"Sailing Directions" is a novelized memoir of grief and recovery set aboard a luxurious sailing yacht traveling the Greek Islands, based on the personal experience of the author. Is it possible that taking a job as cook on a luxurious sailing yacht, and getting away from her own small town can help Nina get over the death of her beloved husband, Jake? Her friend Alex thinks so, and convinces her to come to Greece where he's captain of Desiree, a one hundred foot beauty owned by a ruthless American financier known to his crew as the Boss. It's a small world, with intense dynamics. The Boss is demanding, and prone to tantrums. Seasickness, heat, exhaustion and grief threaten to defeat Nina, and ultimately, the Boss's willfulness nearly destroys his lovely toy and puts them all in danger. However, Nina finds a stock of resilience, humor, and even romance that lightens her darkest moments. The settings are wonderfully and carefully researched and detailed. Sailing under the stars, stormy seas, gourmet meals, visits to remote harbors and ancient sites; the reader is in for some serious vicarious pleasure while at the same time relating to the timeless struggle of recovery from loss.

It is history's most feared disease.  It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead.  Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacterium--the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague.

In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France.  There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death....

Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London.  In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.

From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction.  For in 2005, humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.