SHOW AND TELL

Celebrating signing the two-book contract with Moody for Texas Trails (see the banner), a six-book collaboration with Susan Page Davis and Vickie McDonough.


TEXAS TRAILS

One Family

Four Generations

Fifty Years

The six books in the Texas Trails series cover snippets of Texas’s history from 1845 to 1896, seen through the lens of enduring love that springs up in one Texas family, the Morgans.


Lone Star Trail by Darlene Franklin (pub date: September 2011): Judson Morgan’s Texas roots are drenched in blood. His father died for Texas’s freedom during the war for independence. So when the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas (the Verein) attempts to colonize a New Germany in his country, he takes a stand against them. After her fiance marries someone else, a young fraulein determines to make a new life for herself in Texas—but can the rancher put aside his prejudice to forge a new future?

And since this is my title - isn't the Clint Eastwood look-alike a doll? I traveled through the Texas hill country last week and fell in love with the setting all over again.

Captive Trail by Susan Page Davis (pub date: September 2011). On his first run as a driver for the Butterfield Stagecoach Overland Mail Company, Ned Bright comes across a woman who is nearly dead from exposure and dehydration. He takes her in his stagecoach to a mission outpost operated by Ursuline nuns. He returns to check on the patient each time he passes through and learns she was a captive of the Comanche for the last thirteen years—since she was nine years old. With some detective work, he is able to locate her family. Ned falls in love with her. He plans to reunite her with her brother, but the Comanche have other ideas, and the two end up defending the mission station.

The Long Trail Home by Vickie McDonough (pub date: October-November 2011). When Riley Morgan returns after fighting in the War Between the States, he’s excited to see his parents and his fiancée again. But he soon learns that his parents are dead, and the woman he loved is married. He takes a job at the Wilcox School for Blind Children, just to get by. He keeps his heart closed off, but a pretty blind woman threatens to steal it. When a greedy man tries to close the school, Riley and Annie band together to fight him and then fall in love. But when Riley learns the truth—that Annie isn’t really blind, he packs up, ready to leave. Will he change his mind and find the love he craves? Or will his stubbornness deprive him from the woman he needs?