Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC

Appalachian Justice
Billy May Platte learned the hard way that 1940s West Virginia was no place to be different. After witnessing an incident in which her sexuality was called into question, three local boys instigated a brutal attack that changed the small coal mining town of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia forever.
Return to Crutcher Mountain
Entangled Thorns
Looking for the Sun Door
by Tracy R. Franklin
As recounted in Appalachian Justice, Jessie is an adult survivor of horrendous childhood abuse. At the age of thirteen, she was rescued by reclusive mountain woman Billy May Platte. Now forty-seven, Jessie is outwardly successful but inwardly struggles to reconcile the broken pieces of her past.  
Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood. Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded by homemade stills, corn liquor, and an impoverished family that more often than not preferred life on the wrong side of the law. Now an unwelcome letter threatens to unravel the life she's so carefully built.
With Looking for the Sun Door, Tracy R. Franklin combines her poetry with short fiction and shows us what it means to be broken, whole, and pasted together. With her poetry, she uses her confessional style to explore the universal challenges of trying to understand one’s relationship to oneself, to others, and to the ineffable source of existence itself. With her fiction, she examines the human soul in resiliency and weakness, fulfillment and need. 
After the heartbreak of losing their newborn son to a previously undiagnosed genetic condition, Phillip and Anna Lewinsky managed to patch their lives back together and move forward, filling the emptiness with friends, work, and travel. 

When Anna unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again at the age of forty-three, Phillip is thrilled to have a second chance at fatherhood in spite of Anna’s objections. 

As desires clash, misunderstandings abound, and decisions are irrevocably made, the foundation of their marriage begins to crumble until only tragedy remains.
The Cedar Hollow Series
by Melinda Clayton

Snippets from Cedar Hollow
A series of short stories centered around the lives of the residents of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, the fictional town featured in the Cedar Hollow Series.
Blessed Are the Wholly Broken

Shadow Days
On the anniversary of her husband’s death, forty-nine-year-old Emily Holt runs away, leaving an unmade bed, an unlocked house, two college-aged sons, and an overabundance of bad memories.

Struggling to make peace with the death of a husband who’d been lost to mental illness, she vows to drive to the end of the road, which, she’s surprised to find, is just outside the tiny mining town of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia.



Erma Puckett's Moment of Indiscretion
by Melinda Clayton
A Treasure Box Full of Cedar Hollow
by Melinda Clayton
Goin' Fishin'
by Melinda Clayton
The Sheriff of Cedar Hollow
by W. Michael Franklin and Melinda Clayton
Lena, a shamanistic cat, and her conjure woman Eulalie live in a small town near the Apalachicola River in Florida’s lightly populated Liberty County, where longleaf pines own the world. In Eulalie’s time, women of color look after white children in the homes of white families and are respected, even loved, but distrusted and kept separated as a group. A palpable gloss, sweeter than the state’s prized tupelo honey, holds their worlds firmly apart. When that gloss fails, the Klan restores its own brand of order.

When some white boys rape and murder a black girl named Mattie near the sawmill, the police have no suspects and don’t intend to find any. Eulalie, who sees conjure as a way of helping the good Lord work His will, intends to set things right by “laying tricks.”

But Eulalie has secrets of her own, and it’s hard not to look back on her own life and ponder how the decisions she made while drinking and singing at the local juke were, perhaps, the beginning of Mattie’s ending. 

Bonus “Glossary and Notes” included in the back of the book.

Florida Folk Magic Stories
by Malcolm R. Campbell

Stories from Tate's Hell
by Malcolm R. Campbell
A series of short stories from Malcolm R. Campbell, all set in and around Florida's Tate's Hell State Forest, which is also the setting for Campbell's novel, Conjure Woman's Cat.
The Land Between the Rivers, published by Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, is a collection of three stories from Tate's Hell. In How the Panther Lost Her Roar, you’ll meet the rare and endangered Florida Panther that could be found in Tate’s Hell as late as the 1960s. In How the Snake Bird Learned to Dry His Feathers, you’ll meet a Florida bird—also called the Anhinga—that learns to swim before he learns to fly. And, in How the Bear Found Her Favorite Food, you’ll learn what the Florida black bear eats when she has her choice.
The Land Between the Rivers
Carrying Snakes into Eden
Carrying Snakes into Eden, self-published by Malcolm R. Campbell, is a tongue-in-cheek, 1960s-era short story with a dash of magic. Two students skip church, pick up a hobo with a sack of snakes, and realize there may be long-term consequences. 

