By Her Own Hand. This item is unavailable.By Her Own Hand

Madeline Crowne escapes a violent home, discovers love for the first time, but war and betrayal threaten to destroy it.

Seeking a world away from abuse, she joins the army.  Her first deployment is Afghanistan.  Initially a hero, she is later accused of a war crime she did not commit.  On the run, near death, she is saved by a woman named Mira, a survivor of the civil wars of Lebanon.

Shared sorrows seem to form a perfect friendship, but in time desire and deceit cast shadows.  Mira is an illegal arms dealer, drawing Madeline into an underworld as a means of seduction.    

In another part of the Afghan war, Eliot Lange is accused of desertion as he tried to save a comrade.  Panicked, he flees to America.  

Madeline sees through Mira's duplicity, rejects her advances and finds a way home.  Madeline and Eliot's paths intersect in their native Sacramento, where they fall in love, but the FBI is pursuing them.  And Eliot is holding back a fearful secret, for he has a distant connection to Mira.  Before he can confess, the FBI is closing in.  Mira finds them first.  Spurned, jealous, she has a plan for a perfect revenge.      

Born into a fragmented family in Iowa, during the conservative fifties, I was raised in California during the chaotic counter culture of the sixties. Adrift in a world of drugs and lost souls in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district, I later escaped to find psychological help and went on to attain a Master's degree in psychology, I worked for a time as a counselor to troubled youth and later seeing clients as a psychotherapist. When I'm not writing I'm dancing Argentine Tango with my beloved wife, Jackie.