Saint Maggie (Book 1)
Maggie Blaine, a widow with two teenage daughters, runs a rooming house smack dab on the town square. Boarding houses are only semi-respectable and hers has a collection of eclectic boarders – an aging writer, an undertaker’s apprentice, a struggling young lawyer, and an old Irishman. Eli Smith, a writer who prints a penny weekly called The Gazette, lives and prints his paper in Maggie's outbuilding. Maggie's closest friends are Emily and Nate, the African American couple with whom she shares her home, life, and chores. As the novel opens, Maggie has been asked to house the new Methodist minister, the handsome and gifted Jeremiah Madison, whom she hopes he will provide her boarding house with a bit of badly needed respectability. But Jeremiah comes with secrets that eventually explode into scandal. As the town reels from a series of shocking events, compassionate, faithful Maggie searches for truth and forgiveness. |
Walk By Faith (Book 2)
It is the middle of the Civil War. Things have gotten ugly in Blaineton. Maggie’s boarding house has been burned to the ground. So has her husband Eli’s print shop, which had been home to The Gazette penny weekly. The abolitionist sympathies of Maggie and those in her boarding house have made them a target for anti-war Copperhead forces, and when they continue to receive threats, Eli’s sisters offer the family a chance to escape to safety in the Old Smith House in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The family makes the move, hoping to find some badly needed peace, having no idea what they will encounter. |
A Time to Heal (Book 3) “It seems to me that this time after the storm of battle has been a waiting time, a time of recovery," Maggie writes in her journal. "We did not know where we would be led next.” In the months immediately after the Battle of Gettysburg (June 1-3, 1863), Maggie’s daughters and friends struggle to care for a houseful of wounded soldiers. Meanwhile, Eli and Nate move Maggie and Emily, who are suffering from trauma, to a peaceful location some miles to the north of the devastation at Gettysburg. Everyone hopes for healing and a return to something resembling normal life. But an innocent act of compassion on the part of daughters Lydia and Frankie is mistaken for civil disobedience, and the family learns that their battle is not over yet. |
Seeing the Elephant (Book 4)
Maggie and family finally return to Blaineton after Eli is hired as the Editor-in-Chief of The Register, the town’s new newspaper. While the move promises to be a financial and social step up for everyone, the little town has changed. An insane asylum has opened north of town, and a woolen mill and uniform factory are doing big business to Blaineton’s south. The family soon learns that a wealthy industrialist by the name of Josiah Norton is working to change the face and tenor of their once sleepy little town. Additionally, Eli has begun suffering from nightmares, something that worries him and wife Maggie. More worries appear when daughter Frankie takes a job at the Western New Jersey Hospital for the Insane. Life may not not be as peaceful as Maggie had hoped. |
A Good Community (Book 5)
By 1864, the members of Maggie’s household have become more prosperous. And, since they live at the edge of Blaineton in the spacious confines of Greybeal House, Maggie and friends are free to pursue their welcoming lifestyle away from the town's disapproving eyes. Then one day, Mary and Addie, two orphaned girls of color, show up, Maggie and Emily naturally welcome them without a thought and then decide to enroll the girls in the town’s school. But there is a snag: the school no longer takes Black pupils and the only other educational option for children of color has been closed. Undeterred, Maggie, Emily, and friends start a privately funded school for Blaineton’s Black children. Word quickly spreads among the town's population and whispers quickly morph into resentment and anger. When the controversy almost blows Blaineton apart, Maggie struggles to reunite the town. |
A Balm in Gilead (Book 6)
After the Great Fire of 1864, the traumatized the people of Blaineton need to repair and rebuild their small New Jersey town. Self-effacing Maggie suddenly emerges as a leader, and husband Eli, family members, and friends encourage her to run for Town Council. Running for office is a controversial move because no woman has ever done this before. But running for office abruptly becomes a secondary issue for Maggie when a typhoid fever epidemic threatens to disrupt Blaineton’s new sense of unity. The town’s doctors - including Maggie’s eldest daughter, Lydia - struggle to bring the fever under control and uncover the source of the epidemic, while Maggie apprises the Town Council of the fever’s spread and organizes efforts to care for the ill and control the epidemic. But will fear and blame among some of the town folk derail all the hard work? |
