Newly married Carina DiGratia Shephard longs to make a home for herself and her husband, Quillan, in the rugged mining town of Crystal, Colorado. Quillan, however, has turned away to confront the haunting pain of his troubled childhood. Out of her loneliness, Carina opens a restaurant, and through its success soon attains the independence and identity she has long sought. When Carina is attacked in retaliation for her kindness to the destitute families...

Amos Blevins, a miner at the Blue Gem mine in Hazard, Kentucky, survives a deadly incident that cost nine men their lives and then must go into hiding for fear he knows too much, while inspector Will Murphy, sent to conduct a quick investigation, senses something suspicious going on at the Blue Gem, which belongs to his estranged brother.

"When the war ended, Dr. Samuel Kniqht went home to Texas, but the life he expected was in ruins, his wife married to a carpetbagger. Trying to defend what's left of his previous existence, the good doctor is branded an outlaw and driven from Texas. Now he's laying low in New Mexico, with his image of a doctor on wanted posters everywhere. But when the town explodes in violence, Knight will risk his neck to save innocent lives. After a cave-in injures...

"It is 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young man named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident that makes him think that something else is going on, that provocateurs are at work and bigger stakes are in play. Little does he know just how big they are. Given exactly...

The entire nation is glued to the television as people follow the dangerous efforts to rescue Ursula Maki, a two-year-old, part-Chinese, part-Finnish child who has fallen down an abandoned mineshaft in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, in a novel that chronicles a chain of ancestors, across two thousand years, whose lives culminate in one little girl.