The Lost Women of Mill Street
July 1864: As Sherman’s army marches toward Atlanta, a cotton mill commandeered by the Confederacy lies in its path. Inside the mill, Clara Douglas weaves cloth and watches over her sister Kitty, waiting for the day her fiancé returns from the West.
When Sherman’s troops raid the town and destroy the mill, Clara’s plans to start a new life in Nebraska are threatened. Branded as traitors by the Federals, Clara, Kitty, and countless others are exiled to a desolate refugee prison hundreds of miles from home.
Cut off from everything they’ve ever known, Clara clings to hope while grappling with doubts about her fiancé’s ambitions and the unsettling truths surrounding his absence. As the days pass, the sisters find themselves thrust onto the foreign streets of Cincinnati, a city teeming with uncertainty and hostility. She must summon reserves of courage, ingenuity, and strength she didn’t know she had if she and Kitty are to survive in an unfamiliar, unwelcoming land.
Inspired by true events of the American Civil War’s final year, The Lost Women of Mill Street is a vividly drawn novel about the bonds of sisterhood, the strength of women, and the repercussions of war on individual lives.
Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury
Inspired by actual events and my own family history…
It’s 1913 and Great Lakes galley cook Sunny Colvin has her hands full feeding a freighter crew seven days a week, nine months a year. She also has a dream—to open a restaurant back home—but knows she’d never convince her husband, the steward, to leave the seafaring life he loves.
In Sunny’s hometown on Lake Huron, her sister, Agnes Inby, mourns her husband, a U.S. Life-Saving Serviceman who died in an accident she believes she could have prevented. Burdened with regret and familial demands, and longing for more than her job at the local dry goods store, she looks for comfort in a secret infatuation.
Two hundred miles away in Cleveland, youngest sister Cordelia Blythe has pinned her hopes for adventure on her recent marriage to a lake freighter captain. Finding herself alone and restless in her new town, she convinces him to let her come on a trip up the lakes—during a month notorious for its unpredictable weather.
On November 8, 1913, a deadly storm descends on the Great Lakes, bringing hurricane-force winds, whiteout blizzard conditions, and mountainous thirty-five-foot waves that last for days. Sunny and Cordelia fight to survive while Agnes shelters at a life-saving station besieged by the fury. Amidst the chaos all three women are offered a glimpse of the clarity they seek, if only they dare to perceive it.