Full of mystery, romance, and grief, THE FORGOTTEN BOY is a gorgeously written novel that tells the story of three powerful women who experience love and loss in vastly different time periods.
THE FORGOTTEN BOY
by Laura Andersen
Open Road Media, April 2024
(via Context)
1460: Ismay Deacon, caught between sides in the War of the Roses, tries to hide away in her ancestral home, Havencross. But when word gets out that she has a child, Ismay has to make a terrible choice to protect her son. The Deacon family disappears, but there are rumors of a young ghost haunting the halls of Havencross.
1918: Diana Neville, an experienced war nurse, is hired by Havencross School for Boys to run the infirmary. But soon there is knocking on her door in the middle of the night and she hears footsteps in empty corridors. Plus, the youngest students are reporting a ghostly boy luring them from bed in the middle of the night, all while the Spanish Flu hits Havencross. In the midst of the pandemic, the youngest boy disappears, and Diana has to face her deepest fear by going into medieval tunnels after him.
2018: Juliet Stratford is hired to spend the winter at Havencross to clear it out before it comes a luxury hotel. Juliet, an historian, throws herself into the mysteries of Havencross. Especially: Who is the forgotten boy that has haunted Havencross for so long? And is it the same boy that Juliet has begun to see in the echoing, empty house?
Laura Andersen is the award-winning author of The Boleyn trilogy, The Tudor Legacy trilogy, and The Darkling Bride.
It is the early 1980s and for twenty years Father Joe Kreitzer has been dutifully serving the Lakota community on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota. And in all this time he has carried memories of Veronica; their parting propelled him into the church. Now she has reached out, wanting to rekindle what they had turned their back on so many years ago. While grappling with this resurgence from his past, Joe’s dear friend Alice Nighthawk comes to him with news of her son Little Bear’s arrest for attempted murder. In his efforts to help exonerate Bear, Joe uncovers long buried evidence of a church cover up of abuse at a Catholic school on the reservation, forcing him to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps. What unfolds is an intimately layered story of love, and a search for answers.
Lost something? Gabriela Rose knows how to get it back. As a recovery agent, she’s hired by individuals and companies seeking lost treasures, stolen heirlooms, or missing assets. She’s reliable, cool under pressure, and well trained in weapons of all types. But Gabriela’s latest job isn’t for some bamboozled billionaire, it’s for her own family, whose home is going to be wiped off the map if they can’t come up with a lot of money fast.
Growing up in India and the United States, and being a brown-skinned, cis-gendered, gay man with an Indian name, Anu has experienced different levels of bias, privilege, and prejudice in his life—ranging from the subtly stinging to the all-out violent—and he knows intimately the importance of breaking not only interpersonal bias, but our own internalized biases. Today, he is the founder of BE MORE with Anu, an organization that funds independent research on breaking bias and has provided anti-bias trainings to hundreds of companies around the world.
Words have the power to change lives, and no one knows that better than crisis management expert Arden Ward. But she’s in big trouble—she’s accused of having an affair with a client. It’s not true! She would never do such a thing! But she gets the blame—and now she’s about to be fired.