Vorab-RezensentenDavid Fuller

The historical novel Sundance is the story of what really happened to Harry Longbaugh, better known as The Sundance Kid. Once hailed as one of the master bank robbers of the West, Harry (as legend has it) was said to have been killed in a shootout in Bolivia with his partner in crime, Butch Cassidy. Far from it. Harry is alive, though serving 12 years in a Wyoming prison under an alias. When Harry is released in 1913, he re-enters a changed world. Horses are being nudged aside by automobiles. Gas lamps are giving way to electric lights. Women are agitating for the vote. What hasn’t changed are Harry’s ingenuity, his deadeye aim, and his love for his wife, Etta Place. Determined to find her two years after she stopped visiting and writing him in prison, Harry follows her trail. It leads to New York City, the antithesis of the landscape he knows. There he’s confounded by the city’s immensity, its clanging energy, its chaos and crowds. While he searches for Etta, Harry learns that enemies old and new are also on the prowl for him. He finds himself in a tense game of cat and mouse as he tries to find the past he desires before the one he wants to forget snares him. Along the way Harry crosses paths with sandhogs and suffragettes, gangsters and aristocrats, as he puts together clues to that reveal an Etta very different from the one he thought he knew. By turns suspenseful, rollicking and touching, Sundance is both page-turning suspense and the poignant story of a man who never gives up looking for the woman who truly makes him happy.

First novel, slave narrative set during the Civil War - see LT or Amazon for reviews/description

The year is 1862, and the Civil War rages through the South. On a Virginia tobacco plantation, another kind of battle soon begins. There, Cassius Howard, a skilled carpenter and slave, risks everything--punishment, sale to a cotton plantation, even his life--to learn the truth concerning the murder of Emoline, a freed black woman, a woman who secretly taught him to read and once saved his life. It is clear that no one cares about her death in the midst of a brutal and hellish war. No one but Cassius, who braves horrific dangers to escape the plantation and avenge her loss. As Cassius seeks answers about Emoline's murder, he finds an unexpected friend and ally in Quashee, a new woman brought over from another plantation; and a formidable adversary in Hoke Howard, the master he has always obeyed. With subtlety and beauty, Sweetsmoke captures the daily indignities and harrowing losses suffered by slaves, the turmoil of a country waging countless wars within its own borders, and the lives of those people fighting for identity, for salvation, and for freedom.