To Look and Pass
Raised in a two-room shack behind his father’s smithy shop, Dan Hendricks was marked as an outcast from earliest childhood. The people of South Kenton assumed the poor, gangly boy would become as shiftless and dissolute as his drunkard father. However, Dan manages to remain honest and open-hearted into adulthood. He founders in his attempt to find the tenderness and support a man needs. He cannot be with the woman he truly loves, and the one he marries takes a perverse pleasure in seeing him suffer. At the limits of his endurance, when Dan finally breaks we are left to wonder whether this is a destiny foretold or a senseless tragedy.
Ceremony of the Innocent
Living with her aunt in poor, rural Preston, Pennsylvania, thirteen-year-old Ellen Watson loves books and music and is completely oblivious to her own beauty. But her extraordinary looks arouse envy and malice in the female townspeople—and lust in the males. Hired as a housemaid in the palatial home of the village mayor, Ellen soon catches the attention of his son, Jeremy Porter, who captures her heart in turn. He offers to send her to school, and four years later he proposes marriage. As America’s enemies gather, Ellen must face her own demons. The wife of the scion of a powerful political family, she has everything she could ever desire: security, children, and a successful, adoring husband. But when tragedy rips her life apart, Ellen will be forced to confront some terrible truths about her marriage, her family, and herself.
The Final Hour
Peter Bouchard journeyed from afar to intervene in the power struggle between Armand and Christopher Bouchard. At stake was control of the family’s vast conglomerate spanning the armament, airplane, and automobile industries. Now Peter and his wife, Celeste, have returned from Europe, where the winds of war are blowing once again. Peter warns that the coming conflict will be one of the darkest chapters in human history—but the Bouchards have always profited in dark times...A historical romance of power, bureaucracy, and forbidden love.
This is one of the three novels that can be said to form a trilogy: Its subject is the great Bouchard family, whose power spans a century and a half. TC's great feat here is to weave such a multi-farious group into a coherent story of the battles over America's destiny. The family review is of the 1st novel in the series, TC's first publication: Dynasty of Death.
Let Love Come Last
A “deeply engrossing” saga (The New York Times)...Born into the humblest of circumstances, William Prescott is determined to amass a fortune large enough to ensure that his four children will never want for anything. He’ll do whatever it takes to achieve his goal, even if it means plundering Pennsylvania’s forests of every last tree and destroying anyone who stands in his way. As William’s business empire grows, so too does his insatiable need to be loved and admired. William’s wife, Ursula, tries to fill their ostentatious home with warmth and common sense, but her efforts are destined to backfire. The children resent her for trying to discipline them, and William’s ambition blinds him to any point of view but his own. Only when two of his spoiled children plot against him does William realize that the ties that bind the Prescott family have become warped beyond recognition.
Never Victorious, Never Defeated
Founded in Portersville, Pennsylvania, in the latter days of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the Interstate is a small regional railroad with vast potential. Also, it is the birthright of Aaron deWitt’s sons: ruthless yet charming Rufus and stubborn, idealistic Stephen. When Stephen wins control of the Interstate, his victory starts a series of events that will roil the deWitt family for generations. Over decades, the Interstate grows into an enterprise capable of shaping the future of the nation. Yet, both its triumphs and defeats sow the seeds of the deWitt family’s downfall.
The Arm and the Darkness
A stirring tale of romance, suspense, and adventure in the grand tradition of Alexandre Dumas. In the tumultuous seventeenth-century France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu—a world of secret plots, passionate embraces, and angry mobs—Arsène, a swashbuckling nobleman, falls in love with a Catholic peasant girl.
Great Lion of God
A “beautifully written” and “truly outstanding” novel based on the life of Paul the Apostle (Cincinnati Enquirer)...This is a very human portrait of Saint Paul, one of the most passionate, dauntless, and complex figures of early Christianity—Pharisee, lawyer, theologian, and above all, a “man like ourselves with our own despairs, doubts, anxieties and angers and intolerances, and ‘lusts of the flesh.’”
A family review is location here on our TC website.
The Balance Wheel
Pennsylvania, 1913. A wealthy German immigrant family that manufactures steel precision tools must fight for their family's future in this “stirring...exciting” tale...As the winds of war sweep across Europe, anti-German sentiment turns the family’s allies against them, and war profiteers threaten to remake the entire steel industry into a merchant of death (Chicago Sunday Tribune).