The novel consists of a forward and thirty-six chapters. In chronological sequence, it interweaves both historical and fictional events that occurred near or in other ways impacted the Mexico-United States border in the late 1840s. The forward establishes the history of the Mendoza family''s presence in Texas. This commences in 1748, when Don José Ramón de Mendoza y Robles, a Spanish explorer, receives permission from the viceroy in Mexico City to lead an expedition of wealthy landowners to the land between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers. The land he claims for himself he names the Rancho La Palma de Cristo. Soon after, he marries the blonde and green-eyed Susanita Ulloa, who is his junior by many years, and they have one son who survives childhood, named Francisco. Francisco marries Amalia Soría, who bears him three children—Santiago, Dolores and Ramón—before she dies. Santiago, Dolores and Ramón are raised by their grandmother, Susanita, who instills in them their grandfather''s greatness and the importance of upholding one''s Catholic faith. Susanita, Francisco and Ramón have all died before the novel''s proper beginning, leaving the Rancho La Palma completely under Don Santiago''s care. Chapter One introduces us to Don Santiago, the uncontested patriarch of Rancho La Palma, and his family. He, like his father and grandfather before him, has also married a pureblooded Spanish woman, Doña María Petronilla, who is characterized by her simple and unprepossessing dresses. They have four children, all of whom are in their teenage years. Two of these are sons—Alvaro and Luis Gonzaga—and two are daughters—María de los Ángeles and Susanita. Susanita, like the grandmother whose name she shares, is blonde and green-eyed. She is described as Don Santiago''s "dearest" child and as he watches her join the family for dinner, he glumly acknowledges that time has come to find her a husband. Dinner is interrupted by Don Gabriel del Lago, a friend of Don Santiago''s and a neighboring Spanish-Mexican landowner, who brings news that Texas has been taken from Mexico by the Americans, and that American soldiers under the leadership of Zachary Taylor have infiltrated the territory and are busy establishing defensive outposts. Each of the characters responds differently to this turn of events: Don Santiago scoffs, refusing to consider Americans any threat to his way of life; Alvaro wants to know what military action can be undertaken to stave off the American forces; Luis Gonzaga contemplates whether or not Americans really are the uncultured hoodlums he has heard them to be; María de los Ángeles, under the assumption that Americans are not Catholic, assumes the invasion is punishment from God for Mexico''s sins; and Susanita wonders what it would be like to dance with a tall white-skinned man. The narrative that unfolds tracks these characters, and others, as their suspicions about the invading forces are explored—sometimes confirmed, but more often reformed. A partial text version of Caballero is available at Google Books.

Caballero: A Historical Novel

Three kids by the name of Carlie, Harvey, and Thomas J.(For Jefferson) go to live at a foster home with Mr. and Mrs. Mason, an infertile couple. The Masons have been foster parents for 17 kids already. Carlie thinks it''s a stupid place and is quite skeptical. But she has to stay there until her mother and her stepfather work out their problems. Two other children arrive: Harvey, who has broken legs and Thomas J., who has grown up with two very old twin sisters who found him in front of the farmhouse when he was very young. The twins are now both in the hospital. Thomas J. isn''t unhappy, but has to learn how to express himself. He gets help from Mr Mason. Harvey is very unhappy and needs the others badly, although he has trouble admitting that. Eventually he confesses his father ran over his legs with his car (at first he told everyone he was a quarterback and got tackled too hard). He argues with his dad about his mother, who lives in a commune. His father denies that she ever wrote Harvey back. Harvey has a habit of making lists of the things that bother him. Carlie at first feels neglected. She thinks about running away, but slowly changes her mind. Carlie takes the decision to take her fate in her own hands, and stop being a defenseless pinball. When Harvey is in the hospital, Carlie and Thomas J. give him a puppy for his birthday, which gets him through the pain. Carlie comes up with a name for the puppy: Quarterback. Carlie sees they are not pin balls, because pin balls can''t control where they are going, the children can. All three children start to take control of their lives. Although Carlie still throws out a few insults, the children are now much better friends.

