Book Spotlight: The Birth of a Widow by author Kathie Giorgio

The Birth of a Widow is an utterly shattering portrait of the sudden loss of a husband and a shared life that will speak to anyone who has ever loved or lost a loved one. In these poems of electric honesty, Giorgio explores how she struggles to survive her first year as a widow, using all her wisdom, humor, anger, to cross the vast sea of grief to the other shore, bringing us—wiser, too—along with her.

—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of I Want To Tell You

 

Sixty-six days after Kathie Giorgio’s husband was killed when he was struck and run over by a passenger van while walking to his bus stop, Kathie’s grief broke out unbidden into poetry. For the year after his death, she wrote the poems as they arrived. An intimate study of traumatic loss, Giorgio exposes the full depth of grief’s sadness, anger, and confusion.

Purchase a copy of Murder Under Redwood Moon

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Widow-Collected-Poems/dp/B0GQ45W871

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-birth-of-a-widow-kathie-giorgio/1149562901

Booshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-birth-of-a-widow-collected-poems-kathie-giorgio/359235e5053bf4b0

You can also add this to your GoodReads reading list 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249027194-the-birth-of-a-widow

 

About the Author, Kathie Giorgio

Kathie Giorgio is the author of seventeen traditionally published books: eight novels, two story collections, an essay collection, and five poetry collections. Her new novel, Unique In All The World, will be released in February 2027. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and poetry and awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and the Eric Hoffer prize for fiction, among others. 

Giorgio is also the founder and director of AllWriters’ Workplace &Workshop LLC, an international creative writing studio offering online and on-site courses and workshops for all genres and abilities, as well as coaching and editing services.

 

Find the author at:

Website: www.kathiegiorgio.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kathie.giorgio.5

Instagram: @kathiegio1   https://www.instagram.com/kathiegio1/

Twitter/X: @kathiegiorgio   https://x.com/kathiegiorgio

Book Giveaway

Don’t miss out on your chance to win a copy of The Birth of a Widow. Enter at The Muffin from June 1 through June 14.

5 Things About A Change in Plans by Mike Martin

 

Food, family, friends and a few dead bodies…

RCMP officer Winston Windflower’s rare afternoon off gets interrupted when a hit and run turns into murder and he must pull together a team of Mounties from Newfoundland to resolve the crime. Following the money and fentanyl— and bodies—Windflower and his team join forces with police officers in southern Ontario to take down an international drug-smuggling ring.

Windflower must face personal doubts and fears when fellow Mountie Fil Romano is kidnapped. While the higher-ups at HQ make plans to give safe passage to the drug lords in return for Romano’s life, Windflower worries Romano will get caught in the crossfire. Windflower again looks to his friends and allies for help in the difficult hours and days ahead. 

╰┈➤Book Details

• Genre: Mystery
• Sub-genre: Cozy Mystery/Police Procedural
• Language: English
• Pages: 278
• Paperback ISBN: TBA

A Change in Plans is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“When a Mountie is kidnapped, it further complicates matters. As the tension keeps increasing, the action reaches a fever pitch. This author knows how to keep the plot moving swiftly to keep readers hooked. You will enjoy spending time with Windflower, a hero who’s clever, brave, and endlessly resourceful.” – Steven Finkelstein

“Readers cannot help but enjoy this series. Even though there are some nail biting, adrenaline pumping things going on, it is balanced out by the personal parts of the story. Yes, Windflower could be chasing down a killer or a drug dealer, but he is always grounded with his wife and two daughters, his friends and his community. I personally enjoy when he does his smudging and reconnects with his deceased Auntie and Uncle and gives back to the earth.” – Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

╰┈➤Read if you love…

 Mystery 

̷̊̊̊̊̊ International Drug-Smuggling Ring

Kidnapping 

Dead Bodies

Canadian Mounties to the Rescue

Edge of Your Seat Excitement

Excerpt:

Summer was nearing its end in the small town of Grand Bank on the eastern shore of Canada. Winston Windflower, husband, father and RCMP officer, was enjoying some quiet time while his wife, Sheila Hillier, and their two girls, Amelia Louise and Stella, were in St. John’s for their annual back-to-school shopping spree. He was alone except for his four-legged friends. Lady, an eight-year-old collie, was still frisky and ready to go for a walk as always. Molly, the cat, was ageless and just about lifeless as she sat in her bed waiting for the next treat to fall in front of her.

