Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Adelaide Books (December 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0-9995164-8-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-9995164-8-5
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Price: $22.30 Paperback, $9.77 eBook
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TWO-HEARTED CROSSING
Before he died, Henri Morais thought changing his name to Henry Maris, doing good deeds and surrounding himself with the splendor of the mountains in northern Idaho was enough. He thought that his guilt over being part of the violence of the Quebec separatist movement would be buried with him. It wasn’t. A woman who comes to the funeral, a stranger, turns out to be the loose thread that begins to unravel his hidden past.
Ellen Maris, isn’t sure whom she’s most upset with: her daughter, for going to Montreal and digging up what had happened so many years before; her son, for encouraging his sister; or Henry, for dying and leaving her. In desperation, she starts a small baking business from her home, all the while brooding over what Marie might find out in Montreal.
Montreal during the violence-prone sixties; a bomb thrown into a crowded café in Bahrain; two helicopters burned by eco-terrorists in Idaho.
TWO-HEARTED CROSSING tells the story of a flawed family, struggling to move forward in their suddenly upside-down world. It also tells a story of resilience, of survival, of hope and of love.
 PATRIMONY, A prequel to TWO-HEARTED CROSSING
During the turbulent sixties and early seventies the call for Quebec independence created a political and social maelstrom in Canada. For nearly ten years riots, bombings, labor strikes and violent street scenes were part of daily life in Montreal, the epicenter of battle. PATRIMONY is what happens in a country when political ideology resorts to violence. PATRIMONY is what happens in a family when one brother believes in responsible political action to achieve his goals while the other brother, a time bomb ticking toward an explosion, will stop at nothing to get what he wants, including using his own sister for blackmail. The sister’s struggle to find her way in a world grown increasingly violent is reminiscent of John LeCarré’s heroine in Little Drummer Girl. But instead of being caught between two opposing political forces, she is caught between her two brothers—as siblings the three must deal with each other.
Both PATRIMONY and TWO-HEARTED CROSSING were inspired by a comment made by someone I was introduced to. He said that his father preferred hunting and fishing to being with his family and that he’d been French Canadian. Two sentences, nothing more. I wrote a short story based on that idea then wanted to know more about the man and what had made him a recluse. I knew it had to be something in his past. Researching Quebec’s history, I found him as a young man square in the middle of the French separatist movement. Wow! Talk about a turbulent era and a wealth of material. A belated thank you to McGill University library in Montreal.
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