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in 1894, down the dark hill the woman runs, her child bound in a towel tight in her arms. Behind her, flames break through the windows of the house. Ahead, down by the river, men sleeping rough lean into a campfire. She doesn't falter, her feet seek the path. She knows the men will help--the same ones she'd fed at her back door the other day. What she doesn't know is that one of them will save her, and give her back her voice. And her voice will echo over a hundered years of life, war, loss and love---with singing words that shimmer on the surface of two rivers flowing through Time and the Midwestern plains, until Time itself is full and round and ripe--and another young woman hears, and finds her own voice again. in 1982, Clare Yates returns home, defeated but determined to start over after leaving her lover in San Francisco. She teaches English at a large state university in a very small town. One day, she opens the diary of Jack London and finds something that tells her what she always thought was true--she has lived another life, in a different place and time. She decides to go looking for proof of that life, hoping for renewal and redemption. Then, "he" comes back to town, and it's as if nothing has changed. Only, everything has. A literary roman a clef ("story with a key") of sweeping personal and emotional intensity. Readers say:"In Of Ripeness & the River, Mary Burns moves us back and forward in time seamlessly with language that is at once lush and fresh. This is a story of a woman finding her voice through time but it is also the story of time itself, a tale of the interconnectedness of all things--history, loss, love, living and death, second chances. Two rivers flow timelessly and the midwestern plains sing in the background of this novel that is also grounded in the stories of Jack London and his life and writing. This book is a great read." - Valerie Hastings, author of Searching for Dandelion Greens "In this extremely tender novel of loss and reconciliation, novelist Mary F. Burns once more uses two stories set in different time periods with her characters in close relationship. Very beautiful written and totally engrossing!" -- Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart, The Players, Claude & Camille

On the edge of the cultural earthquake that would be the 1960s, the people who live in the coastal village of Mendocino in 1959 can feel it coming. Beats and Jazz, poetry and art are spilling out of San Francisco onto the northern coasts of California. World War II is laid to rest, but people feel restless. When a village son, now a priest, comes back home to bury his mother, he finds his younger brother gone and a town full of secrets--some of them his own. A youthful mother and her grown daughter find themselves yearning for a wider, more exciting life than what the small village offers, while two brothers taking care of an aging father battle each other and their own spirits as challenges arise to confront them and force them to change. Ember Days, named for the ancient marking of the change from one season to the next, reveals the heart's deep longings and fears in the face of truth and change, life and death. "Ember Days is a magnificent, rich, and beautifully written story. The people are so real and moving that my eyes often filled with tears and I didn't want the book to end." --Stephanie Cowell, author of Claude & Camille, Marrying Mozart

It's Paris in the Spring of 1881-John Singer Sargent's portraits are garnering praise and attention at the Salon, and Violet Paget (aka writer Vernon Lee) is on her way to a literary rendezvous in London. But their lives are interrupted by a dramatic murder at the Musée de Cluny, where a medieval tapestry is being restored--it may hold the clue to murder! Time-travel through the centuries in France as the two intrepid sleuths unravel a mystery that began in 1480. This is the third book in the John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget mystery series.

Nearly 150 years have passed since Moses Shapira, an antiquarian book dealer in Jerusalem, up-ended the Victorian world of biblical scholars and archaeologists by declaring he had discovered the earliest Bible text in the world-an original Book of Deuteronomy, which included the Commandments-ELEVEN of them.He offered fifteen leather-like fragments to the British Museum for one million pounds-the London papers could talk of nothing else for weeks in the summer of 1883, and Shapira was a celebrity. Experts at the museum pored over the manuscripts and came to a decision: they were forgeries, not the 3000-year-old scrolls that Moses insisted they were. He left London in disgrace.Six months later, he was found in a shabby hotel in Rotterdam, a bullet through his head.But was it suicide, as the police thought, or was it murder?Historical fiction author Mary F. Burns has incorporated Shapira's story into the fourth book of her series, The John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget Mysteries. She has consulted with scholars and researchers who are currently involved in the continuing debate about the authenticity of "The Shapira Scrolls", the fate of their owner, and the whereabouts of the scrolls themselves: Idan Dershowitz, Chanan Tigay, Ross K. Nichols and Matthew Hamilton among them. With a researcher's attention to detail and a mystery writer's touch for the human story, Burns has created a masterful suspense story, set in two time periods that start out decades apart and end with the tragedy of Shapira's death. Her witty and sympathetic amateur sleuths, Sargent and Paget, become involved in the mystery when it literally lands on their doorstep one afternoon in Paris. They are driven to navigate a complicated nest of intrigue, impelled by the tantalizing suggestions that the artifacts were authentic, and their owner murdered.Learn more about the author at her website: www.maryfburns.com and view the video book trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcvHfjS0Ag0