The Pinballs

Joseph Davidson is a quiet, self-conscious fourteen- year-old boy and a talented artist. His world changes, however, when he is asked to draw a portrait of his mysterious neighbour Tom Leyton, a Vietnam veteran who for thirty years has lived alone with his sister Caroline, raising his silkworms and hiding from prying eyes. Because of this he is the subject of ugly gossip and rumour, much of it led by neighbour Mrs Mossop, who views Leyton’s brief teaching career with suspicion. When Joseph finally meets his reclusive neighbour he discovers a cold, brooding man lost deep within his own cocoon of silence. He soon realises that in order to truly draw Tom Leyton, he must find the courage to unlock the man’s dark and perhaps dangerous secrets. But Joseph has his own secrets, including the pain of his damaged relationship with his absent father and his childhood fear of the Running Man – a local character whose wild appearance and strange manner of moving everywhere at a frantic pace terrified him when he was a small boy. These dreams suddenly return when Joseph is forced to face his fears and doubts regarding Tom Leyton. As Joseph moves deeper and deeper into his neighbour’s world he confronts not only Tom Leyton’s private hell, but also his own relationship with his father, and ultimately the dishevelled, lurching figure of the Running Man.

The Running Man

Set in a rundown neighborhood of Manhattan in 1936, the novel explores a five-day alcoholic binge. Don Birnam, a binge drinker mostly of rye, fancies himself a would-be writer. He lapses into foreign phrases and quotes Shakespeare even while attempting to steal a woman''s purse, trying to pawn a typewriter for drinking money, and smashing his face on a banister. That accident gets him checked into an "alcoholic ward." There, a counselor advises Birnam on the nature of alcoholism: There isn''t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don''t want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don''t, really. They can''t bring themselves to admit they''re alcoholics, or that liquor''s got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone &mdash; so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They''re rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they''ll take one, or at the most two, and &mdash; well, then it becomes the same old story over again. Perhaps the only thing keeping Birnam from drinking himself to death is his girlfriend Helen, a selfless and incorruptible woman who tolerates his behavior out of love. Helen does, however, upbraid him with the words: &#34;I haven&#39;t got time to be neurotic.&#34; No sooner has he begun to recover from his &#34;Lost Weekend&#34; than he contemplates killing Helen&#39;s maid to get the key to the liquor cabinet. He has a few drinks and crawls into bed wondering, &#34;Why did they make such a fuss?&#34;

The Lost Weekend

Christopher returns to Aurverelle in 1400, more than three years after the Ottoman Empire''s victory at Battle of Nicopolis, his health and sanity severely damaged. He is soured on religion and nobility, having seen hypocrisy of all kinds while away. Etienne of Languedoc, a representative of Roman Pope Boniface IX, arrives to have an audience with him, but Christopher refuses to see him. Staying at the local inn, Etienne takes out his frustration on Vanessa, granddaughter of the elf Varden, by brutally beating her nearly to death when she rejects his advances. Christopher kills him and takes Vanessa in. Just as he is about to give up hope of Vanessa recovering from her wounds, Mirya and Terrill arrive, posing as healers from far away, and they heal her completely. Christopher befriends Vanessa and helps her to make sense of the images in her head that make her fear for her sanity, those images being the patterns of reality she can see because of her part-elven blood. She departs for Saint Blaise, but, arriving at the gates of Saint Blaise, she decides at the last minute to seek out whatever family of hers may still remain in Saint Brigid. Christopher''s cousin, Yvonette a''Verne, baron of Hypprux, has designs on the wealth of the city of Ypris, so he arranges for several bands of mercenaries to sack the town and split the proceeds with him, not foreseeing that when the bands are done with Ypris, they will begin looting the rest of Adria. Using blackmail, Christopher persuades Yvonette to join an alliance of other noblemen of the area to fight off the mercenaries when they do decide to strike off on their own. After the fall of Ypris, one band of mercenaries, the Fellowship of Acquisition, sacks the Free Town of Saint Blaise and takes over Shrinerock, a nearby castle. Realizing the potential of a castle to hold people in as well as out, Christopher convinces Natil to use her otherworldly powers to fuse the castle''s walls, doors, windows, and gates into solid stone, thus giving Terrill time to shepherd the survivors of Saint Blaise''s and Shrinerock''s fall through Malvern Forest to safety in Aurverelle. Christopher goes to Saint Brigid to rescue Vanessa. He is trapped there with Vanessa, Mirya, and Natil when the Fellowship besiege the town. Using Mirya''s elven powers and Christopher''s command of unorthodox fighting tactics, they hold the mercenaries at bay. With discord setting in among the ranks of the Fellowship, Berard of Onella, the leader of the Fellowship, is assassinated by one of his own. At the same time, the remaining members of the alliance ambush the Fellowship and slaughter them.

