Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing

Controversy abounds when a WWII veteran turned choir teacher has romantic relationship with student.

Alec Driver, a WWII veteran with advanced degree in hand, secures the post of choir teacher at a small town high school on Florida’s west coast. He quickly falls in love with a bright, talented and attractive student. Community outrage demands his dismissal prompting influential citizens to affect his rescue. National recognition for his choirs unprecedented performance of Beethoven’s NinthSymphony vindicates his supporters, or so it seems.

About The Author

Dale O. Cloninger is Professor Emeritus and former Dean at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and now the author of two novels (Death on Demand his first). While fiction, The Ninth Passage is based on his experiences while growing up on Florida’s west coast during the 1950’s.

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Lily Fairchild follows the life of a pioneer woman on the Canadian frontier over 77 years of her long life. She is witness to and a pawn of the great historical events of that period: the Underground Railroad, the clearing of the forest, the coming of the railroads, the discovery of oil, the two Riel Rebellions in the West and the flu pandemic of 1918. A story of love and survival.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Long-haul, multigenerational historical fiction such as this is often a victim of skewed perspective, as authors, deeply ensconced in often years of research, often overestimate how much detail their readers will want to endure. Gutteridge’s narrative is prodigiously researched (and includes a bibliography), but he never overloads his audience; instead, he seamlessly works the historical grounding into what is, first and foremost, an intensely personal story. The book’s large and varied cast is uniformly well drawn, but Lily towers over the rest; from her earliest scenes, she’s by far the most compelling figure in the narrative. Gutteridge believably and effectively captures her youthful exuberance, as well as her resilience, even in the face of a heartbreaking tragedy in the book’s final pages. He combines his character study with beautifully evocative prose; at one point, for instance, after sunset, “Lily was sure she could hear the River tuning up for its nightsong”; at another, a character’s skin is described as having “the pallor and touch of gray-white mushrooms too long in the rain.” Overall, the author does an excellent job of giving his narrative the feel of a life as it is lived. Readers of such books as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) or Anna Waldo’s Sacajawea (1978) will see a similar kind of storytelling here; it’s a difficult feat to manage, but Gutteridge does so. A long but intensely involving tale of a tempestuous life.

About the Author

Don Gutteridge is the author of 71 books, including 22 novels and 39 books of poetry. He is a graduate of Western University, where he is currently Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario.

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Published: September 2020

“Rocky meets the Shawshank Redemption”

Set in the real American dystopia of the Great Depression, The Blind Boxer is the story of a prison inmate known as Harvard who is offered his freedom if he will participate in a mysterious boxing match. Harvard, who is a former professional fighter, suffering from failing eyesight, is joined by two other fighters, but when the Big Fight begins the inmates learn that the rules of prize fighting and fair play no longer count and survival is the name of the game.

About the Author

Jim Lester holds a Ph.D in history and is the author of four successful young adult novels as well as a history of college basketball in the 1950s.

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Date Published: October 2020

Publisher: AjijicBooks Publishing

All good historical novels have a fascinating story written around a real event in history. In DESTINATION CALLAO the author has taken two separate historical events and woven them together into a thrilling story that has all the elements of adventure, romance and enough saber rattling to more than satisfy those with a taste for action, including a duel with cutlasses and a deadly ambush.

The year is 1851 and Conor Fitzgerald, a former Midshipman in the Royal Navy having passed his Lieutenant’s Examination fins he cannot get a Navy commission. He obtains a position as second mate on a merchant sailing ship that is heading for Callao, Peru, with a party of 180 Irish immigrants. To get to Callao the ship Louisa has to sail around Cape Horn in winter when it runs into more than just bad weather.

They arrive in Callao where the immigrants plans to set up a farming community are set back when they find that disease is rampant and they lose many in their number.Conor decides to stay in Callao where he goes to work for a Scottish ship chandler.

When the famous Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi arrives in Peru in October 1851 he and Conor become friends but Garibaldi has enemies from his previous military encounters and none greater than the French. The French colony in Lima tries to humiliate him and when that doesn’t work they set out to kill him. Conor finds himself drawn into these events and is forced to fight for his own life while trying to work out his future and his marriage prospects.

About the Author

After graduating from HMS Worcester Naval College in England, David Adamson Harper spent five years at sea as a deck/navigating officer. The latter two years in the Far East were the inspiration for his first book KWANGCHOW. After leaving the sea David joined the Grace Line in New York as a management trainee. He spent the rest of his long career in the maritime industry and worked all over the world in various executive positions.

He retired in 2008 and moved to Mexico to become a writer. Together with wife Susan and dog Bess he lives on the north shore of Lake Chapala in the village of Ajijic. The lake is 5,000 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the climate there is considered to be the best in the world, neither too hot in the summer nor too cold in the winter.

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Second Volume of the Berlin Tunnel Trilogy

Historical Fiction

To Be Published: September 8, 2020

From Amazon bestsellers list author Roger L. Liles comes the second volume
of his Cold War trilogy—THE COLD WAR BEGINS. The setting is
war-ravaged Berlin in late 1946. Spies from both sides begin to move with
relative ease throughout a Germany occupied by British, French, American and
Russian military forces. Kurt Altschuler, our hero, soon becomes one of
them.

While working behind enemy lines as an OSS agent in France during World War
II, Kurt learns that intelligence collection involves both exhilarating and
dangerous encounters with the enemy. He relished every moment he spent as
part of the vanguard confronting the Nazis.

That war has been over for 18 months when he is offered a job as a CIA
deep-cover agent in the devastated and divided city of Berlin. He jumps at
the opportunity, but is concerned that his guise as an Associated Press News
Agency reporter will offer little action. He need not worry. Soon, he is
working undercover, deep inside of Russian-controlled southeastern Germany.
Eventually, KGB agents waylay him and tear his car and luggage apart. His
chauffeur is beaten. He is threatened with prison, torture and death.

Enter Erica Hoffmann, a very attractive, aspiring East German archeology
student. Any relationship between an undercover CIA agent and an East German
woman is strictly forbidden; she might be a KGB or Stasi agent or operative.
But he cannot help himself—he has fallen hard for her. Kurt strives
assiduously to maintain their tempestuous, star-crossed relationship.

Eventually, Kurt works to counter the efforts of Russian and East German
spies, especially a mole who is devastating Western Intelligence assets
throughout Europe. He also must work to identify and expose enemy spies who
have penetrated the very fabric of the West German government and society.
He frequently observes to others that: “the spy business is like knife
fighting in a dark closet; you know you’re going to be cut up, you
just don’t know how bad.”

About the Author

Roger L. Liles decided he had to earn a living after a BA and graduate
studies in Modern European History. He went back to school and eventually
earned an MS in Engineering from the University of Southern California in
1970.

In the 1960s, he served as an Air Force Signals Intelligence Officer in
Turkey and Germany and eventually lived in Europe for a total of eight
years. He worked in the military electronics field for forty years—his
main function was to translate engineering jargon into understandable
English and communicate it to senior decision-makers in the
government.

Now retired after working for forty years as a senior engineering manager
and consultant with a number of aerospace companies, he spends his days
writing. His first novel, which was published in late 2018 was titled The
Berlin Tunnel—A Cold War Thriller. His second novel The Cold War
Begins was published in late 2020 and is the second volume in his planned
The Cold War Trilogy. This trilogy is based on extensive research into
Berlin during the spy-versus-spy era which followed World War II and his
personal experience while living and working in Europe. He is in the process
of writing its third volume of the trilogy which will be titled The Berlin
Tunnel—Another Crisis and takes the story into 1962 and the era of the
Cuban Missile Crisis.

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