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|  | | Blue Angel
This self-help book recounts how the author finds solace after the mental illness and suicide of her twenty-year old daughter.
The memory of her experience at age seven when she was the only angel to show up in a blue dress on First Holy Communion Day at St. Mary of the Angels Church in Chicago provides the starting point for her grief recovery process. She begins a frantic quest to learn everything she can about angels, latching onto the notion that when angels choose to incarnate, the results are often tragic. In the six-year period covered in the book, the author witnesses synchronicities and the presence of angels both in the spirit and in the flesh.
The book is arranged under such topics as angels, dreams | |  | | The Pluperfect Phantom
At his wit’s end because a phantom has just abducted his current girlfriend back in time to 1893 Chicago, Thad is now accused of the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He must somehow transport himself to a bygone era, rescue Ottilia and dispatch the ghost of the serial killer who has bedeviled him for several months. This is no ordinary haunting, for the chilling purpose of the ghostly visitations is to spirit women away in the present and murder them in past time. The charming psychopath is the shade of Chicago’s first documented serial killer, Dr. Herman Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes.
Thad Majeski, Chicago native, geologist, connected with the land since boyhood, driven by his love for things old -- artifacts, houses, historical places -- is swept into the 1890s, triggered by his distress with the encroachments of urban development. On a plane flight to Detroit he hooks into Chicago’s history. Thereafter, two visitors from the past intermittently disturb his life. The main ghost bedeviling him is Dr. Herman Mudgett, an actual serial killer from the darker side of the city’s history.
In the process, his old girlfriend, Carol Trilling, is spirited away, a flesh and blo | |  | | Women at the Well
In first person, forty-three Old and New Testament women re-tell Biblical stories from their unique perspectives. In the pivotal poem of the collection, the Samarian woman recalls her meeting with Jesus at the well years later as an old woman.
All the women in these dramatic monologues yearn for that water which will become a wellspring from which eternal life will flow. Water, a typically feminine symbol, binds all these disparate voices, some strident and defiant, others humorous. The poems are arranged chronologically from Eve to Damaris. Crying defiance against the priesthood, Jezebel proudly defends her name, “Always a curse lisped between lips\I swear, of women-hating priests\who strive to suppress the feminine\No shame it is to be named Jezebel.” In a lighter vein, Mary of Bethany declares herself “the housewife’s patron sain |
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