The Enlistment (A Frankie Blaine Story)
In August of 1862, sixteen-year-old Frances “Frankie” Blaine learns that her beau, Patrick, will be enlisting in the Army and wishes she could enlist and fight by his side. Since no one is able to give Frankie a rational explanation why she cannot do that, other than the fact that she is a girl, Frankie comes up with a daring plan. Unfortunately, it backfires and she is thrust into a new situation from which she learns some large lessons. Meanwhile, her mother Maggie and stepfather Eli follow her trail and hope to bring her back home. |
The Great Central Fair (A Saint Maggie Story)
Romance is in the air for Maggie's daughters when Sergeant Patrick McCoy and Captain Philip Frost make a surprise visit to Blaineton on the way to their new posts at Mower General Hospital in Philadelphia. At first, Maggie and husband Eli hesitate to allow Frankie to go away for a weekend with her beau Patrick. After all, Frankie has always been impulsive and unconventional, while Lydia has been the sensible daughter. But when friend Chester Carson volunteers to chaperone the two couples, Maggie and Eli agree to the trip. After all, Carson will keep an eye on Frankie and Patrick. As for Lydia and Philip... well... they're just good friends. Aren't they? |
The Christmas Eve Visitor (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
Sometimes miracles happen when you least expect them, but need them most. And Maggie and family could really use a miracle on Christmas Eve of 1863. As a snowstorm howls outside their home, they struggle to care for the family's three youngest members, all of whom have taken seriously ill. In the midst of all this, a knock at the door brings with it an unanticipated interruption in the form of an odd little peddler. Maggie invites him in and feeds him supper: a simple act of kindness, but one that has an unexpected impact. |
The Dundee Cake (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
In this gentle prequel to the Saint Maggie Series, it is Christmas of 1852. and widow Maggie Blaine is finding little joy. She had lost her husband and her much-loved Aunt Letty a few years earlier and now struggles to maintain her boarding house, as well as feed and care for those who live in it. Desperate for help, Maggie hires a woman named Emily Johnson to help her. Maggie is white and Emily is black, but the two women quickly become friends. Later, when Emily and husband Nate later suffer a disaster, Maggie is determined to find a way to help them, even if it costs her a much hoped for Christmas celebration. |
The Newcomer (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
In this prequel, set in 1855, newcomer Eli Smith wanders into the little town of Blaineton, The town is supposed to be a stop on his way to New York City, where he hopes to find employment with a newspaper. His plan is to locate a temporary place to stay in Blaineton, get a job, and earn enough money to continue his journey. Eli thinks he has found the perfect place to live: an outbuilding called “the old caretaker’s house,” part of a boarding house owned by widow Maggie Blaine, a warm and welcoming woman. Eli soon discovers that she also is passionately anti-slavery, something that they both have in common. So, Eli presents her with an idea: he could rent the little house, in which he would live and from which he would print a penny weekly newspaper. At first Maggie is hesitant to rent her outbuilding, preferring instead that he live in the boarding house proper. Eli senses that she is hiding something, and gets her to agree to rent the old caretaker's house. Still, he wonders why she hesitated? And does it have anything to with that lock on the cellar door? |
All Hallows' Eve (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
In 1863, industrialist Josiah Norton decided to buy a piece of property in the little town of Blaineton, New Jersey. It was located right on the town square at the corner of Second and Main Streets. There he builds a hotel called the Norton Arms, ignorant of the fact that the property previously had belonged to Maggie Beatty Blaine Smith and had seen both tragedy and a terrible fire. In 1865, Josiah realizes that something is threatening his business. Worried, he invites Maggie and Eli Smith to attend his All Hallows’ Eve ball. While they are at the event, he asks them to him help him uncover what is behind the series of strange events experienced by his patrons. And that's when things start getting spooky. |