The Games We Play
This is the ninth book in the historic fiction series created by Kathleen Haun. The main characters from the previous books come together for a poker tournament in June of 1888 at a ranch in the lush green meadows of Bridgeport, California. We see again Lucy, Jim and Roger Murphy from Virginia City, and are reminded that they had become friends with Emily and Frank Eastman, as well as Charlotte and Vince Perry from Lone Pine. Some of the gamblers who come together for what they expect to be a high-stakes “poker tournament” are friends, and some we are told are meeting for the first time. But the one thing they all have in common is that they have something in their pasts they would like to keep hidden. Unfortunately, some of these men won’t be leaving the ranch alive. Along with the tension created by a weekend upended by shock and tragedy, the reader gets a close look at the way life was in a frontier town that exists today much as it did back in “the good old days” of the late 1800’s, including a visit to Bodie, California, as its big mining boom is fading into history.
Not Enough Forever
After the 1862 events in Digging Deeper, three desperate people journey east across the Sierra, looking for a place to settle. Their journey takes them over the Placerville Road (now Hwy. 50), through up-start Markleeville, the last of Monoville, the boom of Aurora, the infancy of Bodie, the rise of Bridgeport, the quiet charm of Genoa, the security of Carson City, and the unfettered glory of Virginia City. In 1875, their friend, Lucy Murphy (Chasing the Dream, Declining Fortunes, Digging Deeper), goes in search of her teenage son, and finds these towns very much changed. Eventually, they all cease their wanderings, but for uniquely different reasons.
Digging Deeper
How do we keep control over our lives? When events seem out of control, especially while hiding from our past? In Chasing the Dream and Declining Fortunes, Kathleen Haun introduced us to the self-reliant and determined Lucy Murphy. In Kathleen's seventh novel, Lucy becomes involved in a mystery that takes place in 1862 Placerville, a gold rush town mentioned in several of her books. While pursuing the solution of a number of ruthless acts challenging the town, Lucy has to confront some difficult truths, both about herself and those closest to her. We also get the full answer only hinted at in Declining Fortunes, as to why she moved her family to Placerville during the Civil War.
Declining Fortunes
In Kathleen Haun’s sixth historical fiction novel, packed with actual events of the 1880’s, Amanda and Roger Murphy (introduced in No Trees for Shade) learn that sometimes secrets are revealed in layers. These secrets dramatically impact the lives of those who are keeping them, as well as those who uncover them. Meanwhile, the fortunes of once fabulously wealthy mining towns like Bodie in California and Virginia City in Nevada, are changing rapidly, as are the lives of their citizens –- and the society in which they live.
Chasing the Dream
In Kathleen Haun's fifth book, she invites us into the ramshackle mining camps of the 1848 California gold rush during a time in history that changed the state, the country and the world in dramatic and unexpected ways. When enterprising women heard that miners would pay for good food, they traveled to the rough camps and when necessary used tree stumps for tables. This is the story of Lucy, an indentured servant who started out in the camps working for such a woman--but by chasing her dreams, ended up experiencing more of the world than she ever imagined possible.
No Trees for Shade
Kathleen's fourth historical novel gives the reader an opportunity to escape into the events that played out in the pioneer towns along the Eastern Sierra. If you ever wondered what it was like to live in the infamous town of Bodie, California during its exciting and fateful peak years, you will now have the opportunity via the year 1880. Kathleen's fans will recognize some of the people in the book, both real and fictional, from her previous novels--but will also enjoy meeting new people whose lives are dramatically changed simply because they chose to live in Bodie.
Moving On
Kathleen Haun's third novel once again offers insight into life in the 1800's, both on the Oregon Trail and along California's Eastern Sierra. Leaving war torn Missouri in 1863 on a wagon train headed west, the Carrington family experiences adventures and challenges that change their lives in ways they never could have imagined. Arriving in the West with secrets that can at any moment destroy their place in society and future happiness, they must face the reality that the choices they made in the past are forcing upon them an urgent reason to again be moving on.
Passing Storms
This eagerly awaited sequel to Dear Carrie, Letters from the Eastern Sierra 1878-1899 is Ms. Haun’s newest work of historical fiction set in the wild beauty of the Eastern Sierra. The saga of the Eastman and Perry families continues in a memoir written by Whitney Eastman in 1940 to reveal the long-hidden events occurring in her life between 1900 and 1908. Raised by doting parents and a loving community, Whitney marries and moves north to Bridgeport, expecting an equally happy life on a cattle ranch. But she soon discovers that the cloistered security of her childhood was poor preparation for dealing with a remote husband and secretive father-in-law, stunning revelations, devastating loss, and betrayals that challenge Whitney and those she loves in the Owens Valley as they weather the passing storms in their lives.
Dear Carrie, Letters From the Eastern Sierra
Letters discovered in an old trunk introduce the modern traveler to the towns of the Owens Valley in California, back when pioneers, cowboys, and women referred to as “soiled doves” still walked their streets and gold mines flourished in the Eastern Sierra: Cerro Gordo, Mammoth, Lundy, Aurora and Bodie. Emily’s letters describe her adventures, her friendships with women who traveled to the Far West over the Oregon Trail only twenty years earlier, and her years living in the wild mining town of Bodie. For two decades, she describes to her friend Carrie the people, places, and natural beauty of the Eastern Sierra and the Owens Valley before it became today’s recreational paradise and before the California Aqueduct cut through the length of the Valley carrying Sierra snow melt to Los Angeles.