Bøker av Heinz Ann Nolder Heinz

Cora Fielding dares to dream of becoming a physician, a profession all but closed to women in 1859 America. Her twin brother Carl has already been admitted to California's new medical college even though his true passion lies with his woodcarving skills. Cora, unwilling to bow to the new school's decision not to admit females, disguises herself as a man and gains admittance only to be unmasked by her brother. The resultant furor prompts their physician father to send both to the East Coast, where Cora can follow her dream at the Female College of Philadelphia and Carl can enroll at the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School.The siblings pursue vastly divergent paths in Philadelphia. Having attained the freedom to choose her own future, Cora finds herself drawn to the plight of those bound in slavery. Her new city being the cradle of the abolitionist movement, she soon becomes embroiled in the activities of the Underground Railroad. Carl, on the other hand, is bored with medicine, a field that holds no interest for him, and he searches elsewhere for gratification. He falls in with like-minded men whose carnal appetites lead them all into a subterranean life of debauchery. Meanwhile, he and Cora are as estranged as they have ever been.Even as Cora and her new love intervene at their own peril to snatch people from the jaws of slavery, Carl and his friends fall into the much-vilified business of grave robbing. When they run afoul of the law, Cora must make a decision. Allow her brother to fall as a result of his own destructive behavior? Or help him escape his fate and turn back to his art, the one activity that will restore his soul and lead him to the same level of fulfillment she has been able to achieve in her own life? How she decides will determine whether the twins split asunder or go forward in restored, ever-deeper bonds of kinship.

Lizzie Hamilton, the pampered daughter of a prominent nineteenth-century South Carolina cotton planter, has lost everything-her home, her social status, her financial security. Spurned by the Charleston society she once dominated and dependent on the largesse of her extended family, she is an easy mark for handsome professional gambler Jack O'Rourke, who convinces her to run away with him to New Orleans, the possibility of marriage held out as an enticement.She soon realizes she has been duped. Not only will there by no marriage, but Jack will support her only if she agrees to act as his gambling accomplice. She has no choice but to make the best of a bad situation until Jack's shady past catches up with him and they are forced to move their operation to a Mississippi riverboat. Held in virtual servitude, Lizzie decides to escape and make her way to the gold fields of California.Determined to be independent of any man, she manages to attach herself to a wagon train led by a free black man, a situation that comes into direct conflict with her inbred prejudices. Her trip across the prairie is dogged by danger and misfortune as well as a tantalizing new possibility for love. By the time she reaches California, her entire view of life has changed and she is faced with a stark choice: continue on her lonely, self-sufficient course or seize a risky but potentially life-changing alternative. How she decides will determine her own happiness as well as that of those whose welfare she has pledged herself to protect.

Rudy Schmidt is consumed by thoughts of Nora Hartmann. Widow of his lifelong friend and business partner, she is everything he has ever desired in a woman. Neither his pudgy wife nor the many women with whom he has had affairs can match her style, grace, and beauty. Why can't she understand the two of them are destined to be together?Rudy schemes to overcome Nora's resistance. Is she denying her innate attraction to him out of loyalty to his wife, who is Nora's closest friend? Rudy arranges for his wife to die. Is she worried about the effect their union would have on her troubled teenaged daughter, who is still in deep mourning for her father? Rudy uses all his charm to make the girl his ally. Is Nora too engrossed in her small specialty shop to realize that her rightful place is with Rudy in the family business? He makes plans to burn the shop down. A final roadblock to their mutual happiness remains: Nora's new lover. Rudy plots to eliminate him.Nora recognizes Rudy for the dangerous predator he has become. Before she can convince the authorities to take her seriously, however, Rudy makes the final descent into madness. Continually frustrated by Nora's rejections, he reasons that if he cannot possess her in this life, he will settle for the eternal bonds of the next. He sets his trap, using Nora's daughter as bait. Cornered, Nora must summon an arsenal of ingenuity, courage, and fierce resolve to fight for her own life and that of her child.

