Nobody visits Culloden without feeling the presence of its dead. In a long life of walking battlefields and ferreting through the past, I’ve often sensed Things–everyone does, I think. The stories in this book are a fascinating array of paranormal suspense, romance, and mystery, where parted lovers find each other on the other side of death and the spirits of dead killers still roam among the living. What I mean is, you could hardly find more fertile ground than the West, if what you want is a peek through the veil between this world and. and maybe still do, though their earthly traces have vanished. There’s even an official ghost-town–Jerome, in the Mingus Mountains, a (mostly) abandoned mining town–though there are a lot of less-known places in the Southwest where people have once lived. I mean, you want to talk haunted?Īnd then to the south, among the low deserts and their mountains and mirages, we have the stories of lost miners, cowboys and desperate gun-slingers: think the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, Boot Hill and Tombstone (one of my grandfathers was at one time editor of The Tombstone Epitaph, the town ‘s newspaper, which I thought was pretty neat). I’ve sat (a long time ago, lest the National Park Service become Concerned.) on a wall at Wupatki by the light of a full moon and listened to the earth breathe, through blowholes from the caves below. Out beyond the mountains, on the high desert near Sunset Crater, are the ruins of Wupatki and Wukoki, built more than a thousand years ago by people we call the Sinagua or Anasazi, because they are lost, along with their names.
My old family home is in Flagstaff, at the foot of an extinct volcano that is a sacred mountain to at least thirteen local Native American tribes, including the Hopi and the Navajo (to whom it ‘s Dook ‘o ‘oosłííd, the sacred mountain of the west, built with pieces of abalone shell brought from the Third World).
I grew up in the West and–aside from a brief and horrible eighteen months on the east coast (major culture shock)–have always lived here. Thank you Kathryn, Carol, Ken, Jo Carol, Kate, and all the RT staff for your perseverance, dedication, guidance, and ingenuity, which knows no bounds. RT is truly the luminary of the industry. Thank you RT for making the romance industry what it is today.
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