Maze of Moonlight

The charming and eccentric Lucy Angkatell has invited the Christows, along with a number of other members of the extended family. John is already having an affair with Henrietta Savernake, a talented sculptor and, as is demonstrated by what follows, brilliant improviser. He has always remembered with nostalgia an early love, Veronica Cray, who suddenly appears in the house on Saturday night asking to borrow a box of matches. She is living at one of the two nearby cottages, the other of which is currently occupied by Hercule Poirot, who has been invited for lunch on Sunday. Veronica and John go off together, and he returns much too late: at 3 am. The next day, Poirot arrives at the house to witness a scene that seems strangely staged. Gerda is standing with a gun in her hand above the body of John, who is bleeding into the swimming pool. Standing, seemingly transfixed, are Lucy, Henrietta, and Edward. John''s last word, in a note of urgent appeal, is "Henrietta". It seems cut and dried that Gerda is the murderess, but in taking the revolver from her hand Henrietta apparently fumbles and drops it into the swimming pool, destroying any evidence. Later, however, it is discovered that the pistol that Gerda had been holding was not the pistol with which John had been shot. None of the witnesses has actually seen Gerda shoot John, and it seems difficult to build a case against any of the other potential suspects. At first Lucy herself seems to be a strong suspect, when it is discovered that she had kept a pistol concealed in her basket of eggs, but the pistol seems to be of the wrong calibre. Henrietta is also implicated, not least by the leaving of an unusual doodle in the pavilion, apparently at the time that John had been killed. When the murder weapon turns up in Poirot''s hedge, it has fingerprints on it that match none of the suspects. These are all pieces of deliberate misdirection on the part of the family. They know in fact that Gerda is indeed the murderess, and are attempting to avoid her imprisonment. As it happens, the murder, with a motive of jealousy, was planned, in that she had taken with her two pistols, planning to be discovered with a pistol in her hands that would later be discovered to be the wrong weapon. Henrietta, who says that John asked her to help Gerda when he said her name, destroys the evidence of the first weapon instinctively, and later goes back and retrieves the second weapon. She hides it in a clay sculpture of a horse in her workshop, then gets it handled by a blind match-seller, and places it in Poirot’s hedge. There is a romantic subplot in the novel. Midge is in love with Edward, but Edward has always been in love with Henrietta and Henrietta had refused several times his marriage proposals. Besides, she is now deeply in love with John Christow. During the course of the novel, Edward realises that Henrietta is not anymore the Henrietta he used to love and begins to stop seeing Midge as "little Midge". Therefore, he asks her to marry him. During a walk to an area where Edward has walked with Henrietta, Midge believes that he is too deeply in love with Henrietta still, and she calls off the wedding. Edward who does not know that she loves him, misunderstands her decision and later that night, he attempts suicide by putting his head in a gas oven but he is saved by Midge. With this rather dramatic proof of his need for her, she relents and the wedding is on again. With all the evidence apparently destroyed, the family believe that they have saved Gerda, but there is one final clue: the holster in which the murder weapon was kept. Gerda has cut this up and placed it in her workbag. When Henrietta attempts to retrieve it in order to destroy the final means of proving Gerda''s guilt, Poirot arrives and prevents her from drinking tea that Gerda has poisoned. Gerda herself accidentally drinks the poisoned tea and escapes justice by this means. Henrietta who, along with Lucy, has emerged as an attractive and well-characterised heroine throughout the book, ends it by visiting in hospital one of John''s patients who now has little hope of a cure but still shows a resilient spirit. Leaving the hospital, she reflects that there is no happy end for her, but she resolves to embark on a sculpture of herself as Grief.

