BECAUSE I CAN | Synopsis
Pretty with a fist. That’s how some might describe Jemma Dalembert. Survival motivates her. Love for family. Loyalty. Respect. She’s only sixteen year old, but Jemma Dalembert will devastate you if you cross her. Why? Because she can.
Jemma is three quarters French-Canadian, raised in a family of Maine fishermen, now down-and-out, unemployed and willing to do anything to survive. She is also quarter Micmac Indian. Her grandmother says she is a shape-shifter, the last member of the Wolf Clan, the protector of her family and her tribe. Jemma may believe this, does believe it, but her father is only interested in how she can help him keep the family going.
Nothing comes easy to Jemma. She can’t read. She’s dropped out of school. No school even wants her because she has anger management issues and is always getting into fights. She works a ten hour day packing fish in cold storage. She runs numbers for her father. Most important, she is engaged in the world of underground fist fighting where you survive by winning.
Her life is one lived on the gritty edge of ‘think fast, think faster than the other guy.’ When her father and her boyfriend commit a theft, stealing the winning lottery ticket from another criminal enterprise, Jemma is accused of robbery and murder. A local cop, a rogue police officer named Giroux, has it in for the Dalemberts. He would like nothing better than to deal with Jemma and her father permanently.
Jemma has no choice but to go on the run. She has a single thread of hope. Find her older brother Rich who has taken up the life of a professional mixed martial arts fighter. She adores him, would die for her brother. Running away with all her worldly possessions in a backpack, including brass knuckles and a switchblade, Jemma flees to Boston. Only Rich is no longer fighting. Instead, he is on a steady descent into schizophrenia, forcing Jemma to take an offer from a local mixed martial arts promoter. Fight for him. Win for him. Do whatever it takes for him.
Jemma might capitulate, but she is never disloyal to who she really is. As Giroux and the Boston police close in on her, as the fighting promoter who would corrupt her innocence prods her into a world of survival of the ‘fightest,’ Jemma finds the Micmac warrior in her soul, the true shape-shifter. Falling in love and saving those she cares about matter most in the world. Fighting may kill her, but the greatest sacrifice of all awaits.
“Because I can” is Jemma’s mantra. A 21st century Eponine. In a world of betrayal, violence and survival at all costs, no one is as tough and resilient as this teenage girl.
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GOSPEL OF HANNANIAH | Synopsis
BOOK 1
Seven-year old Hannaniah and her mother Miriam live as outcasts in the town of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. Hannaniah is the product of an illicit love affair between Miriam and Yeshuah bar Joseph, the man known as Jesus. Spurned by the townspeople, loved only by her mother, Hannaniah tries everything and anything to make people like her, including magic. One night, during a lengthy spring drought, which has the local fishermen and farmers praying for rain, Hannaniah watches a rainmaker cast his spells. While he fails to bring rain, Hannaniah performs her own ritual with the assistance of her only friend, a lame sheepdog named Sheshmesh.
Miriam of Magdala survives as a pariah making beautiful pottery, which she sells through a local merchant, formerly her betrothed. She has also taken in a destitute man as a boarder, innocently deepening her reputation as a whore. Hannaniah worships her lovely mother and yearns for and dreams about the man, her father, who abandoned them seven years before.
When the rain comes, Hannaniah believes she is responsible for ending the drought and hurtles through the town, Sheshmesh at her muddy heels, shouting out her triumph. She believes the people of Magdala will forgive her all of her sins and welcome her and her mother into their accepting arms. Rather she is met by anger and suspicion, proclaimed a witch, and spat upon. Covered in mud, soaked to the skin by the heavenly downpour, Hannaniah casts her eyes skyward as a friendly hand clasps her shoulder. Her tear-filled eyes follow that hand up the arm towards a warm smiling face, a loving face she will never forget. Unbeknownst to Hannaniah, her father Yeshuah bar Joseph has returned from his seven-year exile.
Yeshuah carries the child he will not proclaim is his daughter back to her house. Miriam is stunned, overjoyed, lustful and anxious but cannot respond to Yeshuah except as if to a friendly stranger while Hannaniah is present. Over the months and years that follow, Hannaniah and Yeshuah develop a special bond, while he and her mother dance a cautious quiet romance, planning how they might someday be an open family again.
