Dakota: A Novel

Review\n"Meet Dakota. She's in love... or thinks she is... or hopes to be. Will she find it? That's the big question in Sarah Patt's lively new novel of young love and old manners in the twenty-first century. You will stay up late to find the answer, and you'll leave Dakota and her friends only reluctantly, because they are a very lively group to spend time with. Enjoy!" 
William Martin, New York Times Bestselling Author of "Cape Cod" and "Bound For Gold"\n"Sophisticated, sweet, and full of energy, this is a romance with real intrigue." 
JoeAnn Hart, author of 'Stamford '76, A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s', 'Float', and 'Addled'\n"This splendid book by Sarah Patt is a captivating story of love, loss, and friendships. Her characters are vividly brought to life through tumultuous relationships and ultimate redemption. Readers will be thrilled to see another book by this accomplished writer." 
Ruth Klein, author of Surviving the Survivors: A Memoir\nEighteen-year-old Dakota Buchannan is determined not to be the messed-up, orphaned teenager with an over the top imagination the media describes her as. After her father’s accidental death at Jennings oil refinery, she finds out that she has a much older half-brother and moves to Houston, Texas, to live with him and his young daughter, Savannah. It doesn’t take long for Dakota to settle in and capture the heart of a young man. Life seems to be going quasi-normal until CEO Jake Jennings breaks into Dakota’s home to confront her. In his narcotized state, he assaults her while incoherently apologizing for something his late father did to her, of which she has no recollection.\nShe eventually escapes, and Jake is charged. Released on bail, he returns to his penthouse, and Dakota’s boyfriend takes her away for the weekend to clear her mind, but on their return, the front page of the local newspaper confirms ‘Jake Jennings plummets to his death.’ Dakota’s half relieved the man is dead, but the other half replays in her mind what he was trying to tell her that terrifying night and whether or not he actually killed himself or did someone push him off his balcony.\nFeisty and determined, Dakota never loses sight of hope or the importance of family and friendships. She navigates her new life with her moral compass –– reconciling the past and seeking answers while discovering secrets and lies.\nSarah Patt graduated from Wheelock College in 1991 and taught for five years before becoming a mother in 1996. It wasn’t until 2008 when she returned to the classroom. While maintaining a full-time teaching position at The Landmark School, Sarah earned a master’s degree in Special Education from Simmons College in 2012. She is enormously grateful for her devoted and loving husband and their three children, who support her writing endeavor wholeheartedly with words of encouragement and expressions of pride. Dakota is her second published novel.

Patt, Sarah

Teen & Young Adult

Addison & Highsmith Publishers

This is the FIRST NOVEL written about the Marquis de La Fayette. This story is an Adventure-Romance Docu-Drama-Biographical romp through the 1770's of France's nobility. This novel will ask of the reader to decide: is the young Lafayette a Romantic Adventurer or an Ambitious Cad? In June 1777 the 19 year old Marquis de La Fayette landed in the American colonies to fight in their revolution, and the rest, as they say is history. But over time many truths have been stretched, most recently including a singing role in a Broadway hit musical. Still, the great historical mystery remains: how did the character of the young Gilbert de la Fayette develop? Much of Lafayette’s own words about his early life were written when he was an elder statesman serving in the French Chamber of Deputies, and such writings were shaded to both the heroic as well as the political climate of the day. Author S.P. Grogan writes a fascinating fictional narrative about Gilbert Lafayette and his coming-of-age in the mid 1770’s within the decadence of Queen Marie Antoinette’s French court. The story begins with the child Gilbert sworn to avenge his military father’s death against the English. The reader will track how a country boy of Auvergne becomes the richest orphan in France, and how forces behind the throne after control over his fortune seek to marry him off to a 12 year old girl to support one of the most powerful military castes in France. Here is where you learn the rebellious and obstinate behavior of Gilbert Lafayette, with women and his desire to become a glorious military hero. Lafayette – the novel-- Courtier to Crown Fugitive is an ‘action’ story of highway robbers, spies, and a 'romance' story of first love and mistresses in court intrigues. The reader can see the developing psychological make-up of Lafayette; his futile search for a father-figure, his need for supportive love, and his blind passion for glory and fame. What is revealed is a young boy in the throes of transformation under the influences of Queen Marie Antoinette’s life style of spoiled privilege, his attitude towards his young wife in a forced marriage, the secrets within the Masonic fraternity, the writings of Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, and the voice of the anti-slavery Abbot Raynal. All come together to transform his mind-set as Gilbert, blinded by class liberté idealism, seeks to run away to join the American revolutionary army. In doing so, he becomes a fugitive from the King’s edicts, and his ensuing flight and pursuit climax in a showdown on the beaches of Spain. Author S.P. Grogan spent four years researching the life of the Marquis de La Fayette, here in the U.S. as well as travels across France, and visits to libraries, museums, and the homes of Gilbert de La Fayette. Enjoy! Let us know what you think.

