John Yearwood

In the summer of 1979, the small town of Whitmire, Texas—deep in the eastern piney woods of the state—is rocked by a series of murders. None of the victims knew one another, none lived close by. A police chief floats to the surface of a lake, hooked on a trot line; a divorcing wife apparently overdoses on illegal drugs; the bodies of a young mother and her three-year-old baby are found near an abandoned barn; a Congressman is murdered in a shoot out at his home, which also claims the lives of two drug pushers from Houston and a used car dealer. The sleepy private town of Whitmire is terrified, and the town’s newspaper publisher is determined to bring the mystery to a resolution. BoMac—short for Beaufort Sebastian Maclean— is a young University of Virginia dropout devoted to journalism and committed to chronicling the life of the little community. He takes the publishing job at the weekly Whitmire Standard very seriously, pouring his life into a job that demands he not only write the news but also take the photos and sell the ads. In the fraught atmosphere of Whitmire where daily routines are thrown off kilter by the unknown terror, he keeps his eyes open and finally spots a jar of pennies: the evidence that clenches the death sentence for the killer.

Twenty-first century Army Ranger Charles Shelby finds himself mysteriously dropped into the middle of a Bronze Age war, with nothing but his superb training to help him. He befriends a culture under invasion by barbaric Achaeans from the north and helps them defend their city. But the war, like all wars, doesn’t end easily. In The Gender of Fire, the third book in the Icarus series (The Icarus Jump, The City and the Gate), Shelby leads his new people to victory over the northern invaders, and then on a perilous migration across torturous mountains to a pirate-infested Adriatic shore. In his heart of hearts, he knows this civilization is destined to become the Etruscans of Italy, if they can get that far. But first, they need to survive the war, the wild tribes of the mountains, and then the pirates. And they need ships.

A secret mission goes awry for Army Ranger Charles Shelby when a faulty parachute jump plunges him through time into a Bronze Age war. Befriending a peaceful city and its lovely priestess, he is tasked with training female guerilla fighters to counter northern barbarians infiltrating the city’s peaceful valley. Meanwhile, he discovers a deep-rooted treachery in the city that threatens to wreck a culture he has come to admire and to destroy the priestess who loves him. With only his Twenty-first Century knife and his superb training as one of the modern world’s elite warriors, Shelby triumphs over every peril but one, the formidable foe of his own heart.

In the last bloody minutes of his escape with Melia from her besieged Bronze Age city, all he knew was that he was in some kind of underground labyrinth. Then the earthquake hit, she was gone, and he was back in the Twenty-first Century. Now Army Ranger Charles Shelby fights his way past underground monsters and ghosts to return to her, finding a city on the edge of collapse. His superb military training and skill help him to overcome barbaric invaders, rescue a captured king, and turn the tide of war to save the city dedicated to doing what is best for women and children.