Catalog

Conjure Woman's Cat
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here. 

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Sample the audiobook here
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Sample the audiobook here
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Sample the audiobook here
Sometimes I Think I Am Like Water
by Smoky Zeidel
 See the trailer here. 
In this moving book of poetry, author Smoky Zeidel celebrates her walk with nature while exploring the peaks and valleys of life through her kinship with the natural world.

In "Crescent Meadow," she shares her deep and abiding love for the flora and fauna of this planet we call home. Through "On the Anniversary of My Father’s Death," she reflects on the cycle of life while remembering her father, who has sent her a gift every year since his passing. In "I’ve Always Thought I Am Like Water," Zeidel takes us on her personal odyssey of growth and discovery. And in "Hush," she invites us to stop, listen, and connect. 

Read the complete poems and more, plus a bonus chapter from Zeidel’s novel, The Storyteller’s Bracelet

Snakebit
Anne and David meet at a summer resort hotel in the Montana mountains and fall in love. When they go back to their respective universities in the fall, she is assaulted on a dark city street at Thanksgiving. She won't let David visit or help her in any way until finally he's allowed to visit Florida in June, where he finds Anne greatly changed. She wants him to give up everything for her. He plans to leave her, but then the magic of the dark swamp called Tate's Hell interrupts his plans.
After going on a business trip to north Florida, you have strange dreams about something lurid and/or dangerous that happened in a cemetery next to Tate's Hell Swamp. You try to remember and when you do, that's all she wrote.

Dream of Crows is self-published by Malcolm R. Campbell.
Dream of Crows
In 1955, at the height of alarm over the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi and after the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, Associated Press reporter Rachel Feigen travels from Baltimore to Tennessee to report on a missing person case. 

Guy Saillot’s last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a seedy establishment situated on beautiful Cherokee Lake. But they have no record he was ever a guest.

As the investigation deepens, Feigen has problems of her own when three local extremists decide to teach a lesson to the “uppity jewgirl” from the north who’s poking around in things that are none of her concern. 

But events in the Tennessee Bend Motel’s room number 10 don’t turn out exactly as they’d planned.


Blood on the Roses
by Robert Hays

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Amazon 
Apple 
Barnes & Noble
Audible
Kobo                 
Making Amends
by Melinda Clayton
On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby’s twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea, while mother Tabby, who also struggles with addiction, lies inebriated on the living room floor.

Bobby isn’t seen by his loved ones again until a fateful morning twenty-five years later, when video of his arrest dominates the morning news. He has been charged with the murder of his father, but before the trial can begin, he manages to escape.

As Tabby and Ricky absorb the news of Bobby’s return and subsequent escape, Tabby is convinced he’ll come home to the quiet Florida street from which he was taken so long ago. But when events begin to spiral out of control, she’s left to wonder: is a child born to be evil, or shaped to be evil? And in the end, when it’s time to make amends, does it really matter?

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here
Bankruptcy, a short story
by Tracy R. Franklin
Donald is a man without a conscience. But a person without a conscience still has feelings. Sometimes that makes them dangerous. Sometimes that makes them helpless.
From Melinda Clayton
From Tracy R. Franklin
From Robert Hays
From Smoky Zeidel
Contact Us

Bookstores: 
For questions about bulk purchases and wholesale prices, please contact us using the button below.

Sarabande
by Malcolm R. Campbell
When Sarabande’s sister Dryad haunts her for three years beyond the grave, Sarabande begins a dangerous journey into the past to either raise her cruel sister from the dead, ending the torment, or to take her place in the safe darkness of the earth. In spite of unsettling predictions about her trip, Sarabande leaves the mountains of Pyrrha and Montana on a black horse named Sikimí and heads for the cornfields of Illinois in search of Robert Adams, the once powerful Sun Singer, hoping he can help with her quest.

One man tries to kill her alongside a deserted prairie road, another tries to save her with ancient wisdom, and Robert tries to send her away. Even if she persuades him to bring the remnants of his magic to Dryad's shallow grave, the desperate man who follows them desires the rowan staff for ill intent, and the malicious sister who awaits their arrival wants much more than a mere return to life.

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Sample the audiobook here. 
​When David travels to north Florida to see his girlfriend, Anne, he also meets her Aunt Ruby and learns that a secret lurks behind her Scotch whisky and her stories. The secret is Anne’s secret, too.



