THE SUMERTON WOMEN: a synopsis

Look for THE SUMERTON WOMEN, available from Kensington Publishing on April 24th, 2012 at your local bookseller, or pre-order from amazon.com! . . . . When Cecily Burkhart is orphaned at age eight, she becomes the ward of Harold Pierce, Earl Sumerton, and finds herself surrounded by a family as endearing as they are complex. There is Lord Hal and Lady Grace, who both nurse a secret pain behind a façade of wealth and excess, their son, the innocent young Brey, and their daughter, the devout and intense Mirabella. There is also Father Alec Cahill, loving tutor and mentor, who maintains an unblemished exterior to disguise a secret of his own. After a string of traumatic events befall Sumerton, everything changes. Old dreams die to be replaced with new plans. Cecily must learn to adapt to a different life, a different love, and hold together a household fractured by tragedy. Meantime Mirabella struggles to adjust to the violent changes being made in Henry VIII’s England, changes that will rob her of her calling. Grief-stricken, Mirabella reshapes her life by embarking on a sequence of choices that threatens to destroy the lives of everyone around her unless she learns to accept one vital truth. This fast-paced character study is a poignant illustration of the ties that bind women and the tragedies that tear them apart. It is a saga of faith tested, of loyalty and betrayal, of resentment and forgiveness. Above all, THE SUMERTON WOMEN is a novel about the choices people make that alter lives forever.