Month: January 2010

From FOB Kat Valentine-

Hi Joe,

It was great to talk to you. Sorry I had to run. Thanks for asking about my book. I’d love it if you’d do a post about it. My brother-in-law called me the other night and he said he is halfway through it and LOVES it. That’s a real compliment because Andy is a real “guy”-guy. He said the opening scene, which is six guys sitting in a bar talking, sounded like something straight out of his life. Here is more information than you probably need:

Each Angel Burns
Kathleen Valentine

Available in paperback from
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble.com
and other online booksellers

Also available in many e-formats from
Smashwords.com.

As part of Operation E-Book Drop,
Each Angel Burns is available free of charge
in all digital formats
for our service people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This book is available in any digital format at no cost to
members of the Catholic clergy. Email for links.

Description: In the latter part of the 19th century the Monastery of St. Gabriel the Archangel was built on a cliff overlooking the ocean on a peninsula in Maine. From its earliest days there were rumors of strange activity there — tunnels through the cliff were reported to give access for smugglers, a miracle-working nun was said to live there, and a group of drunken lumberjacks who stormed the convent to kidnap wives claimed to have been vanquished by a giant angel with a flaming sword. One hundred years later, when the last of the old cloistered nuns was removed to a retirement home, the decision was made to close and sell the convent. That’s when it was discovered that he convent’s treasure, a marble statue of the Archangel Gabriel by Italian sculptor Giovanni Dupré, was missing.

In Ripley Mills, Massachusetts the self-titled “wild bunch”, who played football together back in high school, gather every Thursday for dinner and beer. More than thirty years have passed and the group isn’t what it used to be. Charlie’s new female boss is young, pretty, and intimidating. Whitey’s wife has cancer, Bull’s wife just found out about his affair with an exotic dancer, and Vinnie can’t get women to go out with him. Gabe’s three daughters have grown up and his wife is making life miserable. Peter doesn’t have those problems, he’s a Jesuit priest. But they still get together every week to drink, eat, and listen to one another’s problems. Then Father Peter makes a startling revelation, he had once been in love with a girl he met in Paris. He planned to leave the seminary to marry her but she rejected him to marry an older, wealthy man. Pete is happy as a priest teaching at Boston College but now Maggie has returned. She is leaving her husband and has purchased an old, abandoned convent in Maine that she plans to convert to a sculpture studio.

On Pete’s recommendation Gabe takes a job helping Maggie to restore the convent. But, as winter closes in, the mysteries begin again. Stories are circulating about bodies of young women washing up on the shore. Maggie’s husband refuses to answer her calls. Gabe’s cantankerous father, Mick, tells him the truth about his mother. Ethan Darling, the local sheriff, is snooping around. Zeke, Gabe’s dog, discovers a secret passage in the crypt under the chapel. And Father Peter realizes that Maggie is falling in love with Gabe, his oldest friend.

Each Angel Burns is the story of three people at crossroads in their lives. It is a story of enduring friendship, of faith, of great evil and greater love — and of how they culminate in a miracle.

Review from Amazon: Valentine has the ability to convey the spectrum of love and passion, from gentle ripples to sweeping tides, tossing up on the shore of memory our own deepest feelings. Her characters are full-blown adults whose graying hair does not signify a dulling of openness but instead a mature capacity to embrace the richness and complexity of romance in the third trimester of life.

Valentine has a gift for capturing the nuances of men falling in love and questioning their long-held values. The men in her story are each unique — from the dutiful Gabe to his irreverent father, Mick, and from the brutish Sinclair, to the handsome, elusive priest, Peter. Each man fascinates in his own singular way.

The back-story behind the romance is a taunting mystery with dark secrets, betrayal, infidelity and murder. Steeped in gothic Catholic ambience that includes a crumbling crypt, an ancient convent and a statue of the Archangel Gabriel that holds the answer to a mystery, “Each Angel Burns” is a love story that propels the reader to a satisfying (and surprising) finale.

Kathleen Valentine

Valentine-Design.com
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