Visiting Aunt Ruby
Eulalie and Washerwoman
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here. 
Torreya, a small 1950s Florida Panhandle town, is losing its men. They disappear on nights with no moon and no witnesses. Foreclosure signs appear in their yards the following day while thugs associated with the Klan take everything of value from inside treasured homes that will soon be torn down. The police won't investigate, and the church keeps its distance from all social and political discord.

Conjure woman Eulalie Jenkins, her shamanistic cat Lena, and neighbor Willie Tate discover that the new "whites only" policy at the once friendly mercantile and the creation of a plantation-style subdivision are linked to corrupt city fathers, the disappearing men, rigged numbers gambling, and a powerful hoodoo man named Washerwoman. After he refuses to carry Eulalie's herbs and eggs and Willie's corn, mercantile owner Lane Walker is drawn into the web of lies before he, too, disappears.

Washerwoman knows how to cover his tracks with the magic he learned from Florida's most famous root doctor, Uncle Monday, so he is more elusive than hen's teeth, more dangerous that the Klan, and threatens to brutally remove any obstacle in the way of his profits. In this follow up to Conjure Woman's Cat, Eulalie and Lena face their greatest challenge with scarce support from townspeople who are scared of their own shadows. Even though Eulalie is older than dirt, her faith in the good Lord and her endless supply of spells guarantee she will give Washerwoman a run for his ill-gotten money in this swamps and piney woods story.

The Tennessee Delta Series
by Melinda Clayton
A Woman Misunderstood
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here.

On a sweltering July morning in rural Tennessee, fifty-year-old Rebecca Reynolds visits the family farm, where she literally stumbles across the mutilated bodies of her parents and younger sister, a sister who had spent life in a wheelchair after a birth fraught with complications.

Rebecca’s first thought is to call 911. Her second is to find her estranged sister, Lena, who was disowned by the family years before. Her third is to wonder how long it will be before Lena is arrested for the murder of their family.

As the police gather evidence pointing to Lena, the sisters turn to attorney Brian Stone. Convinced of Lena’s innocence, he agrees to take on the case. But in a family ripped apart by dysfunction, is anyone truly innocent?


From Sharon Heath
The History of My Body
Few of the eccentric inhabitants of her father’s Main Line, Philadelphia estate have much time for Fleur Robins, an awkward child with a devotion to her ailing grandfather, a penchant for flapping and whirling, and a preoccupation with God and the void. 

While her mother spends much of her time with her hand curled around a wine glass and her abusive father congratulates himself for rescuing babies from “the devil abortionists,” Fleur mourns the fallen petals of a rose and savors the patterns of light rippling across the pool. When she fails to save a baby bird abandoned in her garden, a series of events unfold that change everything. 

For one thing, her handsome new tutor Adam Manus sees her unusual potential and introduces her to Nobel Prize winner Stanley H. Fiske, who brings her out to Caltech to mentor her in quantum physics. Fleur puts her preoccupation with the void to good use, making discoveries that promise to ease humanity’s dependency on fossil fuels. But for all her brilliance, she is still a young girl, losing her virginity in a moment of naiveté and learning the hard way to value the irreplaceable gift of friendship.

See the trailer here
Click cover for preview.

Redeeming Grace
by Smoky Zeidel
It’s the early twentieth century, and the tragic deaths of her mother and two younger siblings have left Grace Harmon responsible for raising her sister Miriam and protecting her from their abusive father Luther, a zealot preacher with a penchant for speaking in Biblical verse who is on a downward spiral toward insanity. 

In the midst of his delusions, Luther believes God has abandoned him and devises a plan to get back into His good graces—a plan that puts both his daughters’ lives in danger and unleashes a frenzy of events that threaten to destroy the entire family. 

Will Luther succeed in carrying out his crazed plot against his daughters, or will an unlikely hero step in to rescue them all?

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Sample the audiobook here.
Starlette Jones' Little Blessing
by Melinda Clayton
The Fleur Trilogy
by Sharon Heath
Tizita
Click cover for preview.
Physics wunderkind Fleur Robins, just a little odd and more familiar with multiple universes than complicated affairs of the heart, is cast adrift when her project to address the climate crisis is stalled. Worse still, her Ethiopian-born fiancé Assefa takes off right after her 21st birthday party to track down his father, who’s gone missing investigating Ethiopian claims to the Ark of the Covenant. 

