Driving in a familiar Lane

I admit I considered another course. After writing the Carson Chronicles, an exhaustive five-book set, I was ready for a change.

But as I pondered my options for my next series, I realized I was not quite ready to say goodbye to time travel, family sagas, or even historical fiction. So I jumped back in. I took the best elements of my first fifteen novels, focused a little more on suspense, and came up with a storyline for what I hope will be my best series yet.

Like the Carsons, the Lanes of Fredericksburg, Virginia, are a family with a problem. Weeks after noted physicist Mark Lane, 52, creates the world's first time machines, he learns his corporate partner wants to use the portable devices for nefarious purposes.

Rather than give him the chance to do so, Mark takes the time boxes and his family to the relative safety of 1865. For Mark, wife Mary, and their four children, the adventure is a chance to grow. Mary runs a business selling modern cosmetics. Jeremy, 19, and Ashley, 12, befriend an abolitionist and two escaped slaves in wartime Washington. Laura, 22, finds her place as a nurse in a military hospital. Jordan, 25, falls for a beautiful widow on a recovery mission in Virginia. All hope to find peace in the past.

But billionaire Robert Devereaux has no interest in giving the Lanes even a moment's rest. Shortly after Mark's betrayal, he sends an assassin to 1865 to retrieve his property and set matters straight.

Like most of my previous works, The Lane Betrayal combines history, romance, adventure, and multiple points of view. It also features my first true villain and cameos by Abraham Lincoln, Mary Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, John Hay, Walt Whitman, and John Wilkes Booth.

The Lane Betrayal is the first book in the Time Box series, which will span 1865 to 1963. The novel, available as a Kindle book on Amazon.com and its international sites, goes on sale today.