It was a fine, sunny day as Windflower looked out of their home onto the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was so nice, he had taken the afternoon off for picking berries. The summer had been unusually hot and sticky, and that meant the berries were out a little earlier than usual. His fervent hope was that his special picking spot had not been disturbed by early pickers trampling down bushes and limiting the harvest.

If things went well, he could pick a gallon of berries in a couple of hours, and if he was super lucky, Sheila would make something fabulous with the blueberries when she got back. Maybe a pie or even one of her blueberry specialties. Windflower salivated when he imagined all of that deliciousness. He grabbed a couple of Tupperware containers and a bottle of water and then headed for his favourite spot.

There was a congregation of berry pickers at the closest picking location, just past the clinic. Bent over, they paid him little attention. He didn’t mind being ignored. The area was too busy and crowded for him. He took the trail down by the brook and then up the hill to the lookout. He paused for a moment to take in the majestic view of Grand Bank. Windflower glanced over the brook to the town and the wharf, all the way to the craggy outcrop that the locals called the Cape. Then he continued on up over the hill and towards the other side.

He veered off the path about halfway down and was very pleased to find his desired location calm and untouched. He said a silent prayer of thanks to Creator and began his task. Some people would have thought of this as work, but Windflower found berry picking both meditative and spiritual. It reconnected him to the land and made him think of his early days growing up on the reserve in Pink Lake, Alberta. His Cree family would all go berry picking for the day, bringing a lunch and a kettle to make tea.

He soon had one container filled and was working on the second when his pocket buzzed. He checked the number on his phone. It was Corporal Samira Gupta, his right-hand assistant, calling from the bigger community of Marystown. He had made arrangements with his boss, Superintendent Ron Quigley, that he would take the job as acting inspector for the region as long as he could stay in Grand Bank and have an assistant in Marystown. Gupta filled her role perfectly.

“What’s up, Corporal?” asked Windflower.

“Sorry to bother you,” said Gupta. “Betsy said you were off. But I thought you should know. We had a hit and run in Marystown. Over near Walmart. A woman in her forties is in hospital. Sergeant Tizzard is on the scene.” Eddie Tizzard was one of Windflower’s long-time friends and co-workers. They’d been working together for the last 10 years in one way or another.

“That’s a dangerous area,” said Windflower. “How is the woman?”

“She was unconscious when they brought her to the hospital in Burin,” said Gupta. “But no other information so far.”

“And the driver?”

“We’re working on it. Tizzard has a team doing interviews from the scene.”

“It’s busy around there. Somebody would have seen something.”

“That was our thinking, too,” Gupta agreed. “If we don’t get anything back soon from the canvass, we’ll do a media hit.”

“Perfect. Keep me posted.”

Now that his reverie had been disrupted, Windflower packed up his stuff and headed back down to his car. He was driving towards home when he noticed the driver of a passing car flashing their headlights at him. He slowed down and pulled over and then went to see if they were okay. As he got closer, he squinted to see Moira Stoodley, co-owner of the Mug-Up Café, the best and only diner in Grand Bank, in the driver’s seat. She was also the wife of his best friend, Herb Stoodley, who was tutoring him in two very diverse subjects—classical music, about which Windflower knew next to nothing before he met Herb, and trout and salmon fishing, which he thought he had mastered but now realized he was only a beginner.

He assumed Moira had stopped him to say hello or to pass along a message from her husband. But it was much more serious.

“I saw Mike Winger, that crazy-looking guy, back on the road,” said Moira. “It looked like his wheelchair had tipped over. A few young fellers were helping him get back up. But he looked in bad shape. Had a cut over his forehead. I asked him if he was okay. He told me to mind my business and went on home. You might want to check in on him.”

It wasn’t exactly his job to look after wandering locals, but it had become expected of the lone police officer in the community. He may have the high and mighty title of acting inspector, but his day job consisted of part-time social worker, youth counsellor and senior companion when he wasn’t solving crimes or directing the limited amount of traffic that Grand Bank produced.

Helping citizens in distress certainly fell into his ‘other related duties’, and Mike Winger seemed to be in constant need of assistance of one kind or another. Mostly of his own doing.

Windflower knew a little about the man from his many interactions with him. Winger was an American and a veteran of the Gulf Wars. After he left the military, he got certified as a refrigeration mechanic and started wandering around, first in the United States and then into Canada. He ended up in the Grand Bank area working for fish plants and discovered a place where nobody really knew him but welcomed him anyway.

