town in Oregon, during the 1950s. The reader first encounters the narrator, Sonny Mitchell, when he's just turned fourteen and it's late summer. He and his...

Birds of a feather… or perhaps cougars of a feather come together in Terms of Temptation, a continuation of the lives of the Cantrell family by Lorrie Farrelly. Kinley Cantrell has a heart for taking on wild animals which are injured or sick, but she...

The Last of the Titans by Darryl D. Bowman is one of the most unusual books in the espionage or action genres I have ever read. I picked it up, thinking it might be a story from Greek mythology. Then I thought it referred to...