Finding Casey

by Jo-Ann Mapson

Published 28 November 2011
Glory Vigil, newly married and unexpectedly pregnant at 41, is nesting in the home she and her husband Joseph have just moved to in Santa Fe, a house that is rumoured to have a resident ghost. Their adopted daughter Juniper is home from college for Thanksgiving and in love for the very first time, quickly learning how a relationship changes everything. But Juniper has a tiny arrow lodged in her heart, a leftover shard from the day eight years earlier when her sister Casey disappeared - in a time before she'd ever met Glory and Joseph.

When a fieldwork course takes Juniper to a pueblo only a few hours away, she finds herself right back in the past she thought she'd finally buried.

Solomon's Oak

by Jo-Ann Mapson

Published 12 October 2010
"Solomon's Oak" is the story of three people who have suffered losses that changed their lives forever. To make ends meet, Glory Solomon, a young widow, is using the chapel her husband built on their central California farm, under a 200-year-old white oak tree, as a place to hold unusual weddings. Her first is for a bride and groom who want a pirate wedding. Fourteen-year-old Juniper McGuire is the surviving member of a family decimated by a local kidnapping. Juniper arrives on Glory's doorstep, pierced, tattooed, angry and homeless. When Glory's husband Dan was alive they took in foster children and raised them. But Juniper may be more than she has the capacity to handle. Joseph Vigil is a former Albuquerque police officer and crime lab photographer who was shot during an assignment. Now disabled and in constant pain, he came to California to photograph the giant trees of the state. Jo-Ann Mapson's deeply felt, wise and warm portrayal of broken souls finding their way back to humanity shows how these three people - along with a host of dogs, horses and goats - enter and transform each other's lives.