Sugar Mill Stories

About the Book

On a small Caribbean island, Will Mattison controls everything, even the death and interment of his son-in-law, Charles Collier. Ava Collier, Charles’s mom, arrives on the island for the funeral and soon understands that she must stay to uncover the truth about her son’s death and reclaim his ashes from Mattison’s three-hundred-year-old sugar mill. Allies emerge to aid Ava in her quest—a Rasta boardwalk bum, an aboriginal mystic in the rainforest, a crusading radio-station owner, and Anole, a dark young man named for a climbing lizard. What Ava learns from these islanders and others will change her forever, and the sugar mill becomes her powerful symbol of endurance.

About the Author

Sue Hastings, coauthor of Aransas: The Life of a Texas Coastal County, has written for Texas Parks and Wildlife and Texas Highways magazines and the Op-Ed page of the Corpus Christi [TX] Caller-Times. She lived in the Virgin Islands for six years, meeting people at every level of island society. Many of them, and many details of island life, color the pages of this novel. Sue and her husband now live in Corpus Christi, Texas, in a Caribbean-inspired home. They revisit the islands as often as they can, because a part of their hearts will always remain there.