Lafayette--the novel: Courtier to Crown Fugitive, 1757-1777

Literature & Fiction

Grogan, S. P.

Genre Fiction

Vegas Die: A Quest Murder Mystery

SOMEONE IS KILLING OFF THE OLD MOBSTERS OF LAS VEGAS AND THE MAYOR IS THE #1 SUSPECTWhen Casino Executive Owen McCombs discovers a dead gangster in the trunk of the Mayor's car, he needs to find answers quick - not only to save the Mayor's political career, but to keep his own freedom since Metro Homicide Detective Chastity Tempest Taggart, already pumped up from throwing her ex-husband into jail, is motivated to prove McCombs and the Mayor guilty!In Vegas Die, the best stereotypical Sin City characters and events pop up: the imploding casino, the buxom stripper, the nerdy card counter, super star twins, the Elvis impersonator, the Graffiti Vigilante, and associated corpses, immolated, shot, sliced, and diced. In deadly play is also the desperate hunt for $7 million in twice stolen jewelry.Vegas Die won an award for Best Regional Fiction and was selected by the Las Vegas Review Journal as one of the best selections for summertime reading. This newly revised and updated edition of this classic novel includes a hidden mystery for readers to solve. S.P. Grogan is an award-winning author, his books include Lafayette, Courtier to Crown Fugitive.***"I don't know if Mayor Goodfella is believable. After all, I'm quiet and unassuming and I know for fact we never had mobsters in Las Vegas." Snarky comment from former Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar B. Goodman and board director of The Mob Museum"Vegas Die is the ultimate Sin City mystery." - author Brian Rouff

SOMEONE IS KILLING OFF THE OLD MOBSTERS OF LAS VEGAS 
AND THE MAYOR IS THE #1 SUSPECT 
When Casino Executive Owen McCombs discovers a dead gangster in the trunk of the Mayor’s car, he needs to find answers quick. In Vegas Die, the best stereotypical Sin City characters and events pop up: the imploding casino, the buxom stripper, the nerdy card counter, superstar twins, the Elvis impersonator, the Graffiti Vigilante, and associated corpses, immolated, shot, sliced, and diced. In deadly play is also the desperate hunt for $7 million in twice stolen jewelry. 
Vegas Die won an award for Best Regional Fiction and was selected by the Las Vegas Review Journal as one of the best selections for summertime reading. This newly revised and updated edition of this classic novel includes a hidden mystery for readers to solve. S.P. Grogan is an award-winning author, his books include Lafayette, Courtier to Crown Fugitive.

In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s, a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the Côte d'Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile.Henri dismisses that story; it's an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice, the man an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe, subsumed into the bigger countries around it. They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes. They are also genocide survivors - a word Henri understands for the first time when he hears them utter it - Armen escaping the Smyrna conflagration in 1922, and Luciana surviving the totalitarian powers that scourged Europe in the Second World War. Both are from places that no longer exist. Henri's affinity with them becomes friendship, even as their troubles multiply when Luciana falls prey to a wasting disease.When a series of catastrophes robs Henri of his friends and his countess, his days on the Blue Coast are numbered, and soon he is back in his native England, in and out of London's hospitals. There are signs that his luck has not been all bad: Henri may have salvaged some of the fortune his friends lost, and the narrator feels close to a solution to a final mystery from his time on the Blue Coast when she deduces that he is not as adrift as he seems.Nick Sweeney is a freelance writer and musician living on the English coast. His fascination with East European history and culture will become apparent to readers of A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved. Nick's other books include the Poland-set Laikonik Express and The Exploding Elephant.

A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved

Sweeney, Nick

Literary

Captain Cooked: Hawaiian Mystery of Romance, Revenge… and Recipes!

All she wanted was a quiet beach where she could go topless. It was not to be. Videographer Madison Merlot Dayne arrived on the Big Island to shoot the HDTV of her culinary father's popular television food show, "Insatiable Delights." From the moment of her arrival, Madison and her father are involved in trying to discover who may have poisoned a revered Hawaiian singing star. Her working vacation involves riots, suspicious accidents, earthquakes, flowing lava, ancient Hawaiian war weapons, and a real 'cliff-hanger.' Madison is likewise having men problems. She desires island romance, but is not prepared for three men in her life... at the same time. And there is the mystery of the boiling cauldron. Will Madison get off the island alive?