Fleur is left to contend with the puzzle of parallel worlds, an awkward admirer, and her best friend Sammie’s entanglement with an abusive boyfriend. Assefa’s reconnection with a childhood sweetheart leads Fleur to seek consolation at Jane Goodall’s Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, but it’s through a bumbling encounter with her rival that the many worlds of Fleur’s life begin to come together.  

In the experience of tizita—the interplay of memory, loss, and longing—Fleur is flung into conflicts between science and religion, race and privilege, climate danger and denial, sex and love. With humor, whimsy, and the clumsiness and grace of innocence, Fleur feels her way through the narrow alleyway between hope and despair to her heart’s sweetest home. 

Shadowed Places:  A Collection of Short Stories
by Smoky Zeidel
Leap: a brave woman prepares to take her final journey.

Breathe: how many people can pinpoint the precise time their marriage died; can repeat verbatim the words that sent the marriage plunging into the grave? 

Goodbye, Emily Dickinson: sometimes the delusion is what helps us get through the reality.

Lesser Offenses: stepmothers had disappeared before, for lesser offenses. It was Carlotta’s time to go.

See the trailer here
En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill
While the Dogwoods Were In Bloom
Every spring, fast food junkie Peter Martin packs his wife, Mary, and son, John, into his SUV and crisscrosses the back country of the Florida Panhandle searching for Diddy-Wah-Diddy, a legendary town offering travelers all the free food they can eat. Mary thinks they’ll never find it. John draws maps to show where they’ve been in years past. Peter has more hunches than fleas on a hound dog about the town’s location. More often than not, they get lost.


Transformed:  A Short Story
by Smoky Zeidel
“The way I see it,” said Daniel, “the fence lizard eats the fly, so the fly becomes part of the fence lizard. The fly is the fence lizard. The fence lizard gets eaten by the snake, and thus becomes the snake. What’s to say that snake won’t get snatched up by a Golden Eagle, and thus become the eagle?”


Does the same principle apply to humans? Marina is about to find out.

A Shallow River of Mercy
by Robert Hays

Ernst Kohl has spent nearly half his life in prison after being convicted of murder as a young man. Upon his release, with nowhere else to go, Kohl returns to his old family home on the outskirts of a small Michigan town, hoping for redemption, or at least understanding. 

He finds a dog, a girlfriend, and a job in quick succession, and it seems as if he might finally be able to leave the past behind and make a quiet life for himself. But some of the residents, including the town’s corrupt deputy sheriff, are less than thrilled to see him, and will stop at nothing to rid the town of its infamous resident. 

As events hurtle to an inevitable conclusion, Kohl is left to decide: At what point might a man break, and at what cost to himself? 

Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Garden Metamorphosis
by Smoky Zeidel
In the midst of a confusing and frightening world, Smoky Zeidel remains true to form with her poetry, gently reminding us to close out the superfluous and remember that which is sacred. Garden Metamorphosis is both a love song to Mother Earth, and a celebration of the cycle of life. 

In “Dirt,” Zeidel wishes us “More dirt paths through forest, meadow, and desert,/pine needles and humus and sand sticking to your feet.” In “Hawk Dance,” she shares with us a spiritual moment: “Oh hawks, if I had wings! I hear your music’s secret score,/I start to dance, and dance into the night.” And in “The Big Picture,” her silent prayer is a benediction for all of us: “Slay me with a sunset numinous/ whose colors have no names./Let me see the big picture,/live a macro life,/before my days are over and/my bones reduced to dust.”

Read the complete poems, plus Zeidel’s short story, “Transformed.”  

See the trailer here
Who's Munching My Milkweed?
by Smoky Zeidel
When Ms. Gardener discovers something has been munching on her milkweed plants, she embarks on a fun and educational monarch butterfly journey that enchants both children and adults.
Lena
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here.

When Police Chief Alton Gravely and Officer Carothers escalate the feud between “Torreya’s finest” and conjure woman Eulalie Jenkins by running her off the road into a north Florida swamp, the borrowed pickup truck is salvaged but Eulalie is missing and presumed dead. Her cat Lena survives. Lena could provide an accurate account of the crime, but the county sheriff is unlikely to interview a pet. 