The Hollow

In Odd We Trust serves as a prequel to the first Odd Thomas novel. The ghost of a young boy appears to Odd, and he embarks on a quest to bring justice to the boy''s killer so that his ghost can move on. Odd''s friend, the Chief of Police Wyatt Porter, shares some details of the case, and informs him that the boy''s babysitter is the one that discovered the body. The babysitter turns out to be Sherry Sheldon, a childhood friend of Odd''s girlfriend and soulmate, Stormy Llewellyn. Sherry relates that a stalker has been leaving her disturbing notes for several months, and believes this stalker may be the murderer. Odd and Stormy resolve to catch the stalker before he kills again. Odd asks the ghost of the little boy to help him find his killer, and Joey leads him to a street corner, where he sees a suspicious man. The man flees when Odd tries to address him. Odd gives chase, but loses his quarry when he trips over a lawn gnome. Four neighborhood children are believed to be targets, as they have each received a note from the killer. Chief Porter assigns police escorts to each of the houses, and Odd and Stormy decide to spend the night with Sherry at the house where she is babysitting a girl named Angelica. The policeman on stakeout at the house finds an empty car containing a mutilated mannequin, and from this Odd deduces that the killer is nearby, taunting them. He throws open the doors of a nearby van, and discovers the man he chased earlier. He and Odd trade veiled threats, but when Stormy shows up with a gun, the man drives off. Chief Porter traces the van''s license plates to a man named Kyle Bernshaw, and gives Odd the resulting address. Odd and Stormy break into Bernshaw''s house, to find giant piles of magazines (from which his mysterious notes have been cut and glued together), and a note to Odd, revealing that this was a trap. Odd turns to find himself cornered by a vicious dog, from which he is saved at the last minute by Joey''s ghost. Odd and Stormy race back to the house where they left Sherry, only to find out that Angelica''s parents have fired her and she has left. Odd realizes that Sherry, not one of the four children under police protection, was the target all along. The two borrow a car and, using Odd''s psychic magnetism (an ability that draws him to a person if he concentrates on them while traveling), they locate Bernshaw in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Odd fights him, with limited success, until Stormy shoots him in the leg, and Odd is able to subdue him. They free Sherry from the trunk of Bernshaw''s car. The killer is taken into custody, but refuses to confess, insisting that he will be given a chance to escape, as he has made a deal with the devil and everything he wants always comes to him. He threatens to reveal Odd''s identity and abilities to the world, bringing a storm of media attention, one of the very things Odd fears most. Odd lies and pretends that he, too, has sold his soul to the devil for his powers, but just as he begins to make headway with taking Bernshaw into his confidence, a guard collapses and the killer is able to grab the guard''s gun. He fires, but the bullet ricochets off a chair Odd is holding. The bullet kills Bernshaw. Angelica''s parents re-hire Sherry, and the story ends with Odd and Stormy musing on the happy ending they have managed.

