Jessica And The Golden Swan Feather

Using a medieval wishing charm to escape from a big city museum where she is mistakenly locked in for the night, Jessica, along with Annie-Mae, a homeless Rag Doll, ends up not at home but in OR, where the country’s evil Great Leader holds the charm hostage until brought a feather from a deified Golden Swan in Hoppitland, country of the Stick people. With a brief welcoming respite among friendly rats in their the canyon country of Rodentia, then a perilous trip across a great man-eating Vine Forest, Jessica brings a golden feather back to OR where, after Annie-Mae chooses to return to Rodentia, she uses the medieval charm, first in a heads-on defiant showdown with the all-powerful Great Leader of OR, then to wish herself safely back home.

Chase Morse and his brother, Haydn, heirs to an auction-house empire, split their time between Manhattan and The Moorings, the idyllic family estate on Nantucket, but when a body turns up at The Moorings and a priceless painting goes missing from inside the tight-security vault at the auction house, family secrets get harder to keep. As Gabrielle, a French journalist sent to write features on the glittering New York art world, becomes entangled with the family, the police start digging, and the stakes are high—eighty million dollars, pilfered and then lost in risky Russian investments. Can an entitled one-percenter with expansive resources, and enlisting the help of a wily art forger, outsmart the art cops and the old guard within the company? The glittering, exalted world of art auctioning hides love, hate, and murder in a wealthy and socially prominent family when the forgery of an anonymous Cape Cod painting threatens to destroy them all.

Artist Andretta Salinger awakens one day in an old stone country house she’s bought from a family ownership of six generations to find she’s been living for two years with the bones of someone murdered and buried in the floor of her cellar. When Andretta finds herself drawn willy-nilly into the small-town police investigation of a homicide committed in 1868, it’s into the scandal-ridden lives of the great railroad barons of the day and to identifying the murderer.

Revelation after his death by an elderly priest of a serious crime, reported in the sanctity of the confessional, leads a police officer friend to follow from birth the strangely connected fate of two girls, one from wealth, the other from poverty, whose paths through all their growing years are unknown to each other but which cross dramatically in the arrest of one for assault and deadly arson.

An historic lighthouse at the tiny coastal village of Shinnecock witnesses during one month both murder and espionage when the select Summer White House Oval Office is lodged in the neighboring private home, to which the U.S. president retreats on holiday with his entire family, and which this year sees a highly secret visit by a prince from Saudi Arabia, where two American scientists are held hostage.

Abandoning a life she herself terms “thrown away,” Ana Masaryk, a Purple Heart Army vet of the Iraq war, begins anew in a small northern New England town, where she finds refuge with the gay illustrator of children’s books in an abandoned church he has transformed. A necessary job covering local social functions and writing obits for The Chronicle, the town’s newspaper, leads Ana into an impassioned whole new life of consuming work as the paper’s publisher and editor, and to her defiant defense of it, at the risk of losing everything, when the paper’s independence is threatened by a big-city news chain owned by a politically ambitious billionaire, who always gets whatever he wants through lies, distortions, and sowing dissension.

Alicia, a young American girl in England, visits an old churchyard and evokes Elvira, a sprightly, mischievous young ghost who in turn introduces her to three extraordinary women from three critical moments in history, when each triumphed in a male-dominated society. Considered the greatest English queen, Matilda of Flanders came from Normandy with William the Conqueror and was at the forefront of politics and culture in her era. Sofonisba Anguissola was an accomplished Renaissance artist who studied with Michelangelo and became his protégé, and Lucie Dillon, once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette at Versailles, survived the Terror, living in the new United States as a farmer for a time before returning to France to aid Napoleon and Josephine build the social connections they needed to manage their political power. In their own words, these ghostly women describe their widely different lives and loves, and the three periods in which they lived—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.