Mike Winger finally felt at home. He bought a house and found a girl who eventually moved in.

His life seemed perfect until… the crash that changed his life. His girlfriend was killed instantly as his car slid off the highway to avoid a moose one late spring morning. He was left with one leg paralyzed and the other badly damaged. Stuck with his feeling of loss and grief, he turned to alcohol and then drugs. Then he became mean and isolated. His scooter was his only escape, but even that turned out to be another source of problems.

Windflower had rescued him and the scooter more times than he could remember. From ditches by the side of the road. From a farmer’s field. From the pub, more than once, when he had been asked to leave, none too politely. One time from the cemetery, although Windflower wasn’t exactly sure how that happened. Mike Winger was certainly one of Windflower’s pet irritants in Grand Bank. But since neither of them were going anywhere soon, they had figured out how to survive, if not get along, together.

– Excerpted from A Change in Plans by Mike Martin, Ottawa Press and Publishing, 2026. Reprinted with permission.

5 Things about A Change in Plans

1.    The main character is Sgt. Winston Windflower. Windflower is a Cree from the fictional community of Pink Lake Alberta. People ask why did I make him Indigenous? I didn’t make him anything. That’s the way he came. Windflower came out of the fog one night in Grand Bank, Newfoundland and started talking to me. I just wrote down his story.

2.    A Change in Plans is the 17^th book in the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series. It is a light mystery series.

3.     A Change in Plans is set in Grand Bank, Newfoundland, on the easternmost tip of Canada. It is small, fairly isolated with a history of rum running during prohibition and the love of smuggling runs deep. It is the perfect location for a series of mysterious crimes and adventures.

4. What’s A Change in Plans about? RCMP officer Winston Windflower’s rare afternoon off gets interrupted when a hit and run turns into murder and he must pull together a team of Mounties from Newfoundland to resolve the crime. Following the money and fentanyl— and bodies—Windflower and his team join forces with police officers in southern Ontario to take down an international drug-smuggling ring. Windflower must face personal doubts and fears when fellow Mountie Fil Romano is kidnapped. While the higher-ups at HQ make plans to give safe passage to the drug lords in return for Romano’s life, Windflower worries Romano will get caught in the crossfire. Windflower again looks to his friends and allies for help in the difficult hours and days ahead. 

5. A Change in Plans is available from Amazon, all over the world.

About the Author

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand.

He is the award-winning author of the best-selling Sgt. Windflower Mystery series, set in beautiful Grand Bank. There are now 17 books in this light mystery series with the publication of A Change in Plans. 

A Tangled Web was shortlisted in 2017 for the best light mystery of the year, and Darkest Before the Dawn won the 2019 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award. All That Glitters was shortlisted for the LOLA 2024 Must Read Book of the year award.

Some Sgt. Windflower Mysteries are now available as audiobooks and the latest Darkest Before the Dawn was released as an audiobook in 2024. All audiobooks are available from Audible in Canada and around the world.

Mike is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writers’ Guild and Capital Crime Writers.

Visit Mike’s website at https://sgtwindflowermysteries.com. 

Connect with him on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkerOnTheCapeReviewsAndMore 

╰┈➤ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mike54martin 

Sponsored By:

The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor

 

The story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family…

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

⤷Read sample here.

⤷Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“Mary Lawlor's memoir, Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War, is terrifically written. The experience of living in a military family is beautifully brought to life. This memoir shows the pressures on families in the sixties, the fears of the Cold War, and also the love that families had that helped them get through those times, with many ups and downs. It's a story that all of us who are old enough can relate to, whether we were involved or not. The book is so well written. Mary Lawlor shares a story that needs to be written, and she tells it very well.” ―The Jordan Rich Show

 

“Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized memoir, articulates what accountants would call a soft cost, the cost that dependents of career military personnel pay, which is the feeling of never belonging to the specific piece of real estate called home. . . . [T]he real story is Lawlor and her father, who is ensconced despite their ongoing conflict in Lawlor’s pantheon of Catholic saints and Irish presidents, a perfect metaphor for coming of age at a time when rebelling was all about rebelling against the paternalistic society of Cold War America.” ―Stars and Stripes

*****

╰┈➤Read if you love…

✎ᝰ.📓🗒Memoirs

=✪=Military Family

🎖️Life as a Military Brat

🗺️⁀જ✈︎Travel

✌️The Sixties and the Cold War

✈️Fighter Pilots

Excerpt:

The pilot’s house where I grew up was mostly a women’s world. There were five of us. We had the place to ourselves most of the time. My mother made the big decisions—where we went to school, which bank to keep our money in. She had to decide these things often because we moved every couple of years. The house is thus a figure of speech, a way of thinking about a long series of small, cement dwellings we occupied as one fictional home.

