De Maria, Fiorella
by Fiorella De Maria and K.V. Turley
Hollywood, 1956. Journalist and war widow Evangeline Kilhooley is assigned to write a "star profile" of the fading actor Bela Lugosi, made famous by his role as Count Dracula. During a series of interviews, Lugosi draws Evi into his curious Eastern European background, gradually revealing the link between Old World shadows and the twilight realm of modern horror films.
Along the way, Evi meets another English expatriate, Hugo Radelle, a movie buff who offers to help with her research. As their relationship deepens, Evi begins to suspect that he knows more about her and her soldier husband than he is letting on. Meanwhile, a menacing Darkness stalks all three characters as their histories and destinies mysteriously begin to intertwine.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 280 pages
Father Willie Doyle, S.J., Hero of the First World War
by Fiorella De Maria
This historical novel for young people is about the heroic life of Father Willie Doyle, S.J., an Irish Jesuit priest who sacrificed his life serving wounded soldiers in World War I.
Father Doyle enjoyed a happy, privileged Victorian childhood in Ireland. Growing up in a loving, faithful Catholic family, he heard the call to serve God as a priest from a very young age. Shortly after his ordination, the First World War broke out, and Father Willie volunteered to serve as a chaplain to the thousands of Irish soldiers fighting in France.
This joyful, holy, brave, and compassionate priest left the country he loved and ministered to soldiers in the hell of the trenches, dodging bullets and bombs to ensure that dying soldiers could receive the sacraments. By the time he was killed trying to help a wounded soldier, Father Willie had become greatly loved and esteemed by both Catholics and Protestants fighting in the war.
The cause for the canonization of Father Willie Doyle has recently been opened in Rome.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 185 pages
by Fiorella De Maria
With both realism and humor, this compelling and heartwarming novel describes, in first-person narrative, the joys and the challenges of a modern English family.
They are unique in many ways—for one thing, all of the six children are competitive figure skaters, and for another, they have a pet alpaca. Yet, they weather the storms of life with the same, sometimes clumsy attempts at patience and understanding found in most families.
Age range from 9-12
Paperback, size 8.25" x 5.5", 176 pages
The Irish Priest Who Resisted the Nazis
by Fiorella De Maria
Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty was working in the Vatican when dictator Benito Mussolini fell from power and Germany invaded Italy in 1943. This courageous Irish priest who resisted the Nazi occupation was made famous by the movie, The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck. The Monsignor O'Flaherty brought to life in this story is as intriguing and exciting as the film version.
Witty, brilliant, and fearless, Monsignor O'Flaherty helped escaped Allied prisoners of war and persecuted Jews to elude capture by the Germans. At great risk to themselves, Monsignor O'Flaherty and his equally brave friends—priests, nuns, and lay men and women, including a few aristocrats—saved thousands of lives. They constantly needed to stay one step ahead of the ever-persistent Nazis until their surrender to the Allies in 1945.
Not just a thrilling adventure story, this book offers a portal into a real-life battle between good and evil. It also tells of the need after a war for forgiveness and redemption.
Paberback, size 8" x 5.25", 196 pages
Poor Banished Children
by Fiorella de Maria
An explosion is heard off the coast of seventeenth-century England, and a woman washes up on the shore. She is barely alive and does not speak English, but she asks for a priest . . . in Latin.
She has a confession to make and a story to tell, but who is she and from where has she come?
Cast out of her superstitious, Maltese family, Warda turns to begging and stealing until she is fostered by an understanding Catholic priest who teaches her the art of healing. Her wilful nature and hard-earned independence make her unfit for marriage, and so the good priest sends Warda to serve an anchorite, in the hope that his protégé will discern a religious vocation.
Such a calling Warda never has the opportunity to hear. Barbary pirates raid her village, capture her and sell her into slavery in Muslim North Africa. In the merciless land of Warda's captivity, her wits, nerve, and self-respect are tested daily, as she struggles to survive without submitting to total and permanent enslavement. As she is slowly worn down by the brutality of her circumstances, she comes to believe that God has abandoned her and falls into despair, hatred, and a pattern of behaviour which, ironically, mirrors that of her masters.
Poor Banished Children is the tale of one woman's relentless search for freedom and redemption. The historical novel raises challenging questions about the nature of courage, free will, and ultimately salvation.