In Odd We Trust

Madlyn and Rollo live with their parents in a ground-floor flat in south London. Mrs Hamilton runs a theatre where the plays keep running out of money, and Mr Hamilton is a designer and helps people with their houses. Madlyn is very attractive and has many friends. She has fair hair, blue eyes and a deep laugh, and likes parties and sleepovers. Rollo is two years younger and likes animals and insects. He has an adopted skink at London Zoo called Stumpy. Madlyn is helpful to her brother and mother, who is usually frantic and forgets things like car keys. At the beginning of the summer term, Mr Hamilton receives a large offer from an American college (which the family needs) to spend two months in New York setting up a business course in design. The parents cannot take the children but decide to go to America, sending Madlyn and Rollo to stay with their Uncle George and Aunt Emily (sister and brother) at Clawstone Castle at the Scottish border. Madlyn is shocked at Clawstone''s appearance. When she meets her Uncle and Aunt she is uncertain. Madlyn and Rollo see their rooms and go to bed. George and his sister Emily wake early on Saturdays for that is when his castle is open to the public. George''s hair is sparse and he wears a mustard coloured tweed suit. Howard Percival, their cousin, is very shy, never comes out of his room and is frightened of anyone he has not known for the last twenty years. Mrs Grove comes in from the village to help. She disapproves of how George and Emily deal with Howard. Emily prepares the gift shop. She feels sad at the thought of the rival Trembellow gift shop, which is larger. George starts preparing his work in the castle. He also feels sad at the thought of the rival Trembellow dungeons. Mrs Grove''s sister comes to start taking the tickets, bringing with her what the villagers have donated to help the castle. The day does not go well; by midday only ten people have arrived, and most of them get bored. The next day Madlyn and Rollo make friends with Mrs Grove and Madlyn takes to the museum. Rollo likes the dungeon. Then Madlyn meets Mrs Grove''s son, Ned, and learns about Olive, the Trembellow''s daughter. Madlyn and Rollo go to Mrs Grove''s house to watch TV. When they get back Emily is preparing for Open Day again. Madlyn asks why the money is so important and Mrs Grove tells her it''s for the cows. The next day Sir George takes Madlyn and Rollo to see his white cows. They are astonishing, and George buys Rollo a pair of binoculars. Madlyn, Rollo and Ned go see Howard, and understand that they need ghosts to make the castle better.

The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

On a medium-sized, low-gravity planet with a very slow rotational period, the side that is farthest from the sun is always a very hard mixture of frozen carbon dioxide, rock hard ammonia, and solid water ice, and the side that is closest, a sea of turbulent liquids and icebergs. The planet rotates so slowly that the part that is half ice and half ocean, is constantly beset with troubling weather conditions ranging from blizzards to unanticipated ice melts and earthquakes. It takes centuries if not thousands of years for the wobbling of the planet on the ecliptic to melt certain parts of the planet. Even still, it is possible for the planet to have become locked in orbit, so the farthest side never melts. The tidal locking of the planet may have occurred hundreds of millions of years ago, and seasons appear to be limited to the slight wobbling of the planet on the ecliptic. Far from being an uninteresting planet, the ecliptic along which the planet travels is also tilted. Most of the colonies are located along the "coast" - the place in a murky half-shadow of constant night and constant day. Scientific researchers from all kinds of alien species from all over the known universe have come to this planet to engage in an arduous archaeological expedition to unearth mysterious fossils from deep within the multi-kilometer thick icy crust. They have dug so deep that it is generally considered dangerous to dig any deeper. On some of the worlds around the galaxy, mysterious relics are found from an earlier civilization that no longer exists. Since the planet has almost no rock at its core, and enjoyed a rotational period for the first couple billion years of its existence, there is probably nothing to find here, short of fossils of earlier species once flourishing on the planet, but now extinct.

Fossil

Rosie Richardson works in marketing at a publisher''s, when she starts dating Oliver Merchant, and falls in love with him. Oliver is the host of the TV show called SoftFocus where they tackle mostly cultural and political topics. Their relationship is formed by his erratic behaviour, like one day telling her he loves her and then not calling for days. When Rosie has to go to Nambula on a business trip, the poverty and general environment shock her into the realisation that she wants to spend her life doing something meaningful. So she breaks up with Oliver and leaves to go to Nambula and work at a refugee camp, organised by Sustain. Four years later, she''s running the camp and feels attracted to a new doctor, Robert O''Rourke. Unfortunately, rumours about a locust invasion spread and about the shipping of food that will be late. So Rosie decides that she has to take matters into her own hands. She flies back to England and gets in touch with Oliver and his circle of famous friends to raise funds. After some convincing, the stars and Rosie fly to Nambula for a one hour fundraising show. In the meantime, Oliver tries to get back together with Rosie, who refuses him. After they handle some catastrophes, the show airs and is a full success. Food is delivered, the stars fly back and Rosie gets together with O''Rourke.

