Angel in the Valley

About the Book

In 1970, twenty-five-year-old Mark Smithson is an experienced wilderness hiker and a popular teacher in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Sue Bishop, a truck driver’s wife and the mother of two, lives in the tiny Appalachian town of McClellanville, situated in Perry County, Pennsylvania at the foot of the Tuscarora Mountain, and Carolyn Mason is a struggling prosecutor who has recently returned to nearby Carlisle to work for the District Attorney. As teenagers, the two girls fell in love with Mark, but the sentiment was only reciprocated with Sue, whom Mark considers the love of his life.

Ten years removed from their initial adolescent encounters with each other, Mark, Carolyn and Sue long to recover the innocent love of their youth, but life stands in the way of each. Carolyn blames a male-dominated world for never quite achieving that to which she thinks she is entitled in the way of academics, work and love. For Sue, the responsibilities of mother and wife, and the attitudes of a woman’s role that prevail in her valley, relegate to dreams her need to be loved by someone who matches her memory of Mark.

Mark, the troubled member of the trio, is confronted by experiences with women that engage a dark secret from his childhood. Lydia Banks, a psychiatrist and Mark’s landlord, drowns her sorrows in booze and sexual depravities that threaten to engulf the much younger Mark. Enamored with Mark despite his unwillingness to be with her, an older colleague, Kathy Alick, unnerves him with demands of attention. Patty Moriarity is a stellar high school athlete who becomes a victim of an impulsive assault when she entraps and sexually compromises Mark, her coach and teacher. Thinking he has murdered Patty, Mark flees to the Appalachian Trail and becomes a fugitive that Carolyn Mason is charged to prosecute. Much to Carolyn’s frustration, Mark is never found.

Three decades later a mysterious wanderer, known by Appalachian valley folk as the Long Walker, appears in McClellanville. Seeking shelter from winter and in need of cash, Walker agrees to work at the Tuscarora Hotel, a dilapidated establishment owned by an energetic woman known as Berkie. Walker recognizes her as Sue Bishop, now Sue Berkholder, the love of his life and the angel that has visited his dreams ever since he went into exile and relinquished his identity as Mark Smithson. Although attracted to him with an intensity she does not understand, Berkie does not realize that Walker is Mark, who maintains his anonymity to protect himself from his past.

Berkie and Walker develop a deeply emotional relationship, which he is unable to consummate because of his fear that intimacy will unleash the rage he has tried to repress most of his life. The understanding and unyielding love that grows within Berkie for Walker gives him the strength to acknowledge the murky enigma that led to his life-altering assault on Patty.

Carolyn Mason Richmond, bankrolled by Lesley, her wealthy, reprobate husband, has been elected the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania. She enlists Brock Wellington, a shrewd and callous political operative, to help her win election as Governor. She has not forgotten what she believes was Mark’s betrayal of her, and her failure to bring him to justice in 1970 has implications in an election year...

About the Author

Born and raised in Central Pennsylvania and a longtime resident of Northern Delaware, the author now resides with Zoey the Cat in a small cottage near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the Chateau Country of the Brandywine River Valley. An educator and life long student, the author received degrees from Elizabethtown College and Southern Connecticut State University, and has attended the University of Oregon, the University of Connecticut, Delaware State University, Wilmington College and the University of Delaware. After years of writing and editing technical materials for a Delaware school district, the author tackled the task of constructing a fictional work that entwined his love of nature and interest in the lifelong effects of childhood trauma with his fascination for the sanctity and power of love. Angel in the Valley is the result. He is presently working on Jake, a story that explores how pedophilia’s insidious influence extends beyond its victims.