Lena doesn’t think Eulalie is dead, but the conjure woman’s family and friends don’t believe her. Eulalie’s daughter Adelaide wants to stir things up, and the church deacon wants everyone to stay out of sight. There’s talk of an eyewitness, but either Adelaide made that up to worry the police, or the witness is too scared to come forward.

When the feared Black Robes of the Klan attack the first responder who believes the wreck might have been staged, Lena is the only one who can help him try to fight them off. After that, all hope seems lost, because if Eulalie is alive and finds her way back to Torreya, there are plenty of people waiting to kill her and make sure she stays dead.


Florida Folk Magic Stories: All four ebooks, bundled
From William M. Franklin
Franklin Family History: From 1425 England to 2018 U.S.A.
by William M. Franklin
This booklet is a comprehensive genealogical study of our branch of the Franklin family. We’ve traced our history from Robert Franklin, born 1425 in Skipton-upon-Craven, Yorkshire, England, to 2018 U.S.A. Along the way, we’ve discovered rectors, deans, sheriffs, and even a president of the University of Cambridge. Most importantly, we’ve discovered generations of tough, smart, innovative, hardy people who, through a spirit of adventure and an unwavering sense of optimism, helped shape us to be who and what we are today, both as a family and as a country.
Return of the Butterfly
Click cover for preview.


How do you maintain your balance in a world turned upside down? Buffeted by dire winds of climate change, Nobel scientist and odd duck extraordinaire Fleur Robins rides rough waves of sexual betrayal and gender fluidity, bullying and loss, as she and her physics team speed up their efforts to ensure a viable future for the world’s children—including her own. Thanks to her fascination with the void; a vivid imagination; a loving, if eccentric, extended family; and a couple of dogs named Hot Sauce and Good Time Charlie, she finds her way to surprising new ground.  


A readers’ advisory for this collection of nine stories forecasts widely scattered ghosts with a chance of rain. Caution is urged at the following uncertain places: an abandoned mental hospital, the woods behind a pleasant subdivision, a small fishing village, a mountain lake, a long-closed theater undergoing restoration, a feared bridge over a swampy river, a historic district street at dusk, the bedroom of a girl who waited until the last minute to write her book report from an allegedly dead author, and the woods near a conjure woman’s house.

In effect from the words “light of the harvest moon was brilliant” until the last phrase “forever rest in peace,” this advisory includes—but may not be limited to—the Florida Panhandle, northwest Montana, central Illinois, and eastern Missouri. 


In this satirical and somewhat insane lament about the fall of traditional journalism into an abyss of news without facts, Special Investigative Reporter Jock Stewart specializes in tracking down Junction City’s inept and corrupt movers and shakers for his newspaper The Star-Gazer.

Since Stewart is not a team player, he doesn’t trust anyone, especially colleagues and news sources. Stewart, who became a reporter back in the days when real newsmen were supposed to smoke and drink themselves to death while fighting to get the scoop before their competition sobered up, isn’t about to change.

Stewart’s girlfriend leaves him, the mayor’s racehorse is stolen, people are having sex in all the wrong places (whatever that means), and townspeople have fallen into the habit of sneaking around and lying to reporters and cops. Sure, everyone lies to the cops, but reporters expect gospel truths or else. 

Stewart may get himself killed doing what he was taught to do in journalism school, but that’s all in a day’s work.


Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Chasing Eve
by Sharon Heath
Everyone expected big things from Ariel Thompkins. Wasn’t she the girl who’d roped her friends into one madcap adventure after another, who’d met the challenge of losing both parents before turning eighteen, who’d gone on to graduate summa cum laude from UCLA? So how did this livewire end up delivering the day’s mail for the U.S. Postal Service, hunkering down each night with her half-blind cat in front of the TV, ruminating over the width of her thighs? It looked as though it would take a miracle to get her out of her rut. 

Who knew that miracle would come in the form of an acutely candid best friend and a motley crew of strangers—a homeless drunk once aptly nicknamed “Nosy,” a lonely old woman seeing catastrophe around every corner, a shy teenager fleeing sexual abuse, a handsome young transplant from the Midwest with a passion for acting and for Ariel herself? Not to mention the fossil remains of a flat-faced crone who just might have been the ancestress of everyone alive today? 

Chasing Eve takes us on a funny, sad, hair-raising adventure into the underbelly of the City of Angels, where society’s invisible people make a difference to themselves and to others, and where love sometimes actually saves the day. 