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Grogan, S

Regional & International

The Oar of Odysseus

Penelope Bauer sips on a margarita, celebrating her acceptance into the graduate Classics program at Boston University, unaware that she will soon become the central player in a bold scheme to save Western Civilization from itself. Of course, like any intelligent young woman in the dark days of 2018, she sees the symptoms of decay all around her, and the waning of the original values of ancient Greece. The good life for most Americans has become synonymous with the individual drive for wealth and status, acquisitiveness displacing the quest for the classical virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, and the like. Indeed, the small liberal arts college from which she will graduate in a week, has fallen victim to the money grubbing paws of a shady for-profit educational corporation.Penny's decision to pursue the Classics reflects her growing realization that liberal education may be human kind's last best hope. She and her fellow students at the College of St. Francis had the opportunity to experience, many for the first time, the pleasures of a genuinely good life, a moral or ethical life, liberated from the need to acquire the material symbols of success. Her passionate commitment to live such a life made her the unwitting subject of an ancient prophecy. She has been watched, studied without her knowledge. Fate has groomed her to participate in a grand adventure, a wild ride of Homeric proportions, with help along the way from an Irish Setter mix named Sappho, and a bevy of strong, intelligent women - Black and brown, Irish and Greek, gay and straight. And like her ancient namesake, the wife of Odysseus, she will have to depend on an abiding love and her courage, the courage of a woman warrior, to see her through the perils of her own Odyssey.

Bank, Richard M

The Crossing is a powerful and haunting love story of surprising discovery set in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen during Prohibition. Its mission seeks to reconcile love and guilt, grief and promise. Set apart from other stories, it combines history, fact, surrealism, and reality into an ever-recycling boost of the human spirit.\nIrish-born Johnny Flynn, a former British soldier, is banished from his homeland and sent to America on a ship so riddled with disease that he realizes the voyage was meant to murder him. When he survives the trip, the captain forces him to walk the plank into the Hudson River. Miraculously, Johnny is rescued by a rumrunning Irish gang, the Swamp Angels, and given a job running whisky in Hell’s Kitchen just as Prohibition makes liquor a hugely profitable, dangerous business.\nFighting for his life and livelihood amid the denizens of the Manhattan piers, Johnny is plagued by the memory of his lost lover, Nora, whose father, the famed Irish revolutionary, James Connolly, met his death through a firing squad that included a reluctant gunman named Johnny Flynn. Nora’s last words to him, when she learned of his betrayal and left him, “I love you, Johnny Flynn”, echo in his heart, leaving him pulsing with guilt, yearning, and the hope that she might yet forgive him.\nJohnny drinks hard. One night, drunk on the floor of Hailey’s speakeasy, he encounters a seeming apparition on stage, the ghostly Esme, an Irish singer who suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of the British Black and Tans. Johnny is dazzled by her. She is not only a singer but a healer, teaching poor and afflicted children to sing and gather hope at an old theater called The Woebegone. From Esme Johnny learns how to overcome the desire for revenge, only to discover that she, too, clings to her own dark dream of retribution.\nHell’s Kitchen, Johnny discovers, is thronged with people whose damaged hearts ache for revenge, repentance and love. As he grapples with taking responsibility to help others resolve this overwhelming dilemma, he learns that Nora is coming to New York to advocate for Irish independence. As he confronts her and soon thereafter receives a piercing love letter from Esme, the story comes to a turbulent climax.

The Crossing

Jones, Ashby

United States

Brig Ellis is a new age private investigator with old school values. When he gets a call from an old flame seeking protection for her husband, he agrees to help. Seems the hubby is an artist whose star is ascending. What Brig doesn't know, until he makes contact with the couple, is that the artist paints with the cremated ashes of human remains. While the painter's profile is rising, so too is the number of people less than thrilled with what he is doing--and some of them are determined to stop him one way or another.Ellis soon finds himself in the middle of multiple bizarre events that could be chalked up as accidental mayhem. Of course, they could also be escalating murder attempts. From wild art house happenings in the warehouse district to glittering soirees in the manicured mansions of the upper crust, things get more and more dangerous. A tornado in far west Texas threatens to level everything and everyone in its path. A sojourn to Havana, Cuba turns deadly. An art show in Chicago becomes a nightmare when a Molotov cocktail sets a gallery ablaze. The violence keeps increasing exponentially, as do the suspects. There are jealous artists, shady gallery owners, reporters with hidden agendas, outraged Christian ministers, even Jewish groups who become incensed when they find that one of the artist's paintings includes the ashes of a Holocaust survivor.Ellis struggles to keep the detractors at a distance, the artist safe, and the old flame from igniting a new spark while he looks for a potential killer and wrestles with his own convictions about the moral conundrums surrounding this fascinating but questionable form of DYING ART.

Dying Art (A Brig Ellis Saga)

Kilgore, Joe

Olympia: The Birth of the Games

Martino, John

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Books by Addison & Highsmith Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Addison & Highsmith Publishers publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dakota: A Novel

Lafayette--the novel: Courtier to Crown Fugitive, 1757-1777

Vegas Die: A Quest Murder Mystery

Vegas Die: A Quest Murder Mystery

A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved

Captain Cooked: Hawaiian Mystery of Romance, Revenge… and Recipes!

The Oar of Odysseus

The Crossing

Dying Art (A Brig Ellis Saga)

Olympia: The Birth of the Games