It was my father, however, who turned the wheel, his job that rotated us to so many different places. He was an aviator, first in the Marines, later in the Army. When he came home from his extended absences—missions, they were called—the rooms shrank around him. There wasn’t enough air. We didn’t breathe as freely as we did when he was gone, not because he was mean or demanding but because we worshipped him. Like satellites my sisters and I orbited him at a distance, waiting for the chance to come closer, to show him things we’d made, accept gifts, hear his stories. My mother wasn’t at the center of things anymore. She hovered, maneuvered, arranged, corrected. She was first lady, the dame in waiting. He was the center point of our circle, a flier, a winged sentry who spent most of his time far up over our heads. When he was home, the house was definitely his.

These were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold, metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might get burnt by the air you breathed.

Every day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements, marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen. They had to be ready for it.

A clipped, nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an hour.

This was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.

– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken.  It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself.  Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now.  Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school).  And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often.  My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones.  He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand.  This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be.  Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening.  After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home.  He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned.  At home, there were only women.  My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home.  Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence.  I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war.  But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it.  Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them.  It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another.  It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time.  All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters.  I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things.  The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy.  These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about.  I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character.  Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult.  A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next.  In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings.  So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had.  Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago.  Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did.   As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior.  When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement.  In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon.  When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much.  We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak.  Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that.  Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me.  I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids.  And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through.  When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”?  It’s surprising how often people ask that.  The answer is no.  Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them.  Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life.  His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of  military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families.  Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments.  I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re  having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments.  For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids.  And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

About the Author

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12^th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18^th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Sponsored By:

Book review: Max and Charlie's Highland Adventure by Wendy Leighton-Porter

 

Max and Charlie's Highland Adventure by Wendy Leighton-Porter is another gripping adventure in a middle-grade series that will appeal to readers of all ages. Max is being sent on another special mission by the Guardians of Time, but on this occasion, he is not alone. He and Charlie end up travelling back to the Scottish Highlands in 1746, just in time to be part of the fateful Battle of Culloden that ended Bonnie Prince Charlie’s dream of taking back the English throne. It all starts when Charlie, best friend to twins Jemima and Joe, and their talking (yes, talking!) Tonkinese cat, Max, is sent to visit his great-great-Uncle Alastair, who lives in the Scottish Highlands. Charlie doesn’t know his elderly relative and is less than charmed because he’d planned lots of fun stuff with the twins over the school holidays. But Fate has other plans and the twins and Max end up going with him. But that’s where things take a different turn. Usually, the trio ends up travelling back in time, having incredible adventures. However, this time, Charlie is singled out for a very special reason and Max is part of a very special mission. It’s just them and an ancient watch and some incredible events… Are you ready?

This is the nineteenth book in Wendy Leighton-Porter’s Shadows of the Past series. I have read them all, so I am completely au fait with the backstory. However, readers need not fear they will be lost. The author succinctly puts everything into context and explains to the reader why the kids are even travelling back in time, how Max can speak, and why they are important in the grand scheme of things. The language is beautiful and descriptive, setting the historical scene with mystery, intrigue, plot and counter plot, deception, royal gold, and trickery. Young readers will enjoy every minute as the mystery unfolds and the clues are revealed, and they wonder if Bonnie Prince Charlie’s gold was real. They will be swept up in the fray of battle and will hope against hope that the prince wins. But the author does not sugarcoat history, and events unfold as they are meant to. The end of the book offers readers a glossary and historical notes to put the events and characters into context. This is very useful for educators who want to teach history with a dash of adventure and entertainment. I loved this book and the series. I am of Scottish heritage and my father’s name was also Alastair, so this book is special. I encourage readers to start at the very beginning of the series and be taken on the adventure of a lifetime. With a talking cat by your side, you won’t go wrong with choosing the Shadows of the Past series.