Lois Ruby – författare

A suspenseful and heartfelt story about an era whose uncertainties, controversies, and dangers will seem anything but distant to contemporary readers. If thirteen-year-old Marty Rafner had his way, he''d spend the summer of 1953 warming the bench for his baseball team, listening to Yankees games on the radio, and avoiding preparations for his bar mitzvah. Instead, he has to deal with FBI agents staking out his house because his parents—professors at the local college—are suspected communist sympathizers. Marty knows what happens to communists, or Reds, as his friends call them: They lose their jobs, get deported...or worse. Two people he''s actually met, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, have been convicted of being communist spies, and they''re slated to be executed in two months. Marty just wants everything to go back to normal, but that''s impossible thanks to the rumors that his parents are traitors. As his friends and teammates turn on him and federal agents track his every move, Marty isn''t sure what to believe. Is his family really part of a Red Menace working against the United States? And even if they''re simply patriotic Americans who refuse to be bullied by the government, what will it cost them? As the countdown to the Rosenbergs'' execution date continues, it may be up to Marty to make sure his family survives.

"Comic, creepy, calamitous, and . . . completely satisfying."—Claudia Mills, author of The Lost Language and Zero Tolerance

With his bar mitzvah on the horizon, thirteen-year-old Eddie needs to do a community service project, and he needs to start yesterday. Against his better judgment, he ends up with a volunteering gig at Silver Brook Pavilion retirement home, where the elderly residents call him “Eddie Whatever” so they won’t have to remember his last name. Eddie expects his time at Silver Brook to drag, but at least his friend (and secret crush) Tessa will be there to keep him company—if he can manage to avoid embarrassing himself in front of her.

Soon, though, the seniors upend all Eddie’s assumptions. Their lives are full of excitement, with a dramatic courtship unfolding, long-hidden secrets emerging, rumors of a vengeful ghost running rampant, and a thief on the loose.

When suspicion for the thefts falls on Eddie, he has to team up with the seniors—and Tessa—to clear his name and solve the mysteries of Silver Brook.

Salem, Massachusetts - 1692Thomas is marked as an outcast the moment he steps off the ship from England. As a Quaker, he’s outnumbered and distrusted by Salem’s Puritans. And as an orphan without any useful skills, he has nowhere to live and no way to earn his keep. In a stroke of luck—perhaps good, perhaps not—he’s taken in by the aged widow Prudence Blevins, who’s rumored to be a witch.Patience has tried all her life to be a good Puritan—obedient to God and to her elders—and all her life, she has come up short. But her orderly world is upended when her younger sister, Abigail, falls victim to a mysterious affliction. The same torments have stricken other Salem girls, who claim they’re being bewitched by servants of the Devil. Soon the girls, including Abigail, begin accusing neighbors of witchcraft. As the community becomes consumed by suspicion and fear, Thomas and Patience search for the truth. To protect those they care about, they will have to question everything they think they know: their faiths, their loyalties, and their places in Salem.