It is a large family, composed of a matriarch Mary, who runs her estate like an empress, and Yeshuah’s many brothers and sisters. James, the oldest, is Yeshuah’s right hand. Joseph is the accountant. Simon is the stalwart. And Judas is the impulsive one.
Life is exciting for Hannaniah and her newfound ‘father’ until Pontius Pilate arrives in Jerusalem and sets up Roman icons outside the Holy Temple. To prevent civil insurrection Yeshuah and Hannaniah travel to the nation’s capital along with thousands of other Jews to protest. Everywhere Yeshuah goes, Hannaniah is at his shoulder. In the fields. By the lake. Wherever he walks. Wherever he teaches. But at the stoning of a young woman when Yeshuah confronts Miriam’s father Habbakuk with his infidelities and incest, Yeshuah is forced into exile again.
Hannaniah adores her father, who she still does not know is her father. Back from exile, he teaches her to read and trains her to be a great rabbi who can solve whatever problems people bring to her. Even when Yeshuah meets John the Baptist and begins his journey towards becoming the nation’s messiah, even as he confronts his own ghosts and the doubts he has about God’s plan for him, Hannaniah remains a loyal and devoted ‘daughter.’ It is only when he heads for Jerusalem, only when he has made that awful decision that he must reject the person he most loves in the world in order to become the ordained messiah, does Hannaniah discover the truth. When she confronts him, Yeshuah, whose ministry is open to all, must turn away from her. To be discovered as a cuckold who had a child out of wedlock would be to destroy his ministry and his holy purpose. And so Yeshuah turns his back on her and Hannaniah is forced into her own exile by James, Yeshuah’s faithful and forceful brother.
BOOK 2
Hands lashed to keep her from harming herself and trying to escape, Hannaniah travels with a band of merchants, including one young man, Rashi, who falls for her. Going first by camel and then by sea to Tarsus in Asia Minor, she avoids kidnapping and rape, is rescued by a young Greek philosopher, and ends up at the home of Shmuel bar Jonah, a Pharisee devoted to the Torah, his family, and the Jewish community in Tarsus.
Despite the pious atmosphere in the house, Hannaniah falls under the spell of Shmuel’s dark and brooding eldest son Avram, who has many secrets he will share with Hannaniah. Avram is being groomed to be a Pharisee scholar like his father but has absolutely no desire to follow in Shmuel’s learned footsteps. The lonely and angry young girl who has lost her family and her faith is easy clay for him to mold.
While Shmuel takes an instant liking to Hannaniah, seeing in her what he knows is not in his son, teaching her the 613 laws that hold the Jewish community together, Avram is pulling her in a different direction. He is friends with a young Greek brother and sister: Aristocrates, who worships knowledge as Shmuel worships God; and Sophia, the teenage sybarite, who indoctrinates the vulnerable Hannaniah into the cult of Aesculapius and much more. Sophia is a precocious and sexually active beauty. Her society is the young and wealthy of Tarsus, including a Jewish boy named Paul who is anxious to belong and who is close friends with Avram.
Hannaniah’s three years in Tarsus see her grow physically and emotionally from a child into a young woman. She tries to contact her mother and father in Magdala but hears no word in return. Even when Moshe ben Judah, her mother’s former betrothed and now a disciple of Yeshuah, arrives in Tarsus, he cannot give her the information she needs to regain her faith. Neither Moshe nor anyone else knows that Hannaniah is the daughter of the messiah. No one can tell her how much Yeshuah truly loves his daughter and why he cast her aside. Rather a fire of revolution literally engulfs the Jewish community. The people stone Moshe. A fire of unknown origin burns down half of the ghetto. A cancer in the form of Avram the drunk begins to erode at the family of Shmuel the Pharisee.
