Book 3: The Owen Family Saga. Winner of the 2013 USA Best Books Award for Western Fiction. Marie Owen yearns for a loving husband, but Colorado Territory is long on rough characters and short on fitting suitors, so a future of spinsterhood seems more likely than wedded bliss. Her best friend says cowboy Bill Henry is a likely candidate, but Marie knows her class-conscious father would not allow such a pairing. When she challenges her father to find her a suitable husband before she becomes a spinster, he arranges a match with a neighbor's son. Then Marie discovers Tom Morgan would be an...

Book 2: The Owen Family Saga. Young cavalryman Carl Owen returns from the Civil War to find the family farm destroyed, his favorite brother dead, food scarce, and his father determined to leave the Shenandoah Valley to build a cattle empire in Colorado Territory. Crossing the continent, Carl falls in love with his brother's fiancee while set to wed another girl, but he might lose everything if the murderous thug Berto Acosta has his way. Carl battles a band of outlaws, a prairie fire, blizzards, a trackless waterless desert, and his own brother-all for the hand of feisty Ellen Bates. "I...

Book 1: The Owen Family Saga. 2014 Whitney Award Finalist-Historical Fiction Rulon Owen loves two things more than life-his country and Mary Hilbrands. When Virginia secedes from the Union, Rulon enlists, and finds himself fighting foes both in battle and in his own camp. He struggles to stay alive against all odds, with a knife-wielding tent-mate and a Union army that seems impossible to defeat. It will take every ounce of vigilance he has to survive and, with a little luck, he might make it home to his wife and the son he's never seen. Forced to live with her parents for the duration, Mary...

On a hot summer day, young Elijah Marshall stops plowing to give a drink of water to two strangers and invite them to lunch with his family. His neighborly act sets in motion events that will drastically change his future. The strangers share a new religion, which the family embraces. But the neighbors want no part of Mormons. Multiple acts of unkindness and starvation drive the Marshall family to flee to the Mormon city on the banks of the Mississippi River, Nauvoo. Then the path of Elijah's life takes perilous detours, with twists and turns he never expected to make. In a 19th century...