Château de Montségur (France), Author: levieuxchiendetalus
An early Christian sect, known as Cathars, believed the earth was corrupt and that by giving up earthly possessions, the soul could be redeemed and ascend into Heaven. If you did not become Perfect in this life, you would be given another until you could.
In 1244, in the Languedoc region in France, armies of the Pope laid siege to the castle at Montségur, where the last remnants of the Cathar faction took refuge after decades of Crusade against them. Branded heretics, the Cathars eventually surrendered and hundreds were burned alive in a bonfire together at the foot of the castle mount. Some non-Cathar defenders of the stronghold were said to have been so moved by their faith that they joined the Cathars in their fate.
In 1975, in Carroll, Oregon, Detective Sgt Susan Hannah is the first woman police officer in this small city. When a woman staggers into a local clinic and dies, Susan discovers a series of rapes and a police cover-up.
All the victims were marked in the same strange way, perhaps it was the mark of the Devil then, but what is it now? Suspects are the cops themselves and the men in the local college, which happens to be a seminary with roots back to the old religion.
Is the past playing out once again, and will it turn out better for the victims this time?
"The darkness of death is like the evening twilight;
it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying."
- Jean Paul Richter, German novelist and writer (1763 - 1825)
Genre: Historical Mystery/Suspense
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Armstrong Spring Creek in Paradise Valley Montana January 2008 (photo by Mike Cline)
Kyla doesn't usually have a lot to say. She's not really shy, more like brooding and morbid, according to her gregarious twin sister, Kerry. It's always been that way between them, but Kerry has been missing for months now, sucked under the ice of a winter-cold river in rural Montana.
That's when Kyla's nightmares began: Kerry's eyes are looking back in the rear view mirror, but it's Kyla's body that is driving. Kerry is talking to someone named Angeline, but there is no one else in the car. Suddenly, headlights come up fast, the car slides on the ice and flies into the river.
That's when Kyla wakes up. Finally she's found the courage to investigate, but instead of answers, she finds that before she disappeared, Kerry fled to der Bauernhof, a colony of German-speaking folks of a different religion. Next to the colony is a mysterious military complex built at the start of the Cold War.
The folks in the colony also have secrets, some of them hundreds of years old, but is one of them what really happened to Kerry. . . and who in the world is Angeline?
Red Talkers: Native American expression for people of a different language.
Genre: Mystery/Suspense
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Bridge over Bear creek in Tishomingo State Park (11.24.2008) Photo by Waynersnitzel
HIT MISSISSIPPI RUNNING
How Sonny got to this small town in Mississippi is a mystery, but not one so pressing as the severed finger she found in her pocket. It doesn't help that the only thing she remembers about the guy who turned up dead is that they had an affair in Alabama. But that was months ago, or was it?
Sonny has terrible headaches now and stretches of time she?s forgotten. She wakes up like from a bad dream, and sometimes the morning is days later. She tried explaining that to the cops, but they don't believe her. Now someone is calling her on the phone, but when she picks it up, there's no answer.
Are these fits flash-backs of bad times or something more sinister like drug-induced hallucinations? The cops think she?s crazy, but could she just be hypnotized? Who could do that and why? Clearly her imagination hasn?t been effected at all.
The only other thing she really remembers is that she had to get out of a top secret complex in Huntsville, Alabama, and fast. Has the reason she left found her here? She knew then she was supposed to run and fast: Don't look back and hit Mississippi running.
Genre: Mystery/Suspense
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Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) Photo by Tim from Ithaca.
Nuthatch: A bird used to seeing the world upside down as it descends tree trunks looking for the seeds and acorns it wedged into the bark for safe winter storage. When it finds them, the nuthatch violently hammers them open using its long sharp beak.
Farm: A place of growth and yearly renewal; an area of cultivation and harvest.
Nuthatch Farm and Restorative Center: A serene retreat for personal renewal in a world coping with any and all types of mental or physical fatigue. Recover in a spa-like setting with athletic trainers, medical facilities, and a full-time psychiatric staff. Casual care to constant surveillance provided. Reasonable prices by the week, month, or year.
The Story: When police psychologist Faedra March watched the man jump off the ledge, she didn?t expect him to fall into her past, taking her with him on the way.
He was an embezzler caught in the act. She was supposed to talk people like him down. But Faedra recognized the man as the stepfather of one of her high school friends. She wasn?t surprised to see him out on the ledge, but it would have been better for all of them if he?d taken the plunge much sooner.
Seeing him triggered memories she had long buried. Her personal life now was nothing to brag about, and she wondered how it was with all of her high-school friends. She hasn't seen them in years.
