Autographed Books

Cassandra Patton Conover is about to become an outlaw.
Hiding out from middle age, divorce, and the remains of a legislative lobbying career, Patton is holed up in her family's ancient Maine camp. While searching for her badly-behaved, wayward dog in dense woods, she finds her best friend crushed under a tree. Then she finds tracks larger than any animal she knows and a mystery only wild animals can help her solve.

Before she can absorb the loss of her friend, a large newspaper that smells a story hires Patton to guide a surly reporter seeking extinct wolves he thinks have returned to Maine. The forest, however, has too many wolf agendas. A billionaire hopes wolves will become a save-the-forest strategy. A timber company plans to exterminate the pack, and a black ops mercenary rips open Patton's wounded life so he can aim her at the wolves.

When gold wolf eyes issue a challenge at her tent door, Patton is drawn deeper into her friend's mysterious murder and the wolves' fate. To find her friend's killer, she must find and trust the pack. To save her dog, the wolves, and her own life, she must step outside the law, sacrifice her career, and embrace a wild world. (Sandra won the Mystery Writers of America national McCloy Award and was a finalist in the Women's Fiction Writers Association "Rising Star" contest.)

In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. The result was a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a "book of the year" in multiple newspapers, and a work proclaimed as a modern American classic.

For decades starting in the 1950s, Raymond Patriarca ran the New England Mafia out of a storefront in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1980 he was seventy-two years old, and suffering from diabetes and heart disease. One night in December of that year his life intersected with that of Dr. Barbara Roberts, a thirty-six-year old single mother of three, who was the first female cardiologist to practice in Rhode Island. Asked by Raymond's family to check on him after he was arrested on capital charges, Barbara--a naive Alice in Wonderland--entered a looking-glass world populated by pitfalls, moral ambiguities and dangers for which her devout upbringing had not prepared her. How did a former Catholic schoolgirl from a working-class family become the physician and defender of one Mafioso, and the mistress of another? How did her children handle these scandalous associations and the resulting hostile publicity--and what were the reactions of their fathers?

Expanding on the story first told in the popular Crimetown podcast, this memoir is a tale of motherhood, political activism, controversy, heartbreak and survival; it traces one woman's trajectory against the backdrop of America's 20th century upheavals.