The raincrows' warning rode upon a chill wind down the Kentucky mountainside to Katelin Stone that Indian Summer day. The rain would come, and her world as she knew it would end. There would be a new beginning for her. Her mother's death sets into motion the events that become her hell. Her father's surprise marriage brings into their home a calculating and money-grabbing woman and her troubled teenage son, who terrorizes Katelin with vicious attacks and cold-bloodied threats that force her to forsake Walter, her true love, and at sixteen to marry a man she hardly knows. Her abusive marriage becomes her prison. She secrets her dreams and her love for Walter in a broken heart and almost loses herself after the consecutive deaths of her twin babies. Nurtured by loving friends, she finds renewed strength to escape her marriage and fulfill the promise made to her dying mother. But will she have the strength to overcome the paralyzing fear that keeps her from Walter's arms?
In an unfamiliar city, Jessica Langdon, an aeronautical engineer, has just seen her daughter murdered. Her vow of vengeance rockets her into a tidal wave of danger and deception. With only a set of initials and two words to go on, she takes an alias and tracks down the killers. Fear is her only companion until she meets Special Agent Hunter Rawls. But he wants her to stay out of his ongoing investigation of "the corporation," a mammoth organization whose powerful members will stop at nothing to achieve their purpose--- a plot of conspiracy that threatens a takeover of the United States government. And she will stop at nothing to stop them all.
Homer Ashley Fields has only one living relative, an aging grandfather, who for thirty-two years has lived in self-imposed silence rather than to answer questions about his mysterious past. At age twelve, Homer stopped asking; the scar on his arm a reminder never to ask again. That day, his grandfather sat down with a notebook and a pencil and began to write, over the years filling notebook after notebook and locking them in an old trunk. Homer suspects the answers to all his questions are on the pages, but he will not betray his grandfather's trust. When a stranger's appearance terrifies his grandfather into a near heart attack, Homer feels certain the man is linked to his grandfather's past, and contemplates breaking into the trunk. By chance, he finds two handwritten pages behind the trunk that reveal the horrible truth that took the lives of thousands and drove his grandfather from his home at age eleven to fend for himself. Now he must find his ailing grandfather's siblings, if they are still alive- before it is too late.
Jessie stumbled into the kitchen and glanced to the cat clock Hunter had given her, the eyes darting back and forth in sync with the movement of its tail. It was just six-thirty. Ordinarily, the whimsical clock produced a smile.
She tightened the belt of her robe and glared at the dirty cups and glasses piled in the sink. She grabbed a cup from the top of the heap, rinsed it, and filled it with coffee she had made more than two hours earlier, after returning from Scott Brooks'. Breaking into his house served only to open her eyes to just how irrational she had become.
One day back in the winter of 1929, the wind blew up quite a snowstorm, howling through the valley and racing over the river in a small railroad town in Estill County, Kentucky. I was just a small child, six or seven, the best I remember, and snowstorms were not unusual, but this one was different. More than likely, it stands out in my memory because of what happened that night.
In the days when the sun burns hot and the air stands still, the seas boil, wine turns sour, man and beast become languid, and dogs grow mad. The Greeks and ancient Romans viewed these days, early July through early September, as an evil time. They called them "days of the dogs." As a young child in Kentucky, I grew to fear the approach of July, when the air between land and sky trembled with heat, and the hay in the fields shriveled into itself to hide from it. "Dog days is here," my grandmother would warn, "stay away from bats, skunks, and dogs what foams at the mouth. They'll bite ye and turn ye into one of 'em. Ye'll beg fer water and scream at the sight of it."
When I shut the door to my room, all I could think of was that five gallon lard can Paul and I hid in an old abandoned tobacco barn off Barnes Mill Road. We had buried it beneath a mound of musty and mildewed hay piled in a dark back corner.
That afternoon as the school bus carried me the thirteen miles back to Opossum Kingdom, I still couldn't believe what happened in home room. So lost in my thoughts was I that the antics of rowdy schoolmates failed to pull me from them. Except for my obnoxious first cousin Patsy, who lived in town. I was glad when she got off the bus.
