A spinster schoolteacher in turn-of-the-century Charity, South Dakota becomes involved with a woman whose alcoholic husband has been accused of murder and whose relationship with a beautiful Sioux woman transcends friendship. Reprint.

Charity

Callen, Paulette

Literature & Fiction

BERKLEY

Having finally gained acceptance in the close-knit community of Charity, South Dakota, schoolteacher Augusta Roemer is reluctant to reveal her growing relationship with a Sioux woman named Jordis, but strain between sodbusters and the Native Americans forces it into the open

CHARITY: A Novel

United States

Simon&Schuster

This is an American cozy, with dogs.  Sally Kelleher, a grumpy heroine, and her four irrepressible baby-boomer friends are vacationing together in Sally’s small Midwestern hometown.  Her elderly mentor has just died and Sally believes the death was no accident.  She is attracted to a younger man who is also the chief suspect, somebody is trying to kill her and she is nearing menopause.  Who wouldn’t be grumpy? Things are never what they seem in a small prairie town, where long suppressed rage erupts and kills.  If Sally and her coterie of indomitable women do not discover the murderer, she will be the next victim. If you like feisty women, interesting dogs, and a unique place, you will like this book.

Death Can Be Murder: A Wild Women Mystery

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Two children have been stolen at different times out of the same household, one an infant from a bedroom, the other from a playground. Into this baffling case enters Shiloh & Company. Well known for investigative effectiveness to a cooperative if uneasy police department, unique among detective "agencies," Shiloh & Company is composed of disparate personalities--Sugartime, Hester, Isadora, Lance, Olive, Hawk--who reside in the single person of Shiloh. Shiloh's assorted identities, born out of extreme childhood trauma, have acquired a collective instinct, a priceless gift in detective work: an unerring tuning fork for the truth. Shiloh has been nursed back to functioning health and sanity by lesbian therapist Ray Martinez, still intent on integrating all the self-protective personalities. But this case is lethal to Shiloh's very identity: a crime involving children cuts to the heart of what first brought Shiloh to Ray's attention. In pursuing this mystery, the fragile mental health and fragmented existence of Shiloh will be tested to its limit. Allow yourself time for Command of Silence. Once you pick it up you will be reluctant to leave the compelling world of Shiloh and Company.

Command of Silence (Katherine V. Forrest Selection)

Spinsters, Ink

The friendship between Lena Kaiser, a sodbuster’s daughter, and Gustie Roemer, an educated Easterner, is unlikely in any other circumstance but post-frontier Charity, South Dakota. Gustie is considered an outsider, and Lena is too proud to share her problems (which include a hard-drinking husband) with anyone else. On the nearby Sioux reservation, Gustie also finds love and family with two Dakotah women: Dorcas Many Roads, an old medicine woman, and her adopted granddaughter, Jordis, who bears the scars of the white man’s education. When Lena’s husband is arrested for murdering his father and the secrets of Gustie’s past follow her to Charity, Lena, Gustie, and Jordis stand together. As buried horrors are unearthed and present tragedies unfold, they discover the strength and beauty of love and friendship that blossom like wild flowers in the tough prairie soil.

Charity (The Charity Series)

Literary

Ylva Verlag e.Kfr.

Fervent Charity continues the story of the friendship of five women who have nothing in common but the ground they walk on and the vicissitudes of post-frontier prairie life. Lena, a young mother living on the edge of heartbreak. Her sister-in-law, Mary, more beautiful than loved. Alvinia, midwife to the county and mother of ten. Gustie and Jordis, trying to make a home together but finding their place on either the reservation or in Charity precarious. The women come together in the face of natural hardships—childbirth, disastrous weather, and disease—and the unnatural malevolence of people who mean them harm. In the end, they find themselves bound by a secret none of them could have predicted.

Fervent Charity (The Charity Series)

For millennia, animals have been at our sides—as our companions, our workmates, and at the heart of the folk tales told by our early ancestors. In modern times, the emotional bond between humans and animals has frequently gone beyond interdependence: animals have become our most trusted friends.   Veteran author Paulette Callen celebrates that special role animals play in our lives in a new collection of stories, essays, and meditations titled simply, Epiphany.   Dogs, cats, horses, and a mouse, a wolf, a grizzly, and even a whale star in these stories, ranging in style and tone from the mystical to the personal, from funny vignettes to unsentimental explorations of why all these creatures belong in the fabric of life on our little planet. Callen shows how by making the effort to know these animals, we gain a deeper sense of our place as humans in this earthly tapestry.   Sure to appeal to anyone who has ever loved or tried to communicate with the creatures around us, Epiphany is an ode to what connects us all. Reading this collection, you just might experience an epiphany of your own and realize that we needn’t look to the stars to know we are not alone in the cosmos.

Epiphany: Stories, Essays, and Meditations on Animals

Short Stories & Anthologies

Ylva Publishing

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