The Saint Maggie Series
Novels
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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. She also is friends with Emily and Nate, the African American couple with whom she shares her home, life, and chores. When Maggie is asked to house the new Methodist minister, the handsome and gifted Jeremiah Madison, she hopes he will provide her boarding house with a bit of badly needed respectability. But Jeremiah comes with secrets that challenge Maggie’s resolve to love everyone. As the town reels from a series of shocking events, the compassionate, faithful Maggie searches for truth and forgiveness. |
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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. So, they make the move, hoping to find some badly needed peace. Little do they know that peace soon will be snatched away. |
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A Time to Heal (Book 3) In the time immediately after the Battle of Gettysburg, Maggie’s daughters and friends struggle to care for a houseful of wounded soldiers. Meanwhile, Eli and Nate have moved Maggie and Emily, who suffered terrible trauma during the battle, to a more peaceful location. Everyone hopes and prays for healing and a return to something resembling normal life. But when an act of compassion is mistaken for civil disobedience, the family learns that their battle is not yet over. |
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Seeing the Elephant (Book 4)
Maggie and family return to Blaineton when Eli is hired as the Editor-in-Chief of The Register, the town’s new newspaper. While it promises to be a financial and social step up for everyone, things have changed in the little town. An insane asylum has opened north of town, and a woolen mill and uniform factory are doing big business to Blaineton’s south. They soon learn that a wealthy industrialist by the name of Josiah Norton is working to change the face and tenor of once sleepy little Blaineton. However, Maggie is more worried about Eli, who is suffering from nightmares. When daughter Frankie takes a job at the Western New Jersey Hospital for the Insane, it looks like life will not be as peaceful as Maggie hoped. |
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A Good Community (Book 5)
The members of Maggie’s household have become more prosperous in 1864. They live at the edge of Blaineton in the spacious confines of Greybeal House, where Maggie is free to pursue her loving, welcoming lifestyle away from the town's disapproving eyes. When Mary and Addie, two orphaned girls of color, show up, Maggie and Emily welcome them without a thought and 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 up on Water Street has been closed. Undeterred, Maggie and Emily start a privately funded school for Blaineton’s Black children. Word soon spreads among the town's population and talk quickly morphs into resentment and anger. When controversy threatens to blow Blaineton apart, Maggie takes steps to reunite the town. |
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A Balm in Gilead (Book 6)
The Great Fire of 1864 traumatized the people of Blaineton. Now the small New Jersey town is trying to work together, thanks to Maggie, who is emerging as one of its leaders. She even is considering a run for Town Council, thanks to the encouragement of her husband Eli, family members, and friends. Running for office is a controversial move. No woman has ever held a political position in their town before. But running for office abruptly becomes a secondary issue for Maggie when a typhoid fever epidemic strains Blaineton’s new sense of unity. The town’s doctors - including Lydia Frost, Maggie’s eldest daughter - struggle to bring the fever under control and uncover the source of the epidemic. Meanwhile, Maggie apprises the Town Council regarding the fever’s spread and organizes efforts to care for the ill. But will fear and blame among the town folk derail all the hard work? |
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Novellas
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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. She desperately wishes she could enlist and fight by his side. Since no one seems able to give Frankie a rational explanation why she cannot do that, other than that she “can’t enlist because she is a girl,” Frankie comes up with a daring plan. But it backfires and she is thrust into a new world from which she learns some large lessons. |
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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 in Philadelphia at Mower General Hospital. Maggie and husband Eli normally would have hesitated to allow Frankie to go away for a weekend with her beau Patrick. Frankie has always been impulsive and unconventional. But since their friend Chester Carson has volunteered to be a chaperone, which gives them peace. Frankie's older sister, Lydia, will go along as well, and that is comforting to Maggie and Eli. After all, Lydia is the sensible one, the one who never does anything on impulse. And she is an adult – nearly twenty-two years of age – and still in mourning for her late husband, Edgar. As for Captain Frost, well, he is only a friend whom Lydia met while in Gettysburg. Nothing to worry about there. Or is there? |
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Short Stories
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The Christmas Eve Visitor (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
Sometimes miracles happen when you expect them the least but need them the most. On Christmas Eve 1863, as a snowstorm howls outside their home, Maggie and her family care for their three youngest members, all of whom have taken seriously ill. When a knock at the door brings an unanticipated interruption in the form of an odd little peddler, Maggie invites the stranger in and feeds him supper: a simple act of kindness that has an impact on her entire family. |
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The Dundee Cake (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
In this gentle prequel to the Saint Maggie Series, widow Maggie Blaine is finding scant joy in the Christmas of 1852. Having lost her husband and her much-loved Aunt Letty, she is struggling to maintain the boarding house and feed and care for those who live in it. Desperate, she hires a woman named Emily Johnson to help her. Even though Maggie is white, and Emily is black, the two women soon become friends. When Emily and her 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. |
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The Newcomer (A Saint Maggie Short Story)
In 1855, a newcomer named Eli Smith wanders into the little town of Blaineton, He sees the town as a stop on his way to New York City, where he hopes to find employment with a newspaper. The plan is to locate a temporary place to stay, get a job, and earn enough money to continue his journey. But Eli changes his mind when he spots an outbuilding called “the old caretaker’s house,” part of a boarding house owned by widow Maggie Blaine. Suddenly his dreams of having a newspaper all his own resurface. Then he learns that Maggie, a warm and welcoming woman, is passionately anti-slavery, something that the two of them have in common. When she seems strangely hesitant to rent her outbuilding to him, Eli to suspects that Maggie is hiding something. And it seems to have something to do with that locked cellar door in the old caretaker’s house. |
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CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
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Heart Soul & Rock'n'Roll
Lindsay Mitchell has hit forty. Although she has a fulfilling vocation as an assistant minister at a central New Jersey church, she can’t help but wonder what the next fifteen years of her life will be like and looks fondly back on the good old days with her college rock band. “I just want to rock out one more time before I die,” she moans to friends Pattie and Sue. And that gives Patti an excuse to whisk Lins away to Point Pleasant Beach for a vacation. When the two women take a meal at a local dive called The Flying Fish Club, they encounter Neil Gardner, who works there as the front man for a band called the Jersey Reapers. Neil immediately takes a shine to Lins. But does Lins really want to a whirlwind romance with a broke, agnostic musician with personal issues who lives over a music store? That just might be a wee bit more than she bargained for. |
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