Once again, Hannaniah is cast out after Avram rapes her and she becomes pregnant with his child. Loving and respecting Shmuel as she does, she does not tell him the truth of how she became pregnant. She accepts her fate and is taken in by her friends Aristocrates and Sophia. After Hannaniah gives birth to a daughter Leah, however, she is welcomed back to the home of Shmuel bar Jonah, who has come to love her as his daughter. But the joy of her return is short-lived. Guilt-ridden for his involvement in the fire that destroyed much of the Jewish community in Tarsus and troubled by his own feelings of love for one of its victims, Avram hangs himself. Hannaniah has to deliver the news to the despairing parents but again uses her acquired wisdom to lessen the blow.
Shortly after, she suffers her own terrible blow. The young merchant who fell in love with her on the journey to Tarsus, Rashi, knocks on Shmuel’s door and offers his hand in marriage. Hannaniah isn’t interested in marriage though. She wants word of her father the messiah, nothing else. Rashi knows only one thing, something he has hesitated to tell her. Her father has been crucified. Devastated, Hannaniah, like Avram, attempts suicide by drowning in a well. She is rescued by God in the guise of Aesculapius the Healer and by Aristocrates who pulls her from the rim of the well. Rather than die, Hannaniah has had a vision and she is determined now to return to her homeland to find out what happened to her father and, if necessary, to take up his mantle as the messiah of Israel.
BOOK 3
Hannaniah bids a tearful farewell to Shmuel, promising that she will say a prayer for Avram in Jerusalem. Then, with Aristocrates, Sophia, and Paul of Tarsus, she sets sail for Israel. But the world has changed in Magdala and throughout Israel. Rome is everywhere. Spies haunt the countryside. Armed Jewish rebels, Zealots, try to provoke insurgency. Hannaniah’s mother Miriam has lost her mind over her loss of Yeshuah. Mary, Yeshuah’s mother, has lost her servants and her sons who are on the road all the time, followers of Yeshuah’s successor, his brother James. Undeterred, confused by conflicting reports about her father’s demise which lead her to believe that he might still be alive, Hannaniah heads for Jerusalem.
Almost immediately the seventeen-year-old beauty with the intellect of a scholar and the training of a rabbi draws the attention of people who did not like her father or his ministry. Rashi warns her to keep a low profile, but she is bent on superseding James as her father’s successor. Angry with James for his participation in her exile, she confronts her uncle, who is in turn confronted by a mob of anti-Christian Jews lead by Paul of Tarsus.
Headstrong Hannaniah is determined to succeed her father in a land barreling towards war. Word of another messiah gathering mobs of Jews north of Jerusalem sets her off with Rashi to see if this new messiah might in fact be her father. A force of Roman troops intercepts them all, slaughtering the wayward Jews, their newest messiah, and Rashi. Hannaniah barely escapes, wandering the wilderness in a bruised daze until she is assaulted and rescued, this time by Eliezar, the man who will become her lover, the charismatic leader of a nomadic band of insurrectionists.
In an oasis far from Roman troops, she and Eliezar consummate their love and develop a working relationship. Hannaniah intends to supplant James, becoming the political wing of their effort, while Eliezar builds his forces in preparation for conflict with Rome. Through all of this, Hannaniah has ignored her responsibilities as a mother to her daughter Leah. In fact, she has purposefully pushed motherhood onto Sophia, doing to her child what her father did to her, rejecting all of Leah’s attempts for attention and warmth.
Hannaniah’s reputation as a healer, mystic, teacher, and prophet grows in the countryside and spreads to the city, where she sets up shop in Jerusalem. She builds a following of young urban poor while directly challenging James and the priesthood of the temple, who are no happier with her than they were with her father. She continues to dig into Yeshuah’s ending. Is he dead? Was he indeed crucified? Did he rise after death and ascend to heaven? Or is he in hiding somewhere? And if so, why? James has one story. Yeshuah’s youngest brother Judas has another story. While James insists Yeshuah is dead, Nicodemus tells Hannaniah that he knows Yeshuah survived crucifixion.
In any case, Hannaniah continues to act as a magnet for many of the disenfranchised of Jerusalem. She marries Aristocrates to build up support among the non-Jews of Jerusalem, survives her own assassination attempt but loses Eliezar’s child in the process. Distancing herself further from Leah, ever building her base, she never gives up her search for her father. When Caligula becomes emperor and threatens to engulf Jerusalem with his statues, Hannaniah achieves the height of her renown by circumventing a Jewish delegation to the Roman governor and convincing him to disregard Caligula’s orders.
