Showing results by narrator "Laurie Klein" in All Categories

She had the face of an angel, the will of a spitfire, and a mind of her own. Behind her was the slavelike existence in a Welsh mining town. Ahead, the promise of freedom in America, but to her horror, Eden Richards was soon to discover that slavery wears many disguises. The strict Mormon laws that could bend her to her will. The terrifying rites of the Sioux who had captured Eden and made her one of them. The lustful advances of the arrogant mine owner who would make her his prisoner.

Hattie Clark is an aging advocate of peace in an Idaho town torn by World War I. Crippled by a stroke, she hires Kirsta Strom, a German refugee, to help in her bookstore. But Kirsta has her own problems. A shyster lawyer and powerful man, Carl Foreman has some hold over her, and has her watched constantly. And she must deal with new neighbors, who hate her for her German birth and treat her cruelly.

In the rugged Southwest of the 1880s, fate made her part of three warring cultures...At the military outpost of Camp Bowie, beautiful Brittany Laird was abused by the family who'd given her sanctuary and pursued by Zach Tyrell, rugged rancher whose kisses both inflamed and frightened her. At an Indian encampment in the Chirichua Mountains, Brittany was held prisoner by the notorious Apaches, her life spared only through the pleas of a child.

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...

Madsaw, war chief of the Tillamook tribe, kidnaps Twana, the step-daughter of the Nisqually shaman. Though their people are enemies, and to love a slave violates tribal law, Madsaw and Twana become lovers. Twana is endowed with an unusual power which allows her to mentally commune with animals and "see" them even though they are out of sight.

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....

In 1944, while much of the world is at war, 14-year-old Teddy wages her own war against herself, her brother, and her perfect, and perfectly despised, mother. Forced to spend the summer at the beach with a grandmother she'd never met, Teddy faces her enemies with arrogance and anger. But as the summer unfolds, she begins learning the answers to some painful questions about the past that destroyed her family and left her mother and grandmother bitterly divided.

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.

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.

In an age when robber barons and get-rich-quick schemes abound, a charismatic land developer arrives in Carson City. It doesn't take Major Lansford Fallon long to win the affections of widowed Marthellen Farnsworth - Judith Kingston's housekeeper and dearest friend. And it takes Fallon even less time to win the financial backing of the town's leading citizens when he presents a plan to build a health sanitarium on a mineral spring outside of town.

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.

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?

Cordelia Lu Hankins is the half Caucasian, half Chinese - and all albino. She has grown up in a remote lumber town with her distant father and a giant stepmother nicknamed Babe (after Paul Bunyan's blue ox), convinced she is ugly. Then, in the summer of 1918, when she is fourteen, she falls in love with the dashing Squirl. One day they meet on the mountain and Cordy receives her first kiss, as well as a wild ride down a log flume that gets Squirl fired.

It's 1882, and developer Kellen O'Roarke wants to build a resort near a natural mineral spring in northern California, but he needs a strategic piece of land owned by Guinevere "Guin" Talbot, who apparently would rather die than part with her property. Guin is still in mourning for her parents, who, ironically, lost their money investing in a resort. Kellen isn't her only worry. Grandmother Henrietta, bitter and critical, has taken it upon herself to move in with Guin as her "chaperone."

Christina Swan, the local schoolteacher, is fired when two overzealous suitors brawl at her school. Angry at the unfair treatment, she seizes the opportunity to manage a fledgling ranch for her uncle and runs into the obstinate Kern Yager, a neighboring landholder. As tempers flare between them, the two discover a common enemy in a land development plan that will swallow their ranches. They also discover the faith to meet their problems with God's support.

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.

Notorious outlaw Manitoba Joe Clark seems to have been caught red-handed this time, but he's begging Judge Kingston to find out who framed him. At home, life seems to be unraveling for the judge and his wife Judith. Will their widowed missionary son marry a most unlikely woman and return to India? Can evidence implicating Roberta's fiance as an embezzler and the father of an illegitimate child be true?

When spunky Swedish spinster Lili Tornquist, age 29, learns that her widowed father will soon remarry a woman she detests, she leaves her Minnesota home to become the mail-order bride of a distant cousin, Gunnar Jorgeson, a Montana sheep rancher. But her new husband falls far short of his promise, and putting aside all she has previously believed about steadfastness and endurance, Lili abandons her marriage to make her own way in the notorious wide-open mining town of Butte.

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.

Girl from New Hope is a heart-warming tale of love won and lost, how people react to cultural change, a quite different look a life in the frontier west, and a wonderful addition to the literature of the west. The author writes authoritatively about Colorado, New York, horsemanship, and about the "real west" of American history.