The death of a humble clergyman in 1877 leads amateur sleuths Violet Paget and John Singer Sargent into a medieval world of saints and kings--including the legendary Arthur--as they follow a trail of relics and antiquities lost since the destruction of Glastonbury Abbey in 1539. Written in alternating chapters between the two time periods, The Spoils of Avalon creates a sparkling, magical mystery that bridges the gap between two worlds that could hardly be more different: the industrialized, Darwinian, materialistic Victorian Age and the agricultural, faith-infused life of a medieval abbey on the brink of violent change at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. First in a new series of historical mysteries, The Spoils of Avalon introduces two life-long friends as a different kind of detecting team, beginning as young people on the verge of making their names famous for the next several decades throughout Europe and America: the brilliant and brittle Violet Paget, known as the writer Vernon Lee, and the talented, genial portrait painter John Singer Sargent. (300 pages in paperback edition) "The Spoils of Avalon blends the rich details of historical fiction with the suspenseful, clue-driven sleuthing that characterizes the best in mystery. Dual timelines and missing Arthurian artifacts add delightful layers to this compelling, well-written series, which not only offers a unique, artistic twist on the "Holmes and Watson" detecting pair but places a female sleuth--the brilliant Violet Paget--in the driver's seat. A must for fans of historical mysteries." -- Susan Spann, author of the Shinobi Mysteries "What an engaging, literate page-turner! The author does so many things well in this historical novel. First, she creates two mysteries that take place centuries apart, both of them well-plotted and full of the sweet tension that mystery readers will love. Second, she develops a witty, likable pair of characters from historical friends, Violet Paget and John Singer Sargent. Third, she gently educates readers about history, art, legend, and the grand events involving Henry VIII's break with the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, she creates two past worlds so effectively that I enjoyed losing myself in them, and suspending my twenty-first century skepticisms." -- Mark Wiederanders, author of Stevenson's Treasure.

"Portraits of an Artist: A Novel about John Singer Sargent is a work of historical fiction based on the life of a brilliant yet troubled artist of the late nineteenth century. A contemporary and associate of famous celebrities such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Edward Burne-Jones and Sarah Bernhardt, Sargent's meteoric rise to fame followed by his striking fall from grace, and his retreat to London from Paris, are the tragic underpinnings of his unforgettable career. The stories behind two of his finest paintings, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" and "Madame X", are also explored in context. Told in first-person perspective from the points of view of numerous individuals who figured prominently in Sargent's life, "Portraits of an Artist" is an unforgettable reconstruction of a talented man's search to find meaning in life through art. Highly recommended." -- The Fiction Shelf of the Midwest Book Review "An evocative rendering of the great portraitist, John Singer Sargent, as seen through the eyes of the subjects of his most famous paintings. A tour de force of historical and psychological imagination." --Paula Marantz Cohen, author of What Alice Knew, Jane Austen in Scarsdale "Burns skillfully brings the subjects of his portraits to life, telling their stories in their own voices as the mystery of who Sargent really is, and the culture that both supported and constrained him, is gradually and artfully revealed." -- Laurel Corona, author of Finding Emilie, Penelope's Daughter, The Four Seasons

This second mystery finds amateur sleuths John Singer Sargent and Violet Paget afloat in murder in the fabled City of Venice during the darkest days of the year (1879). Secrets and long-held grudges surface at Ca' Favretto, an ancient palazzo on the Grand Canal, which has been recently purchased and refurbished by an Italian artist and good friend of Sargent--but will the ghosts of the past allow the new inhabitants to live in peace? Join the ever-engaging duo in their latest detecting adventure for a taste of both the 18th and 19th centuries in Italy!

John Singer Sargent has fled Paris after the debacle of "Madame X", the painting that destroyed his reputation-but he begins to heal and paint again in the Cotswolds village of Broadway. There, in a Bohemian enclave of American and British artists, writers, illustrators, poets and actors, he begins to create a painting that will make him famous once again-the luminous portrait of two little girls in a garden: "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose". But all is not well in the garden, and when the mysterious death of "the blue bird" and other strange incidents occur, John calls on his old friend Violet Paget to travel down to Broadway and help solve the mystery. Violet is happy to leave London after her "tell-all" novel Miss Brown has led to her being shunned by the people she didn't think she was exposing...but she finds new friends in Broadway while the simple mystery turns into a much more complex one when a dead body is discovered in the garden. This is the fifth mystery in the John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget Mysteries series.