My Books

My debut young adult novel, EVERLASTING, has been picked up by Scholastic Press and is due to hit bookshelves the summer of 2010.

Here’s a teaser:
Sailing aboard her father’s trade ship is all seventeen-year-old Camille Rowen has ever wanted. But as a lady in 1855 San Francisco, her future is set: she is to marry a man she isn’t sure she loves, or condemn her and her father to poverty; forever lust after a sailor a few social classes below her; never again explore the open sea; and do it all with charm and grace, even if it is a sham.

On her last voyage with her father, Camille learns the mother she has always believed dead is in fact alive and in Australia. When their Sydney-bound ship goes down in a gale, and her father dies, Camille sets out to find her mother and a map in her possession—a map believed to lead to a stone that once belonged to a legendary civilization of immortals. The stone can do exactly what Camille wants most: bring someone back from the dead. Unfortunately, her father’s adversary is also on the hunt for the stone, and she must race him to it.

With the help of the sailor Camille is undeniably falling in love with, and with an Australian card shark acting as their guide, Camille eludes murderous bushrangers, traverses dangerous highlands, evades a curse placed on the stone, and unravels the mystery behind her mother’s disappearance sixteen years earlier. When another death shakes her conviction to resurrect her father, Camille must choose what—and who—matters most.

Other finished projects I’m excited about:

• A middle grade mystery series revolving around fourteen-year-old Suzanna Snowe, the adventurous daughter of two hotel managers in lackluster Loch Harbor, New Brunswick, 1905. She’s being groomed for the hospitality business, but Zanna longs for mystery, excitement, and danger…all the things her famous uncle, Detective Bruce Snowe deals with day to day. When Zanna witnesses the abduction of a hotel guest while in one of the servant tunnels, she is determined to solve the mystery herself, and prove she’s just as clever as her Uncle and his handsome young apprentice.

• A young adult contemporary novel, BEFORE PATAGONIA. Fresh on the heels of her father’s suicide and her mother’s rebound marriage, sixteen-year-old Julia deliberately crashes her car through the front doors of her Boston high school and is expelled. Her stepfather, Bernard, sends her to live on his family’s estancia, a sheep farm in Patagonia, Argentina. There, she meets Bernard’s family: his cousin Val, whose silence is more intense than the winds that assail the prairie; Annalise, Bernard’s sister, who treats Julia like a communicable disease; his mother, Carmen Manzín, a hardy woman striving to keep her estancia afloat; and Raimi, an insightful ranch hand who gently draws Julia out of the shell she has barricaded herself in to avoid the role she played in her father’s death.