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Tiny crabs and periwinkles seem like the most exotic creatures in the universe when you're five years old and standing, for the first time, barefoot and pale-skinned, on a Florida beach. When I was a child growing up in the dull suburban foothills of Atlanta, a week-long trip to the beaches of the vast, Atlantic surf along the cusp of northern Florida was an adventure beyond the wildest imaginings.
Long before Walt Disney arrived in Orlando, Florida was the Magic Kingdom to me.

My husband, Hank, and I honeymooned on the Gulf coast, finding a rare, perfectly intact sand dollar on the beach the first day, which we have kept ever since. During my many visits, I became enamored of the 'other' Florida, home to four centuries of elegant, colorful and bawdy history.

Even now, among the golf courses and resorts of modern times, if you look deep into the woods at night, their shadows draped in moss, their paths footed with sand and seashells brought there by the winds and waters of the world, you may see the heart of Florida looking back at you in the eyes of a wild Cracker horse.

I wrote A Gentle Rain to share that heart, as I have known and loved it, with others.

Out of New Orleans before the catastrophe that was made by a hurricane and, as Dante wrote, "of false gods who lied," comes The Beatitudes, part one in the New Orleans Trilogy. The Beatitudes portrays New Orleans as Dante's purgatory, a place were the sins of men are exposed for all to see, where redemption is close at hand but most often lost.

Social workers Hannah "Scrimp" Dubois and Earlene "Pinch" Washington have just started their own business, Social Investigations, to solve the murders of ten foster children in New Orleans, Louisiana. The New Orleans Police Department, the Catholic Church, and local politicians have sidestepped clues that point to those who hold great power, hampering their investigation.

As Scrimp and Pinch discover more evidence, they realize that they are dealing with a force that crosses into the realm of the paranormal. Then they are thrown into a world much like Dante's purgatory. Soon they link the murderers to a secret organization called the White Army, or La Armee Blanc, centered in New Orleans, but rooted in medieval Europe and the Children's Crusades. Each clue leads to a beatitude, the characteristics of those who are deemed blessed: the pure of heart, the persecuted, the merciful, the sorrowful, the peacemakers, the meek, the poor in spirit, and those who hunger and thirst after justice. By the time the eleventh child-the sacrificial child-goes missing, Scrimp and Pinch are determined to prevent his death.

Racing against time and the threat of an approaching hurricane, these two bold, no-nonsense women work together to restore hope and bring closure to a city battered by sin.