- An award-winning European novelist presents a powerful story of mystery, adventure, peril, suffering, faith, and courage
- A thrilling historical novel that explores the life and cultures of 17th century England, Malta and Africa
- A challenging work that tells the story of one woman's relentless search for freedom and redemption amidst great suffering, loneliness and despair
Hardcover, size 8.25" x 5.63", 299 pages
by Fiorella de Maria
When a British emergency room doctor saves the life a woman who apparently attempted suicide, he is accused of committing a crime and stands trial. Not only is Dr. Matthew Kemble's medical practice at risk, but also his liberty. If he is found guilty of trespassing on a woman's right to die, he could go to jail.
The novel Do No Harm exposes the dangers faced by conscientious doctors in Britain. Dr. Kemble's decision to treat a patient in defiance of her Living Will pits him against English Law, public opinion and his own profession. The legal and personal battles he faces raise many questions about the role of the physician in the modern world, contemporary beliefs about autonomy and human rights, and the increasingly bitter clash of values in twenty-first century Britain.
Set in and around London, the story explores the interrelated stories of a physician facing ruin and imprisonment at the height of his career, his old friend and doggedly determined lawyer, Jonathan Kirkpatrick, and Maria, a passionate, dedicated but intensely lonely young campaigner who while working for the defense proves incapable of staying out of trouble herself.
Hardcover, size 9.25" x 6.25", 235 pages
A Most Dangerous Innocence
by Fiorella de Maria
It is 1940, the time of the Phoney War. Britain stands alone with German invaders waiting across the Channel and an anxious population preparing for the bloody battle ahead. In an isolated girls' boarding school, sixteen-year-old Judy Randall watches the coming of war with a mixture of fascination and fear. She is a misfit in an institution that prizes conformity; a Catholic with Jewish heritage at a time when anti-Semitism is still commonplace. Most inconveniently of all, she is autistic, and her behavior is misunderstood as merely eccentric and insolent.
Bored and frustrated by her inability to help the war effort, Judy becomes obsessed with the idea that her hated headmistress is a Nazi, and she goes to increasingly reckless lengths to prove her theory. In the meantime, the adults of the school busy themselves with planning how best to protect the children in their care if occupying forces overrun the country. For teacher John Peterson, who has seen armed conflict before, his own agonizing history forces him to consider what sacrifices he might have to make if the horrors of the war overtake them all.
A Most Dangerous Innocence offers a glimpse into the early days of the Second World War, seen from a sleepy corner of Britain. It is also a meditation on childhood guilt, innocence, loyalty, and the courage to stand alone.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 214 pages
A Father Gabriel Mystery #1
by Fiorella de Maria
In this unusual murder mystery, the tranquillity of Saint Mary's Abbey is shattered by the discovery of a gruesome crime in a cottage on the abbey grounds. A foreign artist and war hero seeking refuge from the world has been murdered. Marie Paige, the frail, sickly wife of the village doctor, lies beside him beaten into a coma. The police arrest Marie's husband, convinced that they are looking at a crime of passion. But Dr Paige finds himself with an unlikely champion: Fr. Gabriel, a blundering but brilliant Benedictine priest who believes in his innocence and feels compelled to search for the truth. In a country struggling to come to terms with the devastation of the Second World War, even a secluded English village has its share of secrets and broken lives. It is not long before Fr. Gabriel and his companions find themselves embarking on a dangerous journey into the victims' troubled war histories and a chapter of Europe's bloodiest conflict that is almost too terrible to be acknowledged.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 176 pages
See No Evil
A Father Gabriel Mystery #4
by Fiorella de Maria
In this third title in the Father Gabriel Mystery series, the detective priest is less than pleased to find himself the reluctant guest at a wealthy local family's Christmas party. Only the excellent – and probably black market – food softens the horror of meeting the odious Victor Gladstone, a veteran reporter, an ardent anti-clerical and the only witness to a wartime massacre no one wishes to hear about. When Victor is found dead on the Martin estate the next morning, the apparent victim of an unfortunate accident, Gabriel is drawn into the mystery of who among the family's chattering guests could have wanted the old man dead.
Gabriel quickly realizes that Victor Gladstone, like any good reporter, had a nose for rotten behavior, but as Gabriel's investigation moves towards its tragic conclusion, he faces the not one but two serious questions: Who is guilty of Gladstone's murder? and Is anyone truly innocent?
This mystery focuses on the issue of indirect involvement in evil, particularly buying and selling property stolen from victims of the Nazis and witnessing Nazi crimes.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 299 pages
The Vanishing Woman
A Father Gabriel Mystery #3
by Fiorella de Maria
In this next book in the Father Gabriel mystery series, the priest detective tries to solve the riddle behind the disappearance of the most hated woman in town.