She returns to Jerusalem a heroine. But from her great height, she is soon toppled. When the Zealots attack and kill one of the high priests of the temple, Hannaniah is blamed for her involvement with Eliezar and the Zealots. She defends herself well before the Sanhedrin, the high council of Jews, much as her father had in his day. But her fate has already been decreed. She is sent into exile in Alexandria, Egypt with Leah, Sophia, and Aristocrates. Here life is actually good to her. She works at the great library of Alexandria, discovering the sheer pleasure of scholarship. But even immersed in books she cannot escape her past or the empty place in her soul. The oracles of Amun convince her to return to Israel, which she does, minus her husband and her daughter, accompanied only by Sophia, who has come to love Hannaniah.
War breaks out. Eliezar comes and goes, impregnating Hannaniah again. And shortly before she gives birth, she is captured by Roman troops and imprisoned in the Antonia Fortress in Jerusalem. Here in the darkness of her cell, she gives birth to her second child, only to have him abducted by the Romans while she is asleep. Madness descends. Hannaniah is interrogated, whipped, beaten, but survives, somehow, survives for seven years in isolation. Only James’s intervention and events outside her prison cause her to be moved to another prison. Upon her release, though still a young woman, she is physically and spiritually spent, a stranger to her own children. She has given up the hunt for her father, given up trying to be the messiah, barely retains any interest in life.
Eliezar’s abrupt appearance unexpectedly forces Hannaniah out of her lethargy. While she rejects her lover’s plea to join him for the final victorious battle against the Romans, Leah vanishes. Hannaniah’s daughter has longed for her mother’s love and respect. Running after Eliezar is her desperate attempt to gain approval from Hannaniah. She has begun a quest much as Hannaniah had in looking for her father. Only now does Hannaniah realize how grievously wrong she has been. Galvanizing Aristocrates and Sophia, they split up to search for Leah. Aristocrates returns to Jerusalem. Hannaniah goes to Madgdala, eventually rejoining her husband in the nation’s capital to witness the martyrdom of her hated uncle James.
James is dead. So, too, Mary, Hannaniah’s grandmother. Miriam has lost her mind, and Judas has been crucified. Worse, Leah is gone. Hannaniah is about to give up all hope when her uncle Joseph, wounded and beaten by the same mob that had killed his brother, finally reveals the truth about Yeshuah. Hannaniah’s father did survive crucifixion. He is still alive, living with monks in Egypt.
Angered by the deceit yet exhilarated by the news, Hannaniah hurries to rejoin Sophia and Aristocrates to set sail for Egypt. At last, she will be reunited with her father, she will hear him utter the words, ‘You are my daughter. I love you.’ But at the last minute, Hannaniah is visited by the ghost of her grandmother. In a panic, struggling with the choice of reuniting with her father at long last after so much pain or making one last attempt to save her daughter, Hannaniah chooses to run after Leah, to find her first child at all costs.
Sending Aristocrates, Sophia, and her children off, Hannaniah sets out on her own to Masada, where she understands her daughter has gone with Eliezar. She recounts a dream she had of her father and of Sheshmesh her old dog friend. ‘Am I the messiah?’ he asks Hannaniah. ‘That depends on you.’ As for Hannaniah she understands at long last that her father, good man though he was, made one mistake, believing himself to be the messiah when, in fact, through the simple act of loving, we all are.
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ALBERTVILLE | Synopsis
Patrice Lumumba was wrong. Jesse Westcott knew what it was like to be violated. She knew what it was like to lose a loved one, to be insulted, degraded. To be betrayed. Albertville was as much her nemesis as it was Lumumba’s. But only one would survive it.
Just thirteen years old when her brother Bill, a Boston-educated lawyer, returns to Birmingham, Jesse is a product of the segregated Alabama of the 1940s and 50s. Her brother, an activist with the NAACP, intends to go into nearby Albertville for voter registration. Jesse worships her brother but knows him to be impetuous, a courter of trouble, someone who won’t be pushed around. Against her better judgment, she joins him on his fateful ride. But on the road to Albertville, he parks the car and disappears into the neighboring woods. Jesse never sees him again. Worse. The men who do away with her brother do not leave her alone.
