These Thy Gifts is a forbidden love story spanning 50 years between a priest and the widow of a mobster. It encompasses history, mystery, comedy, gangsters, beautiful women, war, and religion.
2006 is a tumultuous year for the Catholic Church. Reports of horrific sexual abuse are becoming widespread. Monsignor Steven Trimboli is troubled. He worries for the future of the church—and rightly so. A new crime will soon reverberate throughout his church and hit closer to home than he ever imagined.
As Trimboli examines his faith, he must also examine his past. This poignant new novel takes readers back fifty years to meet Trimboli as a young and passionate priest, ready to tackle the world. The church, however, has other plans and exiles him to a small town in New York State. It is there that he meets the intriguing and beguiling Rosalie LaMarca. The two will form a connection that will have lasting consequences for both their lives.
Trimboli’s adventures will take him to the front lines of Vietnam and back. He will encounter abuse in his time serving the Catholic Church, but he will also bear witness to moments of unimaginable grace. Follow Trimboli as he confronts his past, his choices, and what it means to be a man of God.
In pre-World War Two London, Penny works as a maternity nurse at the Royal Women's Hospital.
Happy in her work and with two really good friends and several doctor suitors, little does she realise how her life will be changed by a chance lunch-time encounter.
Who is the ruggedly handsome man who helps her? And how will their lives entwine as the war clouds gather?
When Bert Grayson is murdered, it sets off a chain of events to apprehend a relentless killer who would not be stopped.
Don't trust anyone they were warned!
Lee and Miranda risk their own lives in this heart stopping race against time.
Lillian Grace, a woman with her own secrets, had loved Bert. Her rambling letters, written after his murder, are the only link 50 years later to what really happened in that alley the night Bert was found with his throat slit.
When New York art dealer Elizabeth Martel's mother falls ill, she returns to her hometown in the Midwest. After her mother's death she is seriously short of funds, and a friend suggests she take a job as art adviser to billionaire grain merchant, Preston Greylander.
When Greylander is killed in a mysterious murder-suicide, Martel is left in possession of a Rembrandt that needs restoration. She takes the painting to Amsterdam where she deposits it with the prestigious firm of Van der Saar Fine Arts.
The Van der Saar family has been in the art business since the seventeenth century and the current generation is represented by two brothers: Hendrik, suave and charismatic, is the perfect front man, while the deceptively low key Willem is a master of restoration. Hendrik and Martel enthusiastically resume an old love affair, and she discovers that the brothers’ personal lives are in chaos, and the family is haunted by guilt and swathed in deception.
As doubts arise about the authenticity of the Rembrandt, other actors arrive in Amsterdam determined to recover the picture.
“Dirty Pictures” is narrated by a woman with a brash, irreverent point of view. Martel’s voice is caustic, satirical, and darkly humorous. It gets into the readers head and stays there.
Patricia Ketola borrows freely from the genres of the crime novel, the family saga and the love story and combines them into a unique vision of life in a world heading for disaster. This richly textured novel celebrates the profound, the beautiful, and the good, and there is a lot of deep knowledge backing up Martel's often outrageous statements.
***
“From Orson Welles’ “F Is for Fake” to Alan Rudolph’s “The Moderns”, I’ve always adored works of fiction centered on the concept of art forgery. I’m also a goner for strong narrative voice. Patricia Ketola’s clever and sexy debut novel is an audacious genre mash-up, elevated and enlivened by the salty, up-from-the-heels voice of narrator Elizabeth Martel, a sort of lusty spin on Patricia Highsmith’s magnetic sociopath Tom Ripley. “Dirty Pictures” heralds the arrival of a clever, gutsy new voice that fearlessly swings for the fences. —Craig McDonald, Edgar-Anthony Award Finalist
Newport, R.I. 1880 – American débutante Sara Swan Whiting has been trained for one purpose: to marry well into society. Together with her friends, Carrie Astor and Edith Jones (Wharton) Sara débuts into society and is introduced to the bachelors of New York’s wealthy families, hoping to find the perfect marriage.
‘Ethereally beautiful’ and ‘the spirit of the ball’, Sara garners many suitors. But none steal her heart, until destiny steps in and she is introduced to Oliver Belmont, the handsome son of financier August Belmont.
Raised in the privileged style of his family’s wealth, Oliver is pressured by his father to find a suitable vocation, but prefers a gentleman’s life of leisure. Sent to the naval academy by his parents, he begs to resign, and then shows up at his mother’s Paris suite unannounced – away without leave. Oliver begins to realize marriage will offer him freedom from his father’s constant insistence on a career, and he sets his sights on the naïve and beautiful Miss Whiting. Smitten with Oliver’s charms, Sara begins courting the handsome Mr. Belmont.
Set in the late 60s the stories attempt to describe problems encountered by a handful of marginal men of color with personal and social issues who find themselves on an elusive quest for a “better life” in two culturally different environments: London, England, and Stockholm, Sweden.
The main characters are few and most of them are from Guyana, a former British colony situated on the mainland of South America. The other main characters are from the English-speaking Caribbean island of Trinidad (& Tobago). There is an Afro-American and a West African from Gambian.
The first tale is about loneliness, lovelessness, disappointment and despair in the life of Mr. Charlie Cheddar in London.
However, a recently acquired friend Julian has promised to introduce him to Helen, believing that a love relationship would change his life to one of positivity. And so he is hopeful that the day´s event would restore happiness and joy in his life.
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These Thy Gifts is a forbidden love story spanning 50 years between a priest and the widow of a mobster. It encompasses history, mystery, comedy, gangsters, beautiful women, war, and religion.
In pre-World War Two London, Penny works as a maternity nurse at the Royal Women's Hospital.
When Bert Grayson is murdered, it sets off a chain of events to apprehend a relentless killer who would not be stopped.
When New York art dealer Elizabeth Martel's mother falls ill, she returns to her hometown in the Midwest. After her mother's death she is seriously short of funds, and a friend suggests she take a job as art adviser to billionaire grain merchant, Preston Greylander.
Newport, R.I. 1880 – American débutante Sara Swan Whiting has been trained for one purpose: to marry well into society. Together with her friends, Carrie Astor and Edith Jones (Wharton) Sara débuts into society and is introduced to the bachelors of New York’s wealthy families, hoping to find the perfect marriage.
Set in the late 60s the stories attempt to describe problems encountered by a handful of marginal men of color with personal and social issues who find themselves on an elusive quest for a “better life” in two culturally different environments: London, England, and Stockholm, Sweden.