The crowd below was chanting: Jump! Would anyone notice if she did?
Genre: Mystery/Suspense
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Weavers Needle, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona, USA. Photo by Chris C Jones
The Winds of Grace
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship. - Aeschylus, Greek Poet
The winds of grace are always blowing; all we need to do is raise our sails. - author unknown
Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come. - Chinese Proverb
If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy? - Thomas Lovell Beddoes, English Poet
When she was young, Grace Ryman's parents left America to avoid the American Civil War. The family traveled to China where they spent several years as missionaries. But when Grace was attacked by bandits, she was late in returning with medicine and her mother and baby brother died of fever. Her father lost his faith, and that's how they ended up in hell.
On closer inspection, Grace decided she likes it here in the Arizona territory. The hot, dry, wide open spaces seem to burn out the poison of loss, and when her father decides to return home to New England, Grace stays behind to build a life of her own.
No one told her she wasn't supposed to make friends with the natives, but what are they really after when they claim she's been haunting the visions of one of their wisest of men? If she was supposed to fear of them—well, no one told her that either.
The saloon girls are another matter, and then there's an outlaw or two. Grace has no reason to scorn anyone, but she?s soon shunned by the "decent" folk in town. With hard work and her strange collection of new friends, Grace finally comes to terms with her mother's death. She makes a home in the hell that has become her promised land.
Genre: Western/Historical/Inspirational
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Wilhelmina Drucker, pioneer for women's rights, is portrayed by Truus Claes in 1917 on the occasion of her seventieth birthday.
Wild West Women of Some Gumption*
*Gumption: A bustle and a six-shooter. . . or two.
A collections of stories about the women on the frontier of the American western:
- Widow's Weeds (1851)
"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun." - Katharine Hepburn - No Bones About It (mid-1860s)
"Well behaved women rarely make history." - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - Pony Impressed (1860)
"Courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway." - John Wayne - The Journal of Mary Yates (Civil War and later)
"A free race cannot be born of slave mothers." - Margaret Sanger - Among the English (late 1860s)
"Come ye out from among them and be ye separate..." - (II Corinthians 6:14-18) - Betts, Missy Betts (1870)
"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill - Nickel Novels (early 1870s)
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein - You Just Can't Shoot'em (1868)
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - Collette - Negotiable Affection (early 1870s)
"Every step you take, is a step away from where you used to be." - Brian Chargualaf - Cowboys (early 1870s)
"Always drink upstream from the herd." - A Cowboy - Sugar and Spice (mid 1890s)
"Never miss a good chance to shut up." - A Cowboy
Genre: Historical/Western
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Clouds scoot across the Martian sky in a movie clip consisting of 10 frames taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.
The Abdals: A Series
Abdals: Substitutes or the Changed Ones
In prophecy, Abdals are a small group of mysterious beings whose identities are known only to the Divine and to the earth-bound Guardians with whom they serve. Abdals walk in this world as mortals, tasked to ensure its continued existence at any cost to themselves.
When an Abdal passes from flesh to spirit, another must be quickly empowered to take their place in order to uphold the earthly balance of life and death, light and shadow, good and evil—thus maintaining the long-held truce in the War of No Repent.
Abdals constantly battle earthbound demons, known as Djinn, as well as man's own bad nature. The worst of those mortals they call Shadows or Shades, opposites who hope and pray for the destruction of the world, the End of Days.
Genre: Suspense/Fantasy/Inspirational
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Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS)leaving their ship, Pistol Packin' Mama, Lockbourne AAF, Ohio.
THE ALTAR OF MURDERED MEN, (Abdals, Book I)
I stand at the altar of murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause. - Florence Nightingale
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? - Eleanor Roosevelt
An American pilot is downed in the newly-inflamed Balkan states. After several days, he's rescued by no one he'd remotely call "friendly." He's led to somewhat-safety by a mysterious group that turn out to be a band of international women somehow functioning as a special-ops force. Their training is impressive, their weapons a strange combination of high-tech wonder-works and Soviet-era cast-offs. The hotel where's he's kept used to be posh, but he's a prisoner here: There's bars on the windows, and that's not room-service bringing his meals.
Outside, he keeps hearing firing squads and wonders when he will be next. There's no reasoning with his captors, the only person he sees who will talk to him at all is a woman someone down the hall called Eleanor. Is she a spy or a collaborator, freedom-fighter or terrorist? She's American too, he's sure of that, and whoever she's playing for now, her group seems to be connected and well-funded.
When he's bartered in a prisoner exchange, he figures his superiors would only think he was hallucinating anyway. He speaks only of his first days of survival and nothing much in detail. No one asks for more, and some one-star-wonder in military public relations decides he's a hero, though he feels more like a fool. Still, he's ordered to a ceremony in the Rose Garden, president, cameras, and all.
