Böcker av John Smolens

In 1924, an orphan train passed through the Midwest, and two teenagers, seeking a new life, find nothing but hardship when taken in to live on a farm in Michigan. After they are forced to flee, they are hunted by a determined police chief and the reemergent KKK. A bond of mutual trust and determination help the two orphans navigate a stark American landscape shaped by prejudice, hypocrisy, and fear.

Day of Days examines how traumatic events scar one's life long after the dead are laid to rest and physical wounds heal, and how an anguished but resilient American village copes with a bombing in 1927, which at the time seemed incomprehensible, and yet now may be considered a harbinger of the future.

n the tradition of The Name of the Rose and Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Schoolmaster's Daughter is the story of a family torn asunder by political strife and a determined young woman who makes courageous sacrifices for the patriot cause at the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Dr. Giles Wiggins, a surgeon and veteran of the American Revolution, works tirelessly to save lives, often disagreeing with his medical colleagues on both the cause of the deadly ailment and its remedy. As the epidemic grows, the seaport's future is threatened by obsession, greed, and fear.

ohn Smolens's novel Cold was lauded for its "stunning brutality and uncommon tenderness". In the sequel, Out, nature and human nature again collide, illuminating the difference between being rescued and being saved.

Brilliantly renders a haunting and belligerent 20th-century landscape teeming with corrupt politicians, dissidents, and immigrants eager for a fresh start in an America where every allegiance is questioned, and every hope and aspiration comes at a price.

The Invisible World portrays how a remarkable family is indelibly marred by one of the darkest conspiracy theories in American history: the gunman on the grassy knoll. Boston journalist Sam Adams suspects that his father may have been the unidentified gunman in the JFK assassination. True or not, Sam is certain that his father, the elusive John Adams, is responsible for his sister Abigail's tortured life of drugs, prostitution, and the conviction that she is a descendant of Salem witches, as well as the strange circumstances that surround his mother's final hours. After Sam's mother dies and is cremated, her ashes are stolen. Believing that his father is responsible, Sam pursues the man he has not seen in years. He discovers that he is not the only one searching for his father-federal agents, a disgraced politician, a retired Boston cop, and several journalists join the chase. "e;The Invisible World is more than a first-rate political thriller,"e; says The Boston Globe. "e;It's an absorbing tale of alienation and loss, and the ramifications of a rootless, troubled family."e; What Sam Adams ultimately discovers is that the shadowy realm of conspiracies conjures a world of hidden truths and intrigue in which the familiar is the most mysterious force of all.

At nineteen, Hannah LeClaire already has a reputation in the village of Whitefish Harbor, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She is given to solitary walks along the shore of Lake Superior, and on a cold April day she meets Martin Reed, who has just moved north from Chicago to renovate a dilapidated house he has inherited. Hannah immediately realizes that Martin, who is ten years her senior, is also an outcast and quite unlike anyone she has ever met. A story of love, vengeance, and renewal, Fire Point depicts the young couple's attempt to rebuild their lives. But when Hannah's former boyfriend Sean Colby returns home after a mysterious early discharge from the army, he cannot accept the fact that she has a new lover and commits a series of increasingly violent acts against Hannah, Martin, and the house that has come to represent their future.

Internationally acclaimed, Cold takes us deep into a harsh, frozen world, where love, greed, and the promise of a second chance compel six people toward a chilling and inevitable reckoning. In the frozen reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, fierce winter storms hit without warning. The white opacity of one such blizzard allows Norman Haas to walk away from his prison work detail. Dangerously close to freezing to death, Norman is given shelter by Liesl Tiomenen, a middle-aged woman who lives in a house she and her late husband built in the woods. Armed with a rifle, she tries to turn him in, but when they set out on snowshoes, she suffers a fall, allowing him to flee again. Thus begins Norman's journey back to his past, back to the woman he loved who betrayed him, back to the brother who helped put him away, back to a dangerous web of family allegiances, deceptions, and intrigue. After finding Liesl injured and abandoned in the woods, Yellow Dog Township's sole full-time law enforcement officer Del Maki pursues Norman through a storm of mythic proportions.

In 1944 Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula. By 1956 they have become Frank and Claire Green, a young married couple building a new life in postwar Detroit. When INS agent James Giannopoulos tracks them down, Frank learns that Vogel is executing men like Frank for their wartime transgressions. As a series of brutal murders rivets Detroit, Frank is caught between American justice and Nazi vengeance. In Wolf 's Mouth, the recollections of Francesco Verdi/Frank Green give voice to the hopes, fears, and hard choices of a survivor as he strives to escape the ghosts of history.