Cause Celeb

With its near vertiginous procession of visual imagery and objects, its constant reinforcement of how God geometrizes (via the symbols of the number five and Quincunx pattern), developed from hastily jotted notes in a fractured, breathless, style, The Garden of Cyrus is one of the most idiosyncratic of all literary works. A critical examination of draught manuscripts reveals that the rapid procession of visual images from art and nature in Browne''s 1658 Discourse were written with uncharacteristic haste, as if the physician-philosopher''s imagination were conjuring evidence of the Quincunx pattern faster than his pen could possibly write. Cyrus may therefore be considered an early example of stream of consciousness and even of altered consciousness writing. Not unlike Lewis Carroll''s Alice in Wonderland, or the science fiction of H. G. Wells,''The Garden of Cyrus'' invites the reader to share with its author in a fantastic perspective upon life and reality. There are however two major reasons why The Garden of Cyrus is not as well known as its diptych companion, Urn-Burial. Firstly, due to an editorial and publishing trend, totally against Browne''s artistic intentions, it has been omitted from many nineteenth and twentieth century editions. Because it has been little understood, it has thus been frequently omitted in many publications. Even modern editions from highly reputable publishers, such as Penguin New Directions in 2006 and New York Review Books in May 2012 continue to perpetuate this error. The second reason for The Garden of Cyrus being little-known is the sheer difficulty of the text itself, which has baffled all but the most determined readers. Stylistically, the Discourse veers abruptly from passages of sublime purple prose to crabbed note-book jottings. It also alludes to what is now considered to be obscure learning, namely hermeticism and the esoteric in general. Though difficult to read, The Garden of Cyrus however remains an important work of English literature, primarily because it is incontrovertible evidence that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, isolated individuals throughout Europe continued to subscribe to the tenets of hermetic philosophy.

The Garden of Cyrus

Macy is still recovering from the sudden loss of her father. Since he died during one of their habitual morning runs, Macy gives up running and keeps all of her feelings to herself. This results in her being unable to comfort her mother. Her boyfriend, Jason, is currently away at Brain Camp. When Macy attempts to communicate with him about her unhappiness with her coworkers at the library. At the end of one of their e-mails she tells him that she loves him, he replies and thinks it would be for the best if they took a break until he returns in August. Upset and hurt, Macy goes for a ride and sees a van for Wish Catering, which catered her mother''s party. She applies for a job, which she gets. Macy enjoys this new job and her new coworkers. There she meets the artistic Wes, who she later discovers lost his mother in a car accident and attended reform school for breaking and entering. During this time Macy''s older sister begins to renovate their father''s beach house despite reluctance from the other family members (mainly from her mother). Her mother refuses to talk to Macy about the sudden death of her husband, Macy''s father; therefore she proceeds to put all of her time into her work. Macy attends a party with some of her coworkers, where she confesses about her father''s death and her relationship issues with Jason to Wes. There, she bonds with coworker Kristy, who advises her to enjoy her life because forever keeps changing. Later Wes and Macy end up stranded together after their catering van runs out of gas, where Macy opens up to Wes about all of the issues in her life during a game of "Truth". They continue to play the game later during work, where Macy discovers that he is also in an "on break" relationship with a girl named Becky. As Macy and Wes grow closer together, Macy''s mother advises against the job and any possible relationship with Wes. Macy later ends up deciding to confess to Wes, but sees him with Becky and ends up heart-broken again. Her mother has Macy helping her with preparations for a party, but eventually has to have Wish Catering assist her. It is during this time that Macy succeeds in being able to comfort her mother and discovers that Wes has broken up with Becky. Wes and Macy become a couple, with her resuming her running habit with him. Wes later joins her and her family at the beach house that has now been renovated.

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Caballero: A Historical Novel

No Author Listed

The Pinballs

No Author Listed

The Running Man

By Michael Gerard Bauer

The Lost Weekend

By Charles R. Jackson

Maze of Moonlight

By Gael Baudino

The Hollow

By Agatha Christie

In Odd We Trust

By Dean Koontz

The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

No Author Listed

Fossil

No Author Listed

Cause Celeb

By Helen Fielding

The Garden of Cyrus

By Thomas Browne

The Truth About Forever

By Sarah Dessen