A MOONBOW NIGHT
by
LAURA FRANTZ
Genre: Historical Romance / Christian
Publisher: Revell / Baker Publishing Group
Date of Publication: January 3, 2017
Number of Pages: 384
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After fleeing Virginia, Temperance Tucker and her family established an inn along the Shawnee River. It’s a welcome way station for settlers and frontiersmen traveling through the wild Cumberland region of Kentucky—men like Sion Morgan, a Virginia surveyor who arrives at the inn with his crew, looking for an experienced guide.
Though he balks when Tempe is appointed to lead his team through the wilderness, it isn’t long before Sion must admit that her abilities may outmatch his own. But can the tenuous tie they are forming survive the dangers waiting just around the bend?
With her signature sweeping style and ability to bring the distant past to vivid life, Laura Frantz beckons you to join her in a land of Indian ambushes, conflicting loyalties, and a tentative love that meanders like a cool mountain stream.
***
PRAISE FOR A MOONBOW NIGHT:
“From the very first page, A Moonbow Night charmed me into its story, a story as earthy, rugged, and beguiling as the early American terrain upon which it has been laid. The book offers everything this reader wants: fidelity to history with rich, sensory details of time and place; names we’ve known fleetingly from the annals of the past who quicken on the page; fictional friends for whose happiness and romantic redemption we yearn. Tempe is a Kentucky heroine worth our time and heart’s investment—a waif on the outside, steel on the inside, kind in every situation. In Sion we find a hero worthy of the title, willing to grapple with his past to own his present and claim his lady. The plot is complex, tense, and layered and resolves in a most satisfying conclusion. This remarkable, elegantly written novel pulses with life and is a must-read for all who love historical romance.”
—Sandra Byrd, author of A Lady in Disguise
“A Moonbow Night captures the wilds of a young and unyielding American frontier with breathtaking action and Laura Frantz’s signature mastery in storytelling. The effortless merging of narrative with intelligent dialogue allows the spot-on historical research to shine. Sion’s understated valor is in perfect step with Tempe’s independence, making them a pairing that will keep readers turning pages and rooting for them to the end. This is an exquisite novel of love and loss, and a sweet reminder that even in an untamed world, the gentle grace of God heals all wounds.”
—Kristy Cambron, author of The Illusionist’s Apprentice and the Hidden Masterpiece series
“As timeless as it is historical, A Moonbow Night is the shining embodiment of everything Laura Frantz does best, from her trademark attention to detail to the unfolding of rich and textured love in a setting no less complex. To read this novel is to take a journey along with the characters, inhabiting the story with all five senses. Truly, a book to savor and revisit.”
—Jocelyn Green, award-winning author of The Mark of the King
Excerpt, Part II
from Chapter 1 of The Moonbow Night
by Laura Frantz
To read Part I of Chapter 1, go to Lone Star Book Blog Tours stop hosted by Hall Ways!
Come to a turabel mountain that tried us almost to death to git over it.
—William Calk, His Jurnal
March ye 25th 1775 Satterday
The tumult of falling water met his ears, the mist of the falls like ice. He looked back to make sure all was in order. All was, yet he was unable to shake that shadowed feeling. Truly, who would be out on such a forbidding day? Other than a bunch of witless surveyors bent on Indian territory?
Facing forward again, Smokey beside him, Sion crossed the cavern, eyes west, the cave’s dimness offset by a startling burst of light. Years earlier he’d heard of this place. But Boone and Walker hadn’t done it justice. Their tales of its grandeur seemed tattered and lackluster.
Sion stood in the Gap, wordless, barely aware of his surveying crew fanned out around him. The wind had ceased its bitter sighing. Before them was pewter sky. A bluish haze of mountains and then . . . endless, untrammeled, unredeemed wilderness.
Sion hated that Cornelius broke the spell. “Here we shall rest, surely.”
“Here, aye,” Sion answered. “For a quarter of an hour or so.”
Shooting him a black look, Cornelius retreated into the cavern with his manservant, Lucian, and the two chain carriers.
Nate stood shoulder to shoulder with Sion, gaze unbroken. “I misdoubted I’d live to see such a wilderness. But I’m glad I did.” He drew in a ragged breath. “‘O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches.’”
The Scripture chafed, intruding on Sion’s appreciation. Tearing his attention from the view, he began to reload his rifle, distracting himself with powder and shot.
“This here Gap’s the best—and the worst of it, I reckon,” Nate mused, still agape.
“You reckon wrong.” Sion poured powder down the barrel and rapped it with his hand to set the charge. “There are three choke points on Boone’s Trace. The Narrows are next—and a spring-soaked river to ford farther down.”
“Don’t sound so gleeful.” The gleam in Nate’s eyes eclipsed his worry. “I know you’d like to get shed of us and go your own way, just like you been doin’ thirty years or better.”
Sion grinned and drove the ball home. “The way I figure it, I’m saddled with the lot of you till the surveying’s done.”
Nate scratched his silvery chin. “You see any sign back there at the spring?”
With a nod, Sion closed the gun’s frizzen. “Shawnee. Six or so. Mayhap a couple of Wyandot thrown in.”
Nate’s shoulders convulsed in a shiver. “Outnumbered, then.”
Meeting the older man’s gaze, Sion decided against confessing his certainty they were still being watched, even as their frosted breath plumed between them. “We’ll make a cold camp. Stand watch through the night. Indians don’t usually care for a wintry fight.”
“Well, they do like horses. And we got some fine ones left.” Nate darted a wary eye at the woods. “I’ll be glad to get to Boone’s and Harrod’s forts.”
“A hundred miles more.” Again Sion looked square at Nate, unwilling to withhold a last way out. “It’s not too late to turn back.”
“And leave you without a marker?”
Committed, then. Despite Nate’s Scripture spouting and hymn singing, the graying borderman was the only member of the surveying party Sion was sure of. Still, he felt an odd twinge. An old man should be at home, surrounded by life’s last comforts. But Nate Stoner had little to return to in Virginia. He was a widower of ten years, and his only daughter had died in childbirth, leaving him without family. Sion was the closest thing to kin Nate had.
“No need to worry about my old hide. I’ll keep. ‘And even to your old age I am He; and even to hoar hairs I will carry you.’” Nate gave Sion a reassuring grin. “It ain’t me I’m fretted about but you. We’d best head down and make camp.”
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Laura Frantz is a Christy Award finalist and the author of several books, including The Frontiersman’s Daughter, Courting Morrow Little, The Colonel’s Lady, The Mistress of Tall Acre, and the Ballantyne Legacy series. She lives and writes in a log cabin in the heart of Kentucky.
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