Enid Jennings, a retired headmistress and an embittered war widow, has a talent for causing conflict and distress wherever she goes. When Enid's daughter sees her vanish into thin air, she is widely assumed to have been mistaken or to have lost her mind – or worse, to have committed an act of foul play.
Enter Father Gabriel. Working on the principle that some stories are too strange to have been made up, the priest sets out to discover the whereabouts of the missing woman. With help from the town's physician, and hostility from the irascible Inspector Applegate, Father Gabriel delves into Enid Jennings' past, and he digs up the recent past of the whole village during the days of the Phony War, when invaders lay in wait across the Channel and crimes were just a little easier to hide.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 246 pages
Death of a Scholar
A Father Gabriel Mystery #2
by Fiorella De Maria
Father Gabriel spends a few days of relaxation at his old Cambridge College, the guest of friend Arthur Kingsley from his student days. Kingsley is now a respected scientist and a Fellow of St Stephen's College, but after an enjoyable evening dining at High Table, Gabriel receives the shattering news that Daphne Silverton, Kingsley's brilliant young protégée, has been found dead in her laboratory after what appears to have been a tragic accident. Daphne was universally loved, but Gabriel's instincts tell him that her death was a little too perfectly staged to have been an accident.
After an emotional reunion with the parents of his late wife, Gabriel seeks the truth about Daphne's demise. His investigations lead him to the Peace Union and its Ban the Bomb campaign, another member of Daphne's laboratory is found dead. Gabriel struggles to lay aside his personal loyalties and confront the possibility that there are dark secrets lurking behind both deaths.
This fourth book in the popular Father Gabriel series examines the moral minefield of the complicity of scientists in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. It also reveals more about Gabriel's past.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 262 pages
A Father Gabriel Mystery #5
by Fiorella de Maria
Father Gabriel has finally returned to St Mary's Abbey, but all is not well in the sleepy Wiltshire village of Sutton Westford. Joseph Beaumont, a former village boy turned London property developer, has returned to build a row of houses on the grounds of a disused mine. A local opposition group – led by Joseph's boyhood nemesis – campaigns to stop the development, and Joseph finds himself the target of increasingly menacing threats. Then, workmen make a gruesome discovery on the building site: the skeleton of a child who went missing thirty years before, while the Great War was raging. Fr Gabriel is called in to investigate, but the task seems impossible. How can he uncover a secret that has been carefully hidden for three decades? Is the killer even still alive? Worse, as the tragic details emerge of a lost little girl's final moments, Gabriel is tormented by the memory of his own daughter and the life that was stolen from her many years before.
Missing Presumed Lost explores the themes of childhood innocence, guilt, and the responsibilities faced by society to protect the young. The book also delves deeper into Gabriel's own troubled past and the need to lay it to rest.
Paperback, size 8" x5.25", 270 pages
by Fiorella De Maria
Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty was working in the Vatican when dictator Benito Mussolini fell from power and Germany invaded Italy in 1943. This courageous Irish priest who resisted the Nazi occupation was made famous by the movie, The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck. The Monsignor O'Flaherty brought to life in this story is as intriguing and exciting as the film version.Witty, brilliant, and fearless, Monsignor O'Flaherty helped escaped Allied prisoners of war and persecuted Jews to elude capture by the Germans. At great risk to themselves, Monsignor O'Flaherty and his equally brave friends—priests, nuns, and lay men and women, including a few aristocrats—saved thousands of lives. They constantly needed to stay one step ahead of the ever-persistent Nazis until their surrender to the Allies in 1945.
Not just a thrilling adventure story, this book offers a portal into a real-life battle between good and evil. It also tells of the need after a war for forgiveness and redemption.
Paperback, size 8" x 5.25", 196 pages
A Hero of the Holocaust
by Fiorella De Maria
Maximilian Kolbe's decision to take the place of a condemned man in the Auschwitz concentration camp is one of the greatest stories of heroism to emerge from the Holocaust. This book brings to life for a younger audience the incredible story of a Polish weaver's son who grew up to be a priest, a missionary, and a martyr.
Kolbe lived amid the political unrest, the social change, and the spiritual battles that shaped the modern world. In the thick of it all, he had one goal—to share the love of God with as many people as possible. And he was a great innovator, spreading the Gospel through multimedia—a work that took him all the way to Nagasaki, Japan.
With his deep love for Our Lady, Kolbe also founded a Marian movement that has spread throughout the world, the Militia Immaculatae, also known as the Knights of the Immaculata. His imitation of Mary's tremendous trust in God enabled him to bring hope everywhere he went, including a prison camp.
Paperback, size 8" 5.25", 192 pages
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