Click cover for preview.
Hayner Family History: 
From Weinheim, Kurpfalz, Germany 
to Madison, West Virginia, U.S.A.
by Melinda Clayton
This booklet is a comprehensive genealogical study of our branch of the Hayner family. We’ve traced our history from Leonhart Hüner, who died in Weinheim, Germany around 1597, to current day U.S.A. Along the way, we’ve discovered barber-surgeons, farmers, carpenters, and coal miners, and learned that throughout the generations, Hayners have been tough, stoic, innovative people who, through sheer hard work and determination, helped build this country into what it is today. 
Child of Sorrow
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here.
When fourteen-year-old foster child Johna- than Thomas Woods is suspected of murder, an old letter and a tacky billboard advertisement lead him to the office of attorney Brian Stone. Recognizing the sense of hopelessness lurking under John’s angry façade, Stone is soon convinced of his innocence. When John offers up his lawn-mowing money as payment, Stone realizes this is a case he can’t refuse.

In the face of overwhelming evidence assembled by the prosecution, Stone and his team find themselves in a race against time to save an angry boy who’s experienced more than his fair share of betrayal, a boy who more often than not doesn’t seem interested in saving himself. 

Fate's Arrows
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here.
Sample the audiobook here. 

​In 1954, the small Florida Pan- handle town of Torreya had more Klansmen per acre than fire ants. Sparrow, a bag lady; Pollyanna, an auditor; and Jack, the owner of Slade’s Diner, step on fire ants and Klansmen whenever they can while an unknown archer fires fate-changing arrows at the Klan’s leadership. They are not who they appear to be, and while they take risks, they must be discrete lest they end up in the Klan’s gunsights. 

When Julia and Eldon, a married couple from Harlem, New York, run afoul of the Klan because of Eldon’s pro-union stance at the sawmill, they find themselves down at the ancient hanging tree where two policemen, hiding their identity beneath white robes and hoods, are the ones holding the noose.

Meanwhile, Sparrow seems to have disappeared. When the ne’er-do-well Shelton brothers beat up the Klavern’s exalted cyclops because they think he harmed Sparrow, they, too, find themselves the focus of a KKK manhunt. 

Bolstered by support from a black cat and an older-than-dirt conjure woman, Pollyanna persists in her fight against the Klan, determined to restore law and order to a town overwhelmed by corruption.  



This particular branch of Claytons begins with the Claytons of Clayton-le-Moors in Lancashire around the year 1066. From there, the line moves to John de Clayton’s Clayton Hall in Yorkshire before making its way down to Sussex, stopping to obtain a few advanced degrees from Cambridge along the way.

Incentives from the British Crown bring these Claytons to the Colonial Province of Virginia in the 1540s, and shortly thereafter, they follow the burgeoning tobacco industry into the Province of Carolina before seeking vast acres of fertile land in Kentucky. When tobacco moves north after the Civil War, they follow the lumber boom into Missouri.

Clayton Family History:
From England to Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Beyond
by Melinda Clayton
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
In the tranquil solitude of a darkened Room 12 in the ICU on the sixth floor of Memorial Hospital’s Wing C, a mortal existence is drawing to an end. His head and torso swathed in bandages, his arms and legs awkwardly positioned in hard casts and layers of heavy gauze, he’s surrounded by loved ones yet unable to communicate, isolated within his own thoughts and memories. 

He does not believe himself to be an extraordinary man, simply an ordinary one, a man who’s made choices, both good and bad. A man who was sometimes selfish, sometimes misguided, sometimes kind and wise. A man who fought in a war in which he lost a part of his soul, who then became a teacher and worked hard to repair the damage. 

When faced with the end, how does one reconcile the pieces of an ordinary life? Does a man have the right to wish for wings to carry him to a summit he believes he doesn’t deserve to reach?

An Inchworm Takes Wing
by Robert Hays
From Scott Zeidel
Welcome
by Scott Zeidel
These poems are peaceful celebrations of the Southern California desert, Scott Zeidel’s home. He writes about the desert’s profound beauty found in simple, unassuming plants and critters like desert dandelions, blue agaves, monarch butterflies, mockingbirds, kestrels, verdins, and doves. 

But Zeidel’s poetic voice has room for other things, too—a nostalgic tribute to his youth in “Childhood Quintet,” a sweet whimsical cycle in “Four Love Songs,” the humorous satire of “Headless Chicken Fish” and “The State of the Union Address,” and the political anger of “To Be Exact.”

