Paulette Callen

The friendship between Lena Kaiser, a sodbuster's daughter, and Gustie Roemer, an educated Easterner, is unlikely in any other circumstance but post-frontier Charity, South Dakota. Gustie is considered an outsider, and Lena is too proud to share her problems (which include a hard-drinking husband) with anyone else. On the nearby Sioux reservation, Gustie also finds love and family with two Dakotah women: Dorcas Many Roads, an old medicine woman, and her adopted granddaughter, Jordis, who bears the scars of the white man's education. When Lena's husband is arrested for murdering his father and the secrets of Gustie's past follow her to Charity, Lena, Gustie, and Jordis stand together. As buried horrors are unearthed and present tragedies unfold, they discover the strength and beauty of love and friendship that blossom like wild flowers in the tough prairie soil."

Charity

Detective and mystery stories. Please note this is a gay fiction title. Two children have been stolen at different times out of the same household, one an infant from a bedroom, the other from a playground. Into this baffling case enters Shiloh & Company. Well known for investigative effectiveness to a cooperative if uneasy police department, unique among detective "agencies," Shiloh & Company is composed of disparate personalities--Sugartime, Hester, Isadora, Lance, Olive, Hawk--who reside in the single person of Shiloh. Shiloh's assorted identities, born out of extreme childhood trauma, have acquired a collective instinct, a priceless gift in detective work: an unerring tuning fork for the truth. Shiloh has been nursed back to functioning health and sanity by lesbian therapist Ray Martinez, still intent on integrating all the self-protective personalities. But this case is lethal to Shiloh's very identity: a crime involving children cuts to the heart of what first brought Shiloh to Ray's attention. In pursuing this mystery, the fragile mental health and fragmented existence of Shiloh will be tested to its limit.

Command of Silence

This is an American cozy, with dogs. Sally Kelleher, a grumpy heroine, and her four irrepressible baby-boomer friends are vacationing together in Sally's small Midwestern hometown. Her elderly mentor has just died and Sally believes the death was no accident. She is attracted to a younger man who is also the chief suspect, somebody is trying to kill her and she is nearing menopause. Who wouldn't be grumpy? Things are never what they seem in a small prairie town, where long suppressed rage erupts and kills. If Sally and her coterie of indomitable women do not discover the murderer, she will be the next victim. If you like feisty women, interesting dogs, and a unique place, you will like this book.

A Wild Women Mystery

Death Can Be Murder

Fervent Charity continues the story of the friendship of five women who have nothing in common but the ground they walk on and the vicissitudes of post-frontier prairie life. Lena, a young mother living on the edge of heartbreak. Her sister-in-law, Mary, more beautiful than loved. Alvinia, midwife to the county and mother of ten. Gustie and Jordis, trying to make a home together but finding their place on either the reservation or in Charity precarious. The women come together in the face of natural hardships-childbirth, disastrous weather, and disease-and the unnatural malevolence of people who mean them harm. In the end, they find themselves bound by a secret none of them could have predicted.

Paulette Callen

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