Sudan: A Novel (54 page)
Authors: Ninie Hammon
In the deepest, darkest midnight of her soul, Gabriella writes a horror story about demons, and then one of them crawls up out of the pages and confronts her face to face. A deranged, fanatical fan who believes he is The Beast of Babylon from her novel turns up at a book signing and then comes after her to claim her as his bride--and to sacrifice her son, Ty, as an blood offering to their unholy union.
Gabriella, Ty and Ty’s grandfather, Theo, the crusty old stand-up comic called Slap Yo Mama Carmichael, run for their lives, back to the only place in Gabriella’s life where she ever felt safe. But once there, she discovers that facing the demons from her past may be harder and more dangerous than facing the one who hunts her.
As Ty and Theo battle their own personal monsters, Gabriella begins to fall for a man who carries a guilt she can’t even begin to imagine.
The predator who stalks Gabriella and her family tracks them down and corners his prey as a full moon rides high in the night sky and lightning explodes on the mountaintop. Then all their lives and demons collide in a final, apocalyptic celebration of one man’s madness. Gabriella’s only hope lies in the unexplainable power of two-thousand-year-old tree. Is it strong enough to save them? Can a single, perfect bristlecone pine somehow determine the fate of them all?
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talks briefly about
THE MEMORY CLOSET.
Something happened to Anne Mitchell when she was 11 years old that was so horrible her mind erased the whole first decade of her life. Twenty-five years later, she has come home to a dried-up Texas prairie town to live with her crazy grandmother in the rambling old house where she grew up in a final desperate effort to remember.
Unless she remembers, Anne will never understand the meaning of the anguished confession her mother choked out as she lay dying. And Anne will remain forever a slave to what she calls the “Bogeyman”—strange images from her lost childhood that haunt her dreams, stalk her waking hours and leer at her from the shadows behind her reflection in mirrors, windowpanes and wine glasses.
Though Anne has finally summoned the courage to face her past, she really doesn’t understand how expensive remembering will be. The cost of her memories could very well be her sanity. She might very well have to pay for her childhood with her life.
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talks briefly about
WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant, and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and two-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Piper Addington
… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.
Carter Addington
…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.
Maggie
…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.
But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…
… on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.
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Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.
Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.
Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewhere in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, Kentucky and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.
Ninie would love to connect with you on her website,
niniehammon.com
. You can also find there links to other social media where she can chat with you.
Copyright © 2010 Ninie Hammon
For full copyright information,
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All covers by DogEared Design.
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