Madeline (Maddie) Blake is not like other PIs. She has a unique gift, the ability under certain circumstances to bridge time and relive events that have already happened. When a heartbroken mother calls from Seattle and begs for her help in locating her missing daughter, Maddie cannot refuse. Yet it soon becomes apparent that someone will go to any length to prevent her from taking the case.Maddie's grit and determination prevail, and she arrives in Seattle only to discover that more is at stake in the wealthy Hallowell house than a simple abduction. Questions abound. Why is the girl's father so hostile to Maddie's involvement? It is 1979, the Cold War is at its zenith, and he shows more passion over a famous Soviet dissident than he does in finding his daughter. Why is a man murdered and his body dumped on the curb in front of his house? Why does he summon a group of colleagues to a secret meeting in the middle of the night in what looks to Maddie like a full-blown conspiracy somehow tied to the communist regime in Russia? Why has a self-described freelance journalist ingratiated himself into the household and into Maddie's investigation? Who is friend and who foe?As Maddie gets closer to the truth about what happened, she finds herself in ever increasing danger. Her psychic gift takes her from the city to the mountains to the coast and onto a Russian fishing trawler far out in the Pacific Ocean. Faced with the most horrendous odds she has ever encountered, she must use every last physical and emotional resource in order to survive and unravel the skein of lies and ambitions that lie at the heart of her case.

Civil engineer Hannah McPherson has fled from a disastrous marriage and resettled in a quaint Illinois river town where she has purchased an engineering and surveying consulting firm. Like her predecessor, she has been appointed as village engineer, a position that puts her into the ebb and flow of local politics. Her resolve to remain above the fray is shattered when a sinister, unidentified source begins to meddle in the village's decision to annex property for a controversial entertainment complex.The village board is divided into two equal camps on this issue. When a trustee drowns under mysterious circumstances, the fragile balance is broken. Days later, Hannah's offices are broken into and searched, and her predecessor is savagely murdered. As she struggles to cope with the aftermath of this brutality, she becomes the object of a shadowy stalker who is able to anticipate her every move.A quick succession of events raises the stakes. A former employee of the firm disappears after warning Hannah that she is in danger. A trustee's wife is murdered before she can pass along what she knows. Hannah and her ally, a man whose return to town is tainted by the cloud of suspicion under which he left years before, are attacked and barely escape with their lives. Together they race against time to expose a conspiracy that threatens the integrity of village government and the very future of the town Hannah has come to love.

Best-selling author Leslie Anne Galloway has it all. Professional acclaim. Happy marriage. Secure future. Until . . . without warning, her life falls apart. Her husband Jared dies under supposedly accidental circumstances that generate more questions than answers. Who was he with that fateful night? Why was money missing from his investment account? And how do these events relate to a terrible mistake from his alcoholic past?Meanwhile Leslie suffers more misfortune. Her healthy pregnancy terminates for no apparent reason. A menacing stranger with uncanny knowledge of her life's minutia begins stalking her. Someone breaks into her house and sabotages her car. Then comes the final blow, a writer's worst nightmare--an arson fire destroys all traces of her latest manuscript.Is she the victim of a fickle fate? Or is an unknown enemy plotting her ruin from behind the scenes.Before it is too late, Leslie must decide who is her friend, who the foe. There's Jared's foster brother Charlie, whose ruthless pursuit of his own self-interest makes him a dangerous man to cross. And Caroline, the ex-wife who hates Leslie for succeeding where she failed. What of the two people who have suddenly surfaced from her past--her old nemesis Marianne, who made Leslie's teen years a living hell, and Steve, the man whom both women once loved? Can Leslie trust Steve's current romantic overtures? Or do his mysterious ties to Marianne point to a conspiracy that binds the two in a macabre dance of mutual destruction?The stakes grow larger when Leslie is attacked by a brutal rapist, then by a vicious predator. In a race against time, she struggles to uncover the truth. At last, betrayed and cornered, she must summon every reserve of ingenuity and courage to thwart an opponent determined not only to engineer her downfall, but to rob her of life itself.

Beneath its facade of genteel privilege, the Potter family is a snake pit of writhing emotions shadowed by dark secrets. Patriarch Benjamin Potter has managed, through sheer force of personality, to keep scandal at bay and maintain an uneasy truce between his daughters, Abigail and Rona Lee. Now he is dying, and the two women's long-simmering animosity is about to explode in deadly violence.Rona Lee seeks access to her father's fortune so she can continue to indulge the hedonism that has been her lifelong trademark. Abigail is determined to deny her, driven by the need to avenge herself for a personal tragedy perpetrated years before by Rona Lee.As the struggle turns ugly, Abigail's superior intellect and innate decency seem a poor match for Rona Lee's beauty, unbridled sexuality, cunning, ruthlessness, and lack of moral compass. Indeed, after a final, life-threatening assault, Abigail is ready to admit defeat.Then she discovers Rona Lee's brutally murdered body and finds herself identified as the primary suspect. In a race against time, she must plunge into Rona Lee's murky past and sift through the human debris she finds there in order to stop the killer before she herself becomes the final victim.