Sudden Death is a murder mystery set in the world of football. More than a whodunit, the novel spans roughly thirty years from 1966 to 1997 in the life of one couple, who grew up half the world apart. Kendall Harris, a brilliant law student from Georgia, and Duke Astin, a star quarterback from Hawaii, meet at UCLA, fall in love, and marry soon after graduation. Kendall practices law and Duke plays for a decade in the NFL, then becomes a college coach. Juggling two careers and moving from state to state puts pressure on their relationship. But through the joys and stresses of life, they stay loyal to one another. Things take a troubling turn when Coach Astin is hired by a football powerhouse in the South. Immediately, an influential group unhappy Duke was hired begins to undermine everything he tries to accomplish. The coach and his wife both receive death threats as they work to keep focus on their careers and activities in the community. But when the murder occurs, the story becomes a search for joy and goodness in life, and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit over unspeakable odds. Written by a woman who has spent her entire life married to a football player and coach, Sudden Death also explores serious themes of sports gambling, alcoholism, and spousal abuse within the varied cast of characters.

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas was an intelligent, spirited woman born in 1834 to one of the wealthiest families in Georgia. At the age of fourteen she began and kept a diary for forty-one years. These diaries of her life before, during, and after the Civil War filled thirteen hand-written volumes with 450,000 words. In the early years she described her life of leisure and recorded the books she read. Her father recognized her love of learning and sent her to the first college for women in America, Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. After college graduation in 1851, she was a gay young girl of fashion who met and married her Princeton-educated husband in 1852. However, with the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath, her life changed forever. Thomas experienced loss of wealth, bankruptcy, the death of loved ones, serious illness, and devastating family strife. She gave birth to ten children and saw four of them die. But, through it all, she kept pouring thoughts into her diary. Thomas examined what was happening, asked questions, and strived to find ways to improve her family's dire economic straits. She started a school in her home and later ran a boarding house out of the old family mansion. In 1893, Thomas left Augusta and moved to Atlanta where she became active in many women's organizations. She found comfort in her work with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Suffrage Movement. She began producing articles for newspapers, keeping them in scrapbooks that tell the story of her life after she quit keeping a diary. In 1899 she was elected president of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association. Because of her own losses, Thomas was sensitive to the well-being of other women. As she said, she had suffered and grown strong. Her life is an amazing story of survival and transformation that speaks to women in our own time.