This is the second in the Shallow Draw series of Western romances by the author Mae Claire, who is one of my favorite writers. I eagerly devoured her Hode’s Hill and Point Pleasant series, which are supernatural thrillers, and was anxious to see how she transitioned to a romance set in the 1860s. I was not disappointed. This book tells the story of a thirty-three year old widow named Leah Holt, and a handsome twenty-five year old man, Shey Lafferty, the rakish son of the wealthy local rancher. Leah has come to the town of Shallow Draw to live with her sister and her sister’s husband, who run a hotel, after taking the position of the local school’s new teacher. Shea is well-known for his amorous high-jinx with local women, and Leah meets him by literally falling down a hill into his lap during one of his assignations. The immediate attraction turns out to be quite mutual.  Shey’s father is also in a May-December marriage, where he is much older than his second wife, and he despairs of Shey ever settling down. A chance encounter by Leah with two drifters, who threaten to rape her, brings Shey back into her life to save her. One of the drifters, Monk Sunday, is not in Shallow Draw by chance, having mysterious ties to Shey’s new stepmother and her young son. The author teases the reader with the twists and turns she’s created to illustrate just how. This is an old-fashioned story of good vs really, really awful evil, revenge, mis-matched love, and excitement on the high plains, including brawls, threats, and shooting. The author writes with her usual compelling style – I inhaled the book in one day! Her attention to detail – the colorful scenery, the pace and business of ranch life, the smells, even the feel of the air and the weather – draw the reader right into the story. Best of all are her characters. Both Leah and Shey are drawn with loving strokes, and the families of each are distinctive in their personalities. I especially enjoyed the machinations of Leah’s sister, trying hard to match Leah with the town’s two most eligible bachelors, neither of which Leah, nor I, found at all attractive. Monk Sunday is a truly nefarious character, associated with equally odious side-kicks, and the reader will be longing for his elimination as much as Shey and his father. I leave the reader to discover how the Lafferty Ranch became named the Diamond Jack and how Shey relates to Monk Sunday. I very much enjoyed this read and look forward to reading the first book in this series, as well as the next. Highly recommended! About the author (from Amazon): A member of the International Thriller Writers, Mae Clair is also a founding member and contributor to the award-winning writing blog, Story Empire. She has achieved bestseller status on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with several of her novels chosen as book club selections. Mae writes primarily in the mystery/suspense genre, flavoring her plots with elements of urban legend and folklore. Married to her high school sweetheart, she lives in Pennsylvania and is passionate about cryptozoology, old photographs, a good Maine lobster tail, and cats. Discover more about Mae on her website and blog at MaeClair.net 0 0

Everyone probably has a childhood memory of a friend—or an enemy – that remains with them despite the passage of time. For me, that person was Ann. Ann was what my mother called a wild child and for some reason, she hated me. I only discovered why decades later. Although we both belonged to the Eel River Beach Club and took swimming and diving classes together, we didn’t spend time together outside of school until junior high, when we played sports. Her closest friends were her sisters and friends that lived in an area known as Chiltonville, several miles from where I lived. In junior high, Ann went out of her way to be nasty to me, forcefully bumping into me whenever we met and making snide remarks. “Little Miss Smarty Pants. You think you’re better than me.” The usual kid stuff, to which I never responded because I wasn’t a fighter. But I did wonder why she hated me. Ann loved to challenge authority. One day in middle school, she mashed herself inside her full length locker and had a friend shut the door. The bell rang, and we all went inside our home room – without Ann, of course. The teacher took attendance and noted the absent Ann.             “Ann. Where is Ann?”             “Outside in the hall,” several of us replied.  The teacher went out of the room, ostensibly to look for Ann in the corridor, then came back in, saying, “No she’s not.”             “She’s in her locker.”             Another visit to the hall. “No, she’s not.”             “She’s IN her locker.”             We heard the locker door open, and then, “GO DRECTLY TO THE PRINCIPALS OFFICE.”   That is the Ann I remember.  Ann was especially mean to me on the school bus. She and a cadre of other kids from Chiltonville were the first to be picked up by the bus in the morning. I was one of the last pick-ups and drop-offs on that route. Ann made a habit of moving her friends around in the bus so she could sit next to me on the way home. This allowed her to kick me in the legs and elbow me in the side at will. I took it, and eventually, not getting a response, she would stop. Still, I had bruises and my fuse got shorter. Frenchy Roubidoux drove the Chiltonville bus for all my years in junior and senior high, a man who always wore a newsboy cap and who came up to my shoulder on a good day. He’d fought in World War II – or at least that was the student rumor. Frenchy always had a smile and greeted us by name, and I knew he knew what Ann was doing but figured we would work it out. One day, on the way home, my fuse lit. When Ann kicked me, I hauled off and kicked and pushed her so hard she fell on the floor. Frenchy stopped the bus and walked back to where Ann laid sprawled in the aisle.               “She kicked me!” Anne whined, bringing up some real tears and looking a little surprised.             “And well-deserved,” replied Frenchie. “Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing to her?” He pulled her up and marched her to the front of the bus. “Get off. You can walk home.” The bus riders gave an audible gasp, since we were more than two miles from her house. I remember looking back and seeing her standing forlornly by the side of the road. Silence reigned in the bus for the rest of route. We’d never seen Frenchy lose his temper. I quietly thanked him when I got off. Ann never hit or kicked me again, and we played amicably as teammates on the high school field hockey and basketball teams. We even occasionally exchanged words. I found that I admired her wildness, her athletic ability, and I loved listening to her adventures, things I would never, or could never, dare do. I remember being at a slumber party with her and some other friends during our junior year. Sometime after midnight, she exited via a second story window, climbing down an outside trellis, in order to spend the night with her boyfriend. She climbed back in around seven AM. No one said a word. Soon after, her parents sent her away to a boarding school, but apparently she was just as willful there, because she was back for her senior year. My mother told me many years later that Ann had stolen some money when she was at our house for a day when we were both very young, something I didn’t remember at all. Ann’s mother made her come back and apologize, and Mom said that might have been why she hated me. That and the fact her mother held me up as an example of the girl she wanted Ann to be – polite with good grades and little trouble. In other words, a nerd. Too bad for Ann, because I was actually far from perfect. In retrospect, I don’t blame Ann for feeling the way she did, but I sure wish I’d known at the time. Maybe we could have been friends instead of frenemies. Anne developed cancer in her forties, and, after what my classmates said was a brave fight, died. On a whim, I went to see her mother when I was in Plymouth for my fiftieth high school reunion. We had a nice chat about Ann and I asked where she was buried. He mother gestured to the barn where they kept their horses. I drove down and found a stone bench with her name on it. I sat on the bench for a moment, thinking about our troubled relationship, and realized why I had fashioned the main character in my mystery books after her, the feisty, challenging frenemy of my childhood. 0 0

My Mom used to write things down as she remembered them, and this is something I recently found among my papers. The original Memère (according to Mom) was her grandmother, my great-grandmother.) Mom’s mother, my grandmother, became Memère in turn for me and my brother, and now I am Memère (Maymay) to my grandchildren. That name has quite the history! So my great-grandmother wanted some good photos taken of her and Pepère, her husband. He agreed as long as he could have one special one taken just of him. His special photo of him is of a man with his back turned to the camera! The original Memère and Pepère had several children, among them my grandfather (called Peno) and his brother Leon, along with three daughters, Cora, Josephine and Olive. The daughters were of the opinion, probably gotten from their mother that their father was a bum, because he liked his bucket of ‘suds,’ as they called it, when he came home from work. The original Pepère was a wood carver, and he did altars, statues, and communion railings. As such he had to travel and was often away from home for a month, taking two or more days to get home, walking and hitching rides on wagons. For this reason, the whole family (except Pepère) was against liquor – until a time when Pepère was very old, when Leon decided to do what other French Canadian families always did on New Year’s Day: serve alcoholic drinks to visitors. He had Peno buy one bottle each of rye, gin and rum for the celebration. My Mom and her dad, Peno, went to visit the family after Mass on the first of January that year. Others had visited before so Leon apologized because all he had left was half a quart of gin. He fixed them drinks, a water glass half full of gin with a little water and ice cubes. It was so powerful that Peno poured his onto Olive’s plants and Mom poured hers down the bathroom sink. Mom and Peno laughed all the way home because Cora and Josephine had greeted visitors in their pocking chairs and had something to drink with every visitor, mixing very strong drinks that Leon made, willy-nilly. We watched while they rocked their chairs back and forth across the floor. Mom and Peno did not visit them the next day for obvious reasons! I don’t remember Great Aunts Cora, Olive or Josephine very well, but I do remember Great Uncle Leon. He used to come to my grandparents’ house once a week to play pinochle with his brother. He and Peno played in the back room of the house, where I slept when I was there, and I remember them laughing and jabbering away in their French Canadian patois and having a grand old time. 0 0

I’ve been taught a thorough history of England during Tudor times through the author’s Tudor Trilogy (Owen, Jasper, Henry) as well as Mary, Tudor Princess; Katherine, Tudor Duchess; and other characters populating the Tudor world (Raleigh, Warwick). Here the author begins his exploration of the Stuart world, beginning with Anna of Denmark, wife of James I, king of England, Scotland and Wales, and son of Mary Queen of Scots. THe author tells us that Anna’s story began when the author researched Walter Raleigh’s herb garden at the Tower of London. Anna was a believer in the power of Raleigh’s herbal potions. Anna is the daughter of Queen Dowager Sophie and sister to King Christian, who will reign over Denmark for almost 60 years. Her marriage to King James of Scotland is arranged when she is very young. When she reluctantly leaves her family to sail for Scotland, her ship is met by savage storms at sea, which force her to return to Denmark. When she finally reaches Scotland, after several attempts, she finds the country very strange, with its odd customs and a difficult native language. For several years, while she comes