I H    Hope you are enjoying the Season of Light!  The tradition of welcoming neighbors in for a hot drink  toast to the new year has been around for over one thousand years.  Wassail!  Good Health! Here's a recipe for your slow cooker that you can keep going all day...

                         

  4 cups hot brewed tea

4 cups cranberry juice

4 cups unsweetened apple juice

2 cups orange juice

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup lemon juice

3 cinnamon sticks (3 inches)

12 whole cloves

In a 5-qt. slow cooker, combine the first six ingredients. Place the cinnamon sticks and cloves on a double thickness of cheesecloth; bring up corners of cloth and tie with string to form a bag. Add to slow cooker.

Cover and cook on high for 1 hour or until punch begins to boil. Discard spice bag. Serve warm. 

Yield: 3-1/2 quarts.

Book 2 of Code Talker Chronicles is out!  

I'm delighted with the response from readers about Watch Over Me.  

 "...kept me up way too late on work nights because I couldn't put it down, but that's how you know a really great book!"

"...can't wait for the next in the series!" 

Many many thanks to my wonderful editors at BWL, Catherine Brown and Jude Pittman, and cover artist Michelle Lee.  What a team!  

This one is my love song to New York City, where my parents were born.

It’s the summer of 1942 in New York City. War widow Kitty Charente’s night on the town with a man she thinks is her company’s visiting salesman turns into a hunting ground.  Luke Kayenta is a Navajo code talker, and a Nazi agent is in pursuit.  American isolationists are searching for Luke too.  And his superiors at the the U.S. Office of Strategic Services want to know if he’s cracked under torture in Spain. Kitty and Luke must evade capture from one enemy and death from another as they race from the Lower East Side to the Savoy Ballroom to Coney Island, aided by unlikely allies in the Canadian and French spy networks, a Harlem baker, and even Weegee, the city’s most famous tabloid photographer. 

New Series!

I'm delighted to announce the publication of the first books in my Code Talker Chronicles series. They follow two OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA) operatives, Navajo Code Talker Luke Kayenta and New Yorker war widow Kitty Charente.

I'm using popular song titles of the era in naming the books of the series, and  having fun with that.  Kitty and Luke don't meet each other in Book I so I'll Be Seeing You seemed a good choice!  It's also one of my World War II army vet Dad's favorites, and we asked that it be sung at his funeral.  What a moving moment for the family and friends he was leaving behind after a long life well lived.

Here's my dad in 1941...