BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS!

​I try to limit shameless advertising in my blogs, but the fundamental truth is that if you don’t know about my books, you aren’t likely to read them. If you don’t read them, I believe that you have missed some good books to read or to give away. I write to entertain; it’s certainly not for money.
 
However, I am a rabid introvert and am shy about my products, so it’s hard for me to tell you to buy anything. To compensate, I have included in my website, DonaldWillerton.com, the first two chapters of every book that I have published, including all the adult novels and all the middle-grade mysteries. That allows you to determine if the books are interesting to you to read or to buy as gifts without having to spend your hard-earned cash. It also allows you, for the books in the series, to buy one and point to the others to stir a reader’s interest.
 
And I get to feel a lot better about telling you to buy them. They’re all on Amazon and you can order them through my website.
 
I have three adult books currently available:
 
Smoke Dreams, which uses Western history from the late 1800s to portray life among the Comanche Indians, as well as a lot of modern-day techniques to rebuild and remodel a spirit-possessed Victorian house. It’s a thriller that is quirky enough to really enjoy.
 
The King of Trash, which concerns two disparate topics, ocean pollution and homelessness, until I put them together in a surprising way. It’s a thriller and crime novel that has a side of morality tale in it that will grab you in the end. There are a couple of scenes that may give you nightmares.
 
Teddy’s War is my most recent book. It is a historical fiction novel that centers on the journey of a young man through World War II and involves not only his experiencing the war, but deals with family betrayal when he is away. I think it’s my best work, is the most complex in terms of themes and characters, and will be interesting to history buffs, veterans of any conflict, adults whose parents were in WWII, and military readers in general, as well as young adults who want to know more about WWII.
 
I began writing it as a tribute to my mom and dad. Dad trained first in the US, then England, and then landed at Omaha Beach 26 days after D-Day. He was a radar operator, was always close to the front line and combat, experienced the Normandy Breakout, Paris, and was always stationed close to the changing front in the Battle of the Bulge. He was, in fact, in Bastogne when the Germans were attacking. He then served in the Third Army under Patton in Southern Germany until May 8th, when the German Army signed their surrender. It took him another six months to get back home. He was in my mother’s arms the day before Thanksgiving, 1945, three years and ten days after he left.
 
That was seventy-six years and two days ago, by the way.
 
My mother, no less important, worked her war years in the chemistry lab of Continental Oil Company.
 
Teddy’s War is not about my father or mother or any real person I know, but I used my dad’s detailed war itinerary for the locations, timing, pace, and progress of the novel. It gives the story the roots of an honest tale.
 
In addition to the adult novels, I have nine middle-grade novels currently available (the tenth is coming in 2021):
 
The Mogi Franklin Mystery Series is written for boys and girls from age 10 to age 14. The books are like Frank Dixon’s Hardy Boys stories but are more complex in plots, themes, and updated vocabulary. They are also Southwest oriented: each story, except for one, takes place in a setting that is within a day’s drive of Santa Fe, New Mexico; you can find each location on a highway map. They are typically authentic to the history of the location, and to the culture, which makes them fun to read and educational at the same time.
 
My heroes are Mogi Franklin, a fourteen-year-old boy, and his seventeen-year-old sister, Jennifer, who live in Bluff, Utah. He’s got exceptional reasoning skills and a phenomenal memory, and she’s a mature teen with a keen awareness and sensitivity of how people work and what they care about.
 
The first chapter of each book lays out a fictional mystery that occurred in the past that must be solved to address a present-day crisis that has embroiled Mogi and Jennifer. This structure works very well, and, with the first two chapters featured on my website, you can read the different historical mysteries that I create.
 
Check them out. If you have a teen, or have a relative who is a teen, or know a teen who could use a book as a Christmas present or stocking-stuffer, consider this series or any of the individual books – they’re written as stand-alone adventures.

---