of age, she works to fit into the court, with its politics and paranoia, and tries to understand her husband, who has a deadly obsession with witchcraft. James believes he will be Elizabeth I’s successor, and the long wait until she dies is filled with tension. When James becomes King of England, Scotland and Wales, Anna once again finds herself in a glittering and dangerous court, where she must maneuver to hold her place as queen, exerting some influence on her husband’s reign. Anna becomes a strong character as she grows up, having to develop mettle in the face of the King’s male favorites. She has thirteen children. Many die young, and particularly tragic is the death of Henry, Duke of Wales, who was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps, leaving only Charles, the ‘spare,’ to assume the throne after James. Her role in the court’s politics, partially through many masques created and designed by the renowned Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, and starring Anna herself, dare to make political and personal statements. I was particularly impressed by her commissioned building of Denmark House, also known as the Danish Pavilion, in 1706, which became her residence. I had to find pictures of it, because the author’s grand descriptions! She dies at the young age of forty-four, in time to see her daughter Elizabeth begin her life as the ancestor of the Hanoverian dynasty through her thirteen children, but six years before her son Charles assumed the throne. I always enjoy this author’s books because of their depth of characters and his rich and sparkling backdrop of life at court with the food, the dress, the manners, the games. The food is tempting and the dress alluring. He has also successfully managed to represent the army of ladies who attend a queen by picking a few on which to concentrate. His detail and depth of knowledge of court intrigue, both Scottish and English, is richly satisfying to anyone with an interest in this era. Another book by Tony Riches to be highly recommended. About the author: Tony Riches was born in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, and spent part of his childhood in Kenya. He gained a BA degree in Psychology and an MBA from Cardiff University and worked as a Management Consultant, followed by senior roles in the Welsh NHS and Local Government. After writing several successful non-fiction books, Tony decided to turn to novel writing. His real interest is in the history of the fifteenth century, and now his focus is on writing historical fiction about the lives of key figures of the period. His novels Warwick, The Man Behind the Wars of the Roses and The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham have both become Amazon best sellers. Today Tony lives in Pembrokeshire, an area full of inspiration for his writing, where he lives with his wife. In his spare time he enjoys sailing and sea kayaking. Visit Tony online at www.tonyriches.co.uk 0 0

Garfield graciously allowed me his access to the computer today. I figured what he told you about me was one-sided, and I want to set the story straight. I joined the household two years ago. It’s taken that long for me to learn typing with my paws, but I’m here now. I’m a Manx. In case you don’t know what a Manx is, I’m a breed of cat originating on the Isle of Man, and have a mutation that has shortened my tail. Some Manx cats have no tails, but I have a stub, which I spend time twitching. I also have elongated hind legs and a rounded head. Manx cats come in all coat colors but I am a black and brown tabby. I was a runaway from a home I don’t remember and spent some time living on my own. During that time I got pregnant, and some cat rescue people picked me up and got me fixed up, spayed and chipped. Then I bounced around from here to there while they tried to find someone to give me a forever home. I understand that Mr. and Mrs. wanted another cat to keep Garfield company (as if!), and it was decided that they would take me. So here I am, two years later. I do like my life here, but I miss being outside. I’ve escaped three time, twice when the door was left open while Mrs. talked to a neighbor. But I didn’t go far and came back when I was called. The third time, I butted the screen door to the patio open and persuaded Garfield to join me! That didn’t last long, and Garfield is a big pussy (literally) who really doesn’t like being outside. Mrs. made a sign for the front door that was supposed to say Watch the Cat, but it came out Wath the Cat. Now everyone yells to anyone coming in or leaving to Wath the Cat. Her son even used it with his cats. It took some time for me to whip Garfield into shape. He is very jealous and short-tempered, and we usually have one hissy fit a day. However, we have mapped out our territory in the house, and generally get along. One thing I don’t like, though, is that he sleeps in MY cat tree. That big gallump squeezes into my little room and spends the mornings sleeping away. Not that I’ve ever slept there myself, but still, it’s just the idea. I do love sitting in the bathroom open (but screened) window to survey the back yard and I like sleeping on my cat tree with the sliding glass door open to the patio. I also will sit just inside the patio screen door or on the sofa cushions. There’s lots of things to see there in the morning – birds, squirrels and rabbits! Garfield says I am weird. I like to drink water from the faucet in the bathroom sink. And I also will drink water with my paw. I do like to walk around on the bed at night, and Mrs. gets upset with me when I walk back and forth over her head. But I do enjoy cuddling for short periods of time and I purr a lot – for petting, food, and fresh water. Garfield and I like to play and we have a ton of toys. He’s learned to take turns. And we eat the same food, although gets a lot more than I do. Mrs. fusses about me putting on weight because I’m such a small cat. But I can hold my own with Garfield. Mrs. says we’re frenemies. Well, my paws are getting tired so I think I’ll sign off. Samantha 0 0