About the Book Classical pianist Renata DiMonte has abandoned a career with the symphony to entertain in the elegant Piano Bar and Lounge of the Claremont Arms, one of New York City's premier luxury hotels. Haunted by guilt following her mother's death, Renata finds solace in the music she has always longed to play, bonding closely with her audience for the first time./ However, five-star service is not all the Claremont Arms has to offer. There are rumors of paranormal phenomena-rumors that Renata ignores until she begins to have experiences she can't explain. Patrons she has never met will request songs, and without warning, their life stories reveal themselves to her, open books of pain and joy. Nothing frightening has happened-yet-but nothing about this is remotely normal, either. Are Renata's strange experiences simply flukes, products of an overactive imagination? Does the beautiful concert grand piano she plays possess supernatural qualities? Or is there magic in the music itself? About the Author Michaele Lockhart, passionate historian, author, and avid reader living in Tucson, Arizona, is acutely aware of the need for contemporary fiction that portrays and appeals to the vast spectrum of today's multigenerational readers. A registered nurse and former teacher, this author is also a talented landscape and nature photographer. Michaele is currently writing a mystery series set in the Southwest. "In this charming mix of fairy tale, allegory, and personal discovery, where each chapter is cleverly overlaid with the ambiance of contemporary music, Lockhart has produced a quite modern-day and mature love story." "-- Robert Hammond, author and playright, "The Nursery, Where Were We, "and" Don't Call Me Ishmael "Affirms the power of music to lead to love and to meaning." "-- Toby Fesler Heathcotte, author of" The Alma Chronicles

A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century. On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. “If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay,” she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. “Three elderly widows and one old man . . . who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind” serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What is Mrs. Palfrey to do with herself now that she has all the time in the world? Go for a walk. Go to a museum. Go to the end of the block. Well, she does have her grandson who works at the British Museum, and he is sure to visit any day. Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known “the right thing to do,” but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else. Elizabeth Taylor’s final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.

The Victorian era was full of majestic beauty and scandalous secrets—a time when corsets were the least of a woman’s restrictions, and men could kill or be killed in the name of honor… Lady Margaret Cassidy left a life of nobility behind in Ireland, forsaking her grieving homeland to aid war-ravaged men in England. Still, she never expected a cruel turn of fate to lock her into an unwanted betrothal with one of her English patients—much less one as broken and dangerous as Viscount Powers. Wrecked by his tragic past, Powers’ opiate-addled sanity hangs precariously in the balance, leaving him poised to destroy anyone who dares to utter the names of the wife and child he still so deeply mourns. So when he is forced to marry Margaret in exchange for freedom, he is shocked by the desire to earn her trust, her body, and—most alarming of all—her heart…

"I'm going to make a pinkie-swear with you right here and now, Tom Walton; when, not if, you return from Afghanistan, you must come up here and I will have a mad passionate affair with you..." With this proposal, Thomas Walton, an infantry soldier in Alpha Company, Second Platoon, arrives at the threshold of events that will change his life forever. Breakfast with the Dirt Cult chronicles the days of love and war in the life of Tom Walton. Torn between a beautiful, bibliophilic, Canadian ex-stripper and the hunt for Al-Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, Walton finds himself forced to grapple with being a young man in the days of modernity. While Breakfast with the Dirt Cult has been written as a novel, it is based on a true story. The names have been changed and the chronology has been condensed for the sake of editing.