Hazel Tharsing was born in California in 1888. Intensely shy, she learned to meet the world as the glamorous actress Carlotta Monterey, by far the greatest acting role of her twenty-year career. Counted among the most beautiful women in America, she married a British aristocrat in London, then the twenty-year-old son of her mother’s lover in San Francisco, then a famous artist in New York, and finally America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill, in Paris.

This novel about her life takes us to the cities and the backcountry of the Old West, to Edwardian London and an English country-house life reminiscent of Downton Abbey’s, to the Broadway theater in its golden age and the tough reality of the actor’s life on the road, and to bohemian Greenwich Village and Manhattan’s arty Smart Set in the 1920s. Through it all, Carlotta is an outsized presence, inventing endless new faces to meet the challenges that life throws her way and turning from every defeat and disillusionment to look ahead with newfound energy and determination. Free on Kindle.

To Leave a Memory is a tender, funny, and heartwarming story about a cranky history professor, his psychic Unitarian wife, and their nerdy daughter, who overcome tragedy to love again. You’ll laugh and shed a tear as each character becomes like a member of your own family by the novel’s surprise ending. $0.99 on Kindle.

Everywhere life takes them, there are others with the same haunting dreams of war. Some have only one leg and some have none. Some have just lost their way home. Cassie and Jake begin with one person at a time and over 27 years, hundreds of vets find a little peace on the bank of the farm pond. Free on Kindle.