Böcker av Marolyn Caldwell

Things may seem bleak when your friends and family all died nearly 150 years ago, and worse, the group who did most of them in is still doing evil. The good news is you have a loving wife, a ragtag group of brilliant scientists, and a whole new mixed-race family stemming from a night of mutual respect and affection involving your father long before you were born.The bad guys are rich, powerful, and control almost everything, but that doesn't make them smart. Their evil founding document enslaves families in perpetuity. But there's a catch.Can Jeff, Lorie and the gang defeat the evil and destroy the compact once and for all before it's too late?

What do you do if the bad guys in your life grab you to get back a priceless diamond--which, by the way, you don't have--and they're willing to kidnap, torture, and/or kill to obtain it? After you make your escape, you help devise--with the assistance of the most devious people you know--a totally improbable plan to reproduce the lost treasure. Then you get really sneaky! Lorie and Jeff Preston and their devious friends go full tilt at the Blackheart Compact in the follow-up to Battle of Wills.

In the darkness of a misty Georgia night, Lorie Manning aids a badly wounded Confederate reenactor, a blue-eyed career soldier and spy calling himself Major Jefferson Preston. The name is an intriguing footnote to the genealogists in Lorie's family, who know Major Preston only as a dashing Union spy who disappeared in the service of his country 150 years before. His fate has remained a mystery. In this century, the extended family is grieving the recent loss of Jon Randolph Third, beloved centenarian patriarch of Randolph City, the small town which has taken his name. Randolph has been extraordinarily generous to the town. His legacy is crucial to its well-being. His will, however, can nowhere be found. As his family frantically searches, hoping to track down the document before Jon Third's adopted son, Rolf Maratti, long estranged, files papers to acquire everything of value including the old mansion and its many secrets, Jeff volunteers his service to the cause. He and Lorie embark upon an adventure that unmasks a multi-century conspiracy of kidnapping, murder, slavery and the Underground Railroad, tying Randolph's legacy to an ancient document that binds the signers' descendants to unending servitude. In so doing, they discover a way not only to save Randolph's legacy--but to free his embattled family and friends from their hidden foes.