Every Generation

by Jim Short

Against the wishes of her dying Grandma, young Sandy married a new man in town. Sandy should have listened. Anger soon fuels pregnant Sandy to toss her husband of eight months while fear drives her to commit bank embezzlement. One small theft is all, one just big enough to replace her inheritance cash squandered by her husband. And by taking it from a massive account of GWS, Inc., certainly no one will ever learn. But a friend did. And now he’s dead. The newspaper said suicide. The townsfolk disagree. That judgment error by Sandy Burke, a small town bank teller, stresses pregnant Sandy into premature delivery of twins and directs her life down a trail soon littered with murder and blackmail. But now it’s eighteen years later. Small town has grown. Sandy manages a bank competing with her former boss. Her twin boys are fine students, and even though Sandy conceals a tremendous lie from them, life is good; their rural home is safe and comfortable. Or is it? Who are the men behind tinted windows that stopped outside her house on Pot Hole Road? Why do they hold such an intense interest in Sandy's ten acres of wooded land? After Sandy’s former boss is ordered to acquire Sandy’s property at any cost, powerful men collide with their own pasts, leading them back in time to whom they were and why they are. You are invited to ride this story of innocence and death, love and abandonment, commonality and great wealth, all the way through streets of small-town California, into slums of Los Angeles, atop snow-capped mountains of northern Italy, along a sea bay of old Genoa, to where the end explosively erupts in white-ice mountains of Colorado. All to try a mother’s love for her children, no matter what.

418 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2010