Then he sees Eleanor in the halls of the White House and follows. She leads him to a military base and beyond. Women in war zones have never fared well, and someone has been trying to help since the American Revolution. It's never been about victory, but a familiar goal more commonly know as survival.
Genre: Historical/Suspense/Inspirational (part of the Abdals Series)
These four female pilots leaving their ship, Pistol Packin' Mama, at the four engine school at Lockbourne AAF, Ohio, are members of a group of Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) who have been trained to ferry the B-17 Flying Fortresses. L to R are Frances Green, Marget (Peg) Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn. (U.S. Air Force photo)
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Fremont Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, Seattle, Washington, USA to the Fremont Bridge (low bridge) and Aurora Bridge (high bridge). Photo by Joe Mabel
CROOKED ANGELS (Abdals, Book II)
We are, each of us angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another. - Luciano de Crescenzo
Fish cannot drown in water,
Birds cannot sink in air,
Gold cannot perish
In the refiner's fire.
This has God given to all creatures,
To foster and seek their own nature,
How then can I withstand mine? - Mechtild of Magdeburg
Julia Coles came to Seattle to marry a man she met on the Internet, but instead of jumping into wedded bliss, Julia took a dive off the Aurora bridge. The cops figure it was all in her head, because instead of finding romance, Julia found that Simon Oleander was keeping company with Lily Sung, an exotic Asian beauty working for the South Korean government. Julia started to stalk him, it seems, and the cops wrote it up as a broken-hearted suicide. Cops aren't romantic at all.
But Emie Rye isn't buying the official reports. She knew Julia Coles since kindergarten. Julia was curious about a lot of things, but one of them wasn't men. Besides, Julia was afraid of heights. No way would she go out on a bridge like that. Not for a man at least, but what about Lily Sung?
It's true that Julia had been talking to Simon Oleander on the Internet, but it wasn't romantic, it was business-- in an industrial-espionage-kind-of-way. But Emie can't tell the cops about that. They might start to ask other questions, and she has too many secrets to keep.
Lily Sung is beautiful, it's true, but she's also a liar and worse. It's one thing to be after Simon's soon-to-be billions, but quite another to break into his computer with bodies piled up along the way. Identity theft in the financial world is damaging enough to people, but in the Intelligence community, it could change the balance of power in the world. Was Julia Coles only one of the first casualties in a whole new kind of global war?
Genre: Mystery/Suspense
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A massive dust storm cloud rolls over Al Asad, Iraq, just before nightfall on April 27, 2005. DoD photo by Corporal Alicia M. Garcia, U.S. Marine Corps.
It seems like somebody always wants something from her, but Kea just wants to read. She's into paleography, the study of old writing, and there's plenty of that around here. She roams the ancient civilizations of Persia and Mesopotamia, alone mostly and mostly unnoticed in these places where she's not supposed to be.
Too bad people still fight all the time, and worse, many are still superstitious. In some of these villages, they stone sinners to death, and throughout history, religious folks have burned people like her: Kea is a healer, she does so by the laying of hands. Truly it's her father's gift, but her mother usually gets blamed as a witch. That's only to be expected when your the earthbound daughter of an archangel and a demoness.
Down here in the low, one side of the family or the other is always asking for help, but Kea has enough problems of her own. It's the empathy that makes it so hard to say no, and that she did get from her mother. Demoness is an interesting term anyway, and one usually given undeserved.
When a copter goes down in the remote reaches of southwest Iraq, it seems that mortals are dangerously close to stumbling into the Disa, the entrance to the Abyss. This would break the age-old truce between the forces of Light and Dark. Kea is mortal too, but she's allowed into the Disa because she has family on both sides: She's the only one who can help prevent a problem of pre-Biblical proportions.
But the crash-caused explosion created an ash cloud from remnants of past battles in the War of No Repent. The cloud is now serving to shield the entrance to the Disa. It's a fail-safe system, of ancient sorts, but it has also blocked out any high-tech surveillance. This definitely has the attention of the Coalition Command, not to mention the Desert Djinn in the region. They operate in the guise of insurgents who are always looking to cause more trouble. How long before high-technology overcomes faith and good-intent?
The Coalition sends in an expendable team—or two. Kea needs to do what she promised to restore harmony once again. Not peace on earth, good will toward men: That's an impossible task. Kea just wants the two sides of the family to stop bickering, so she can go back to her reading.
Disa - Aramaic term meaning door, portal, . . . rapture.
Genre: Suspense/Inspirational (part of the Abdals Series)