Jo Ann Bender Livres

A Program of Secrets Summer, 1941: Antoinette Gauthier and her father, the mayor of a French village, unwillingly find themselves servants to a group of SS officers led by the charming but cruel Major Reinhardt Hurst who commandeers their house. Antoinette soon finds herself the object of the Major's affection. His motives include populating his country with "racially pure unmarried women," as part of Himmler's plan for his SS and Gestapo officers. While Antoinette hopes to use this opportunity to gain information about the Major's motives for the Resistance, she also finds herself under the spell of the Major's deceptive tactics. When Antoinette finds herself with child, the disgrace and stigma of being an unwed mother is horrific. Hurst sends her to a German Lebensborn home, a place for the women who "have been found fit to bear a child for the Fuhrer." She finds it a lonely and secretive place and is given the new German name, Hannah, and is treated poorly. Himmler enjoys her pastry at a baby-naming ceremony and she becomes the new cook for his SS Party House next door. The tension mounts when she is invited to attend their weekend party which includes Hurst's fiance from Berlin. Though Antoinette's life has seemingly taken a turn for worse, things become even more interesting as she discovers an English navigator in the woods who ends up changing the course of her life.

Alone and deathly afraid, Mara Ortega felt eyes watching her. A sense of the sublime rippled through the stones of the mountains-yet the seeming emptiness of the terrain northeast of Superstition Mountains exuded a presence that haunted Mara. Could it be the spirits of the long dead Apaches who once camped along this river? Or did Mara sense the presence of the Jesuit priest, Fr. Mauer, who with two of his flock were captured, first by the Spaniards and then the Apache? Mara, watching her husband Vance hike farther up the mountain to set another boundary marker for their claim, derived little comfort from his assurance that no one was following them. Her gut feelings and observations told her that the power of the vast desert had unleased spirits of the unknown. The Ortegas' search for lost Spanish gold in the mountainous desert country had all the ear marks of an exciting adventure but now Mara wondered what it could be turning into. It's treasure they found-but will it be worth its horrors?