Overview

Heart's Blood mixes the epic vistas of the border with its cruel social realities of drug trafficking and human smuggling. It begins in the early 1970s with the book's central character, Tyler McNeil, leaving behind his itinerant life to begin a difficult journey through unexpected parenthood, loss, love, and finally, peace in his old age. A cast of colorful characters light up and change Ty's life. Mana, an abused, illiterate border crosser, shows up just long enough in his life to bear an infant daughter and then vanish. Ty makes the difficult decision to adopt and raise her orphaned child, Lita, and commits to life on his tumbledown ranch on the border. But a vicious leader of the local drug cartel, called Blanco, and his wife, Marcela Beltran, covet Lita (and later the daughter Lita bears as an adult), because Blanco is Lita's biological father. Tyler's own existence becomes further complicated when he meets Claire, the love of his life with a gypsy soul and a stumbling heart. And CJ, his son from a brief early marriage rejects him when he learns of his real parentage. These complex family ties keep him off balance until the very end, in a saga filled with love, loss, humor and pain. With its Western setting and cavalcade of personalities, Heart's Blood will warm the heart of fans of modern western dramas. Though set in the scenic and dangerous desert of southern Arizona, the novel transcends its place and time. Heart's Blood blends the complexities of life on the border with the universal themes of blood relationships and secrets kept across generations. It's a rich story that readers of all backgrounds will enjoy.

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9781542748520

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Elizabeth Zinn Biography Elizabeth Zinn grew up in Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan. She attended the University of Paris as a Fulbright Scholar in classical saxophone, and enjoyed an academic career in music. During its 18-year existence her ensemble, The Sonora Quartet, was internationally acclaimed as one of the finest of its kind in the world. Their CD, Treasures, available on Amazon.com, is widely used as the model for classical saxophone quartet playing. Before retiring from academia, she spent eight years as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Arizona. Ms. Zinn has been privileged to study under a number of wonderful writers and teachers: while at the University of Michigan, G.B. Harrison was her professor of Shakespeare and Marvin Felheim taught her Romantic Literature. At the University of Arizona she studied under M. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo, and was able to work intensively with the late Diane Freund, winner of the Pirate's Alley/Faulkner Prize, during the last year of Diane's life. As a fiction writer Ms. Zinn has now completed three novels. Two of them, Dancer and Heart's Blood, are set on the southwestern border and share some of the same characters. In its short story form, Dancer, won an Honorable Mention in Glimmertrain's 2010 Short Story Award for New Writers competition, placing it in the top 5% of over a thousand other works. Heart's Blood won Honorable Mention in the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, placing it in the top 3% of entries. Her third novel, The Happiness Lottery, is set in Michigan, where she grew up. She has also authored a collection of short stories, a number of poems, and has finished a fourth novel, The End of the Music. Ms. Zinn lives and writes in a small town in the mountains of southern Arizona.

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