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Based on her research into her grandfather’s past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.

In 1859, women have few rights, even to their own children. When her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha—bereaved and scared—flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naive woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York’s street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there. When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them.

As Van Reinhardt clears out her father’s belongings, she comes across a request penned by her father prior to his death. Examining the family portrait of her German immigrant ancestors that he has left her, Van’s curiosity grows about one of the children portrayed there.

Meanwhile in the 1870s, Kate is a German immigrant newly arrived in America with only her brother as family. When she and her brother split, she eventually finds her way back to him, but with a secret.

Van revisits the town and the farm of her ancestors to discover calamitous events in probate records, farm auction lists, asylum records and lurid obituaries, hinting at a history far more complex and tumultuous than she had expected. But the mystery remains, until she chances upon a small book—sized for a pocket—that holds Tante Kate’s secret and provides the missing piece.

Find more about Unsettled here.

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother’s narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.

But then Jane at 75, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of 45 years of hidden diaries. Daring to “read” Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora’s Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. This process, accompanied by strange physical symptoms—memories awakening in the body—forces an understanding, allowing Susannah to calm herself and work through each of them, finding ultimately that truth wins out. As Susannah Kennedy re-lives her life through her mother’s eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.

Find more about Reading Jane here.

Donna Marie Hayes had fortitude and smarts. She’d already survived so much. In this gripping memoir, Hayes recounts the story of her impoverished Jamaican childhood and eventual immigration to the United States at 14. She weathers hardships, including a strict church upbringing, family abandonment, and marriages fused with domestic violence. Then she breaks free as a single mother.

Decades later, Donna is educated and at the top of her game in New York City. Her career is soaring on Wall Street and she is starring in her own one-woman show off Broadway. Yet at the peak of her triumph, she is scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of her life” who she meets on an online dating site. The mastermind was not the usual faceless online fraudster, hiding behind a computer screen in a faraway land; rather, he slept beside her for a year and a half, pretending to be the love of her life.

This is the story of how that woman rose yet again to find her power, making the scam and her choice of such a man the last run along the broken roads of her past.

Find more about These Broken Roads here.

In this first case in the new Hugo Sandoval Eco-Mystery series, an old-school San Francisco building inspector must reluctantly venture outside his beloved city and find his sea legs before he can solve the mystery of how a 90-ton blue whale became stranded, twice, in a remote inlet off the North Coast.

Set on the turbulent Mendocino Coast against the backdrop of a failing fishing fleet and illegal cannabis grows, Sandoval encounters roadblocks and lies as he grapples with the connection between a red tag posted on the historic Chicken Cove ranch and the decomposing marine mammal at the foot of its cliffs.

Debilitated by more than a few idiosyncrasies, reluctant media darling Hugo Sandoval is a people’s hero, fighting the good fight in a modern era where development and climate change butt heads—and where each requested permit attempts to eclipse the old San Francisco Sandoval loves.