Zeidel often uses a poetic language that’s simple and direct, inspired by the Japanese haiku. He uses this concise language to discuss big things like birth, death, rebirth, and time. In Welcome you are invited to enter Zeidel’s world of big questions with no answers, his world of bewilderment and wonder. 
See the trailer here
Since the publication of the first edition, I have had the opportunity to travel to Kelshall, England to see the home of my ancestor, the first Reverend Edward Franklin (1548–1617). My notes and photos from the trip are contained in the chapters following our ancestral line. 

We’ve also included additional information generously provided by the historian of St. Faith’s Church in Kelshall, Mr. Peter Gartside. Mr. Gartside’s work provides a richer picture of the history and circum- stances that would have affected Edward and his family as they lived and worked in the tiny English village. 

Additionally, we’ve included a chapter discussing the origin and design of the coat of arms for our specific branch of the Franklin family, one of only four branches of the Franklin family upon whom a coat of arms was bestowed.  

A gift!

Seven Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC authors bring you 15 of their short stories, excerpts, and poems. Sometimes offbeat, always captivating, the selections include historical fiction, magical realism, crime, psychological suspense, literary fiction, coming of age, and poetry for both children and adults. The works are grouped by author name, not genre, ensuring a surprise each time you turn the page.  

For a free download, click the format you'd like: 

  mobi      epub      PDF

The Further Adventures of Fleur
by Sharon Heath
The Mysterious Composition of Tears
Click cover for preview.
After a series of climate calamities, physicist Fleur Robins takes off for deep space in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction. During her mysteriously prolonged absence, the internet has crashed, fire and flood have devastated whole countries, and End of Times cults have proliferated. There have been some intriguingly hopeful changes, too—nanoparticle holograms have replaced electronic devices, young people are witnessing exquisitely colorful “Shimmers,” and the most gifted of them converse regularly with animals and trees. 

While Fleur’s distraught husband Adam leads their Caltech physics team in frantic efforts to pinpoint her whereabouts, and Fleur herself plots her return home, their teenaged children Callay and Wolf fall in love with surprising partners. But when the charming son of an End of Times pastor crosses Wolf’s path during a particularly vibrant Shimmer, events are set in motion that will upend everyone’s life and transform planet Earth itself.

This latest installment of Sharon Heath’s saga of the quirky Nobelist Fleur is simultaneously a vision of what awaits us in a post-Covid world, a wild romp through quantum reality, and a deep-sea dive into the dark and light vagaries of the human heart.


From Malcolm R. Campbell
Special Investigative Reporter
by Malcolm R. Campbell
Widely Scattered Ghosts
by Malcolm R. Campbell
Nonfiction
An Empty House by the River
by Robert Hays
Click cover for preview.
See the trailer here
Life has been good in the old Prather house on the bluff overlooking Singleton’s Branch. Then the second “once in a hundred years” flood in a decade brings changes that will affect the Prather family for years to come. Lacy, who sees beauty wherever she looks and expects others to be as good as she is, can no longer count on her big brother to protect her from an abusive husband, and the family learns a hard truth: No one is immune to the quirks of fate, be they blessings or tragedies, and the river takes more than it gives.    
Patton's Oracle: Gen. Oscar Koch as I Knew Him
by Robert Hays
Oscar Koch's sterling performance as Gen. George S. Patton Jr.'s intelligence chief, G-2, was a critical element of Patton's success in World War II and earned Koch the reputation as arguably the most brilliant intelligence officer in U.S. Army history. 

His collection and analysis of information in early winter 1944 led him to issue stern warnings of the German buildup preceding the Battle of the Bulge and let Patton be prepared, but higher headquarters refused to listen. Today, intelligence specialists cite that work as a model for combat intelligence training. After the war, Koch went on to help overhaul the CIA and, in retirement, earned a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship to support research and writing on intelligence in combat. 

His unlikely friendship with Robert Hays, a young journalist who also happened to be a veteran of Koch's beloved U.S. Third Army, led to a book that has become a crucial source for military historians. Now, Robert Hays offers a deeply personal account of their relationship, reveals the general's astonishingly gentle and caring nature, and describes Koch's philosophy and concerns about the intriguing field of intelligence. Overarching all is the poignant story of Koch's valiant battle with terminal cancer. The reader will understand why Hays grants Oscar Koch the eminent rank of personal hero and feels an obligation to help ensure his place in history.