New Tacoma, Washington Territory was a rough, frontier
town in the 1870s, a community of barely 300 people, where life was centered on
the waterfront, and revolved around the Northern Pacific Railroad. It was a place magazine articles described as
having a climate just like that of the Mediterranean. This is the town to which
the Bacom family, Ira, Verdita and their
three children, Hildy, age 12, Reuben, 8 and Dovie 1 1/2 have come, leaving
behind friends, family and the coal-dust air of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in
hopes that Ira will regain his health.
A Feather for a Fan is Hildy’s story of
her first year living on Puget Sound. The family has to find a place to live;
Hildy and Reuben start school where Hildy meets, among others, Nell,
an outspoken
girl of overwhelming poverty who wants Hildy’s mother to teach her how to be a
lady. While Nell becomes Hildy’s closest
friend, she gradually builds a community of eclectic friendships: Mrs. Money, who runs a stationary shop where
she also raises birds, Mr. Peak, a laborer who gives her a chicken and buys
bread she makes, and the Misses Violet, Lily and Rose, ladies of the night who
save Hildy’s life during a violent storm.
Living
in New Tacoma means learning to walk on streets where the mud is more than a
foot deep, or on wooden sidewalks under which pigs wallow and vermin thrives, a
town of massive mudslides that close the school, not to mention trigger happy
gamblers. But it’s also a place of great, unspoiled beauty—a bay full of steam
ships, bateaus, two and three-masted schooners and the occasional Chinese
junque, of so much seafood no one need ever go hungry, and Mrs. Wilkeson’s
amazing hat, the talk of the town. And even twelve-year-old girls have
romances. Samuel is an enigmatic boy,
part French Canadian and part Indian who is in and out of Hildy’s life
everytime something important happens.
The
book ends with a fire that burns a good portion of one whole street, after
which some of her friends move away, and which finally reveals the secrets Samuel
has been keeping.
In the 19th century, a twenty-two year old, unmarried woman
was on the shelf—already an old maid, destined to live on the charity of a
family member. For Jane Heath, this is not an option. Disappointed in love and
determined to make a life for herself, she takes a job at Wynters Way, the
remains of a burned manor house deep in the country near the little town of
Yearsley. The Wynters family is returning from India and Jane is hired to make
their home habitable.
From the day she leaves home, Jane
begins encountering the locals: a mute named Billy, a little person named
Bright who is destined to become her closest friend, and the aggravating local
doctor. And as if her job isn’t difficult enough, Wynters Way feels inhabited
by the presence of a mysterious family member, one the Wynters won’t talk
about. What are the strange sounds Jane hears? Bright says they’re just birds
on the roof and mice in the wainscoting. But that doesn’t explain pockets of
frigid air that suddenly appear, or the scent of apple blossoms only Jane
encounters.
Wynters Way combines life in a
brooding country house from the housekeeper’s perspective with a love story,
and a family mystery with a solution destined to change lives.
Tahuya Daze
Mercedes Mackaill is on a month’s leave of absence from work, and has
arranged to dog sit for her parents at their Hood Canal home near the little
town of Tahuya, Washington while they are away. It will be the perfect time,
she thinks, to write the “Great American Novel.” Surely someone who reads as
much as she does can write a book. The day she arrives, Mercedes meets retired
school teacher Alice Thorndyke over a table of used books and, a few days
later, watches as Miss Thorndyke’s body is pulled out of the canal. From then
on, nothing goes as planned. Something, or is it someone, sneaks around the
house at night, trying to get in. During a quick visit to her apartment in
Tacoma she learns that a man was seen picking the locks on her door. Her car is
broken into, she can’t figure out why. It contained nothing of value. However,
when someone loosens the plug in her boat and she nearly drowns, things start
to get serious. Mercedes’ life is further complicated by Dorsey Finch, the man she
saw with Miss Thorndyke a few days before the elderly lady drown. Finch had
been working as the retired teacher’s handyman, and asking the old timers a lot
of questions about the area. Mercedes and Finch’s love/hate relationship leads
them to The Lady of the House, a used
book Mercedes bought at the Tahuya Days festival, and a whole lot of questions
about who Alice Thorndyke really was and, more importantly, who wanted her dead
and why..
Karla's Books can be found here http://bookswelove.net/authors/stover-karla-mystery-romance/
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