Richard and Rachel fell in love as teenagers and married at twenty-one. Both had survived childhoods marred by adversity and early deaths. Richard trained as an accountant, and they had two beautiful children and a lovely home. Then, the ovarian cancer that ran in Rachel’s family struck, and she was gone without seeing her children marry or holding her grandchildren.

After her domineering father dies, leaving her a fortune, Karen Ryan decides to change her life. Having lived all her life in his shadow in a huge, isolated house in northern Wisconsin, she plans a long Italian vacation. But before flying out of Chicago, she meets handsome Paul Archer, marries him and her vacation becomes an unexpected honeymoon

Richard Machen, a naval lieutenant of American descent in England’s navy, and English heiress, Jane Ashford, duel alone in Napoleonic Europe to foil the Illuminati’s subversive plot for world power.

On December 4, in the year 1872, the American brigantine Mary Celeste, bound from New York to Genoa, was found abandoned but completely seaworthy, some 600 miles off the Spanish coast, with no sign of captain or crew.

Damaris Moore keeps having a dream of being chased through a forest by unseen demons prodding her with pointed sticks as she seeks the branched shelter of a large beech tree that in some strange way seem to offer her sanctuary.