Jesse carries the scars of Albertville north to Boston. She keeps them buried deep inside even as she graduates college, prepares to join the Olympic fencing squad, earns her Masters in French Literature. Her future is mapped out for her. She wants to live the literary life, become a novelist and settle on the banks of the Seine. She is conservative, voted for Eisenhower, and takes a dim view of civil rights leaders who advocate defiance. But everything changes when Allan Crosswhite, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and her former lover, recruits her to join the US State Department.
Crosswhite has plans for his ex. He is not just a journalist but has secret connections to the CIA. It is now 1960. The Cold War is at its height. Korea is over. Viet Nam lies ahead. Nixon is fighting Kennedy for the presidency, and the war between the East and the West is about to get even hotter.
Using Crosswhite’s connections, Jesse is assigned to the American embassy in the Congo at the moment that African nation gains its independence from Belgium. Mutiny awaits. Secession. Civil War. It is a dangerous stage to stand on. Only the most charismatic of men can hold the country together. Only the most dangerous will let it fly apart in the face of unwanted Western intervention. Patrice Lumumba is elected by his people to be that man. And Jesse has been chosen to be his American watchdog.
ALBERTVILLE is the coming of age story of a young black woman, raised in the embattled American South, sent into the heart of darkest Africa to bond with a man who resembles her brother, but whom she must try to save at all costs while her handlers at State and the CIA seek his removal. The novel ends as it begins, this time on the road to Albertville, the Congo. Lumumba has escaped his captors and made a mad dash for his own political base in Stanleyville. The UN is after him. The Congolese army under future dictator Joseph Mobutu is after him. Can Jesse even trust her lover Crosswhite in her lonely fight to save the Congo? The West wants Lumumba dead, and Jesse, fired by State, now on her own, follows Lumumba into the wilderness to try to save him. It is a road Jesse has traveled once before. It is a road she will never leave behind.
Confronted by the questionable invasion of Iraq and the profound consequences this nation has faced economically, socially and politically as a result; faced, as well by the widening hostile divide between Red Staters and Blue, readers of ALBERTVILLE will learn that little has changed since the Cold War ended. Only the faces of the enemy has changed.
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ASUNDER | Synopsis
As Kinnie Whitfield stares out the bedroom window of her farm house in Maine, all she can see is snow and darkness. The blizzard she can handle even if the weather forecasters are predicting two brutal storms back-to-back, shutting down and isolating New England from the world. Kinnie’s a married woman with an unemployed spouse she no longer loves and autistic twin sons she adores. She is an Army veteran who served her country as a sniper in Afghanistan. Now she supports her family driving a snow plow. Good money, vital money, this time of year. But squinting into the blurred blackness of the first Nor’easter, she can’t know that within a few hours, while she is plowing out the parking lot of the local bank, agents of the FBI and Immigration will be surrounding her home, her husband will be committing suicide, ending her life as she knows it and taking her two sons to the grave with him.
It is January 2012. The primary season is about to begin leading to the election of a new administration. The nation is asunder, divided along angry political lines. Angry and violent. Conservative militias take up arms. Radio talk show hosts encourage insurrection. Blue states. Red states. Threats are made against the life of the incumbent president. With unemployment remaining high and benefits ceasing, desperate people take to the streets. Leading the charge towards change, stirring the masses, enjoying her notoriety and oblivious to her own evident shortcomings, ex-candidate for vice president Becky Martin arrives in Maine just in time for the nation’s first primary. She is not alone, for there are those in the shadows who dislike her as much as they detest the sitting president and will kill her to stop her from replacing him.
Rich Francoeur is a Boston sports reporter with no political interests or entanglements. A former high school classmate of Kinnie’s, he has no idea that his wife is cheating on him, that his best friend has just been murdered or that his mother has kept secret from him her own past of violence and revolution. Drawn back to Maine in the path of the storm and in the wake of two deaths, he finds Kinnie Whitfield just as others are intent on using her skills with a rifle and her anger at the world to assassinate presidential candidate Becky Martin.
