Last year on Valentine’s Day, I was featured by the Mark Twain House & Museum in the author spotlight, Romancing Mark Twain . Later in the year, my novel Tom Sawyer Returns won the Laramie Grand Prize for Americana Fiction in the 2021 Chanticleer International Book Awards . This year, it reached First Place in the 2022 contest for Mystery . I could not be more thrilled and honored. Both books in this series are the work of a lifetime. Of all the novels I’ve written, these a

The last, and most exciting, installment in the series, Steam! Romance and Rails. The Pinkerton & the Outlaw May 1874, Indian Territory A Pinkerton detective and an outlaw form a temporary partnership to solve a mystery and get caught in a net of corruption, crime, and murder. The Steam! series follows a trail of historical events surrounding the expansion of the railroad across the American West. For Lawless Hearts , I took inspiration from the history of the Pinkerton Agen

The author Mark Twain is best remembered for his satire and his scathing observations on human nature.  But there was another side to the man, Samuel Clemens…a romantic one. At age 32, Sam returned from a successful trip abroad with a new friend, Charles Langdon, who invited Sam to an outing with his family. It was late December 1867 when Sam joined the Langdons at Steinway Hall in New York City to hear Charles Dickens read from David Copperfield. The reading didn’t impress S

In my novel Redbird , elements from Cherokee myths are woven into the love story, which is set during a historical event in the 1870s involving the Cherokee Nation and the Katy Railroad. Read on to find out more about these fascinating legends that inspired me. Uk-ten-a Jake crept next to the dark side of the locomotive. Tonight, Uk-te-na didn’t hiss or spew its dark breath. The smoking dragon crouched on metal rails with its nose pointed south, directly at the heart of the T

The New Adventures covers feature original paintings by Missouri artist Gary R. Lucy From an early age, I’ve been afflicted with a fondness for two precocious Missouri-bred boys introduced to me by Mark Twain. As I read (and reread) Tom and Huck’s adventures, I hated to bid them farewell at a point where their stories were just taking off. I wanted to know what happened to them when they grew up. Did they find new adventures? Did they embark on the greatest adventure of all—f