ASUNDER may be the future of America if this country does not realize political change soon. Even the most astute and rational of us may resort to violence if there are no other choices. Violence driven by hatred and vengeance, fear and the will to survive at all costs. Kinnie Whitfield has faced the worst any woman can. Rich Francoeur is about to see his paranoia come to life. Both lives may be torn asunder by enemies waiting for them in the darkness and in the storm.
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TRACES OF A LIFE | Synopsis
Archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer has been around the world seeking the greatest treasures of antiquity. In Afghanistan and in Iraq she risked her life pursuing the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his daughter Hannaniah. She is a driven woman conflicted by loyalty to her faith and unrelenting passion for historic truth. But it is in Boston on a lonely harbor island that she will discover the secret that will unearth the greatest, deepest secrets of her own life.
In her early 30s, Molly is a highly educated, passionate explorer and teacher bearing up under the pressures of her recent finds in the Middle East. The president of the college where she teaches, a Catholic institution, questions her academic integrity. The press hounds her to reveal the identity of the bones she uncovered in the middle of the Iraqi war. Ghostly calls begin to come every night plunging her into a mystery that will involve her own family and her own dark past.
When Molly was a child, she was raised by a single mother, a brilliant sociologist and political activist. She never knew her father. When her mother dies in a fire on an island in Boston harbor inhabited only by a single dwelling, she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, a Boston police detective. She is unaware that her mother had been involved with underground activities providing illegal abortions to local girls. She is unaware that her mother was conducting an even more counter culture love affair with a woman known to Molly only as Aunt Tabby. She is unaware, now, that a killer is cleaning up old traces of what really happened on that island. Conducting an investigation of old Indian remains, Molly inadvertently stumbles upon the remains of her own past and the truth of what happened to her beloved mother thus putting herself in the path of a psychopathic killer.
The conflict of faith and intellect that haunts Molly began on a lonely island, in the dark, in a house on fire, lost in smoke, crying for her mother. Those TRACES OF A LIFE have never left her soul. They are now coming back in bits of bone, flashes of memory, and in the frightening calls that come to her in the middle of night. Surviving them will take all the faith and love that has survived with Molly all these years.
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LIGEIA | Synopsis
In 1850, America is ten years away from bloody conflagration. War with Mexico has been won. Now a war from within is being waged. The North wants to put a halt to the expansion of slavery into the new territories, from Texas to California. The South will take up arms to defend its ‘peculiar institution.’ Compromise is the word of the day, but is it possible?
In 1850, Zachary Taylor is President of the United States. Though a native Virginian and slave owner, he has served in the military for over three decades and will fight to the death to uphold union. Despite being the general who defeated the Mexicans at Monterrey, the hero of the war with Mexico, he is mistrusted by North and South. For him, compromise is out of the question. Not so for his vice president. In the halls of congress and on the dusty, muddy streets of Washington City, whispers abound, the muttering of angry people who would just as soon see Ol’ Rough and Ready out of the way. He’s old. He’s out of touch. He’s stubborn and a danger to the peace and harmony of the land.
Ligeia Taylor, twenty-eight years old, and born into slavery, adores her master, the twelfth president of the United States. A loner among the slaves brought from Louisiana to the White House, she longs for freedom with every breath she takes and every page of every book she reads. Ligeia is self-taught. Not only can she read, but she can write. And through her friendship with the mulatto engineer Martineau, she sends her poems to local men of letters in the desperate hope that one day she will earn her freedom through publication of her verses. Her favorite author is Edgar Allan Poe whose despair and grim outlook on life resonates with Ligeia. Both in their own ways are desperate for redemption.
Never has there been such a love story between two such different individuals. The one a slave, who has lost her only child and been disfigured by the wife of her first master. The other a renowned author destined for an untimely end. When Taylor dies of a sudden illness, the two, Ligeia and Poe, are brought together by the force of Ligeia’s beliefs. She doesn’t know that Poe has himself died, months before, and is appearing to her now as a lonely spirit who can only be seen by those who know slavery of the soul. He is her guide, her mentor, and she the only thing between him and purgatory.
At a time when the greatest men of American history dominate — Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglass — it is a slave and a drunkard who find resolution, a man and a woman who find the meaning of true love.