NovelBooks, Inc.
Release Date- February 2002
Cover Art by Ariana Overton

"In the small village of Saranac Lake, high in the Adirondack Mountains, thousands of sick people came in the hope that the mountain air, the sanitoriums, the many private home turned into `cure cottages� would save their lives. Gabriel Levine was sent because a foolish act of bravery, knocking down a notorious gangster to protect a young woman threatened a gang war. He never dreamed that he would find a new life, true friendship, love, and mortal danger."

Excerpt

"It wasn�t until the walks with Anne that Gabe realized how living in Saranac lake was changing him. An actual change, over and above the feeling of contentment that he was becoming used to. Suddenly a slow walk to the little downtown was aa wonderful adventure and walking slowly like an old man didn�t make any difference. He and Anne stopped and chatted with people curing on the porches along the way. Sometimes Anne would walk up to a porch and introduce Gabe to friends of hers and they would chat for a few minutes, or they would pass the time of day with other patients our for their walks. Like all of the patients, they played the game of recognizing famous people. "Oh look," somebody would say, "there�s that writer, John Dos Passos," or "that�s Adolph Menjou," or "that husky man with the beard, that�s Ernest Hemingway," or "that�s Christy Mathewson across the street talking to laughing Eddy Doyle, remember Eddy won the the World Series for Christy when he hit that home run ion 1912," and "that pretty girl over there with William Morris, that�s pearl White," so everybody made plans to take a taxi out to Lower Saranac Lake where she was filming The Perils Of Pauline and "look, that funny little man in the kilt, that�s Harry Lauder, we�re going to see him at the Pontiac tonight," and that beautiful woman who walks on Church Street every day, that�s Sara Murphy, whose little boy is so sick. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a friend of hers. He�s writing about Sara and her husband in one of his books. I think he was here, Fitzgerald, a few months ago, but I�m not sure," and is Pearl White prettier than Norma Talmadge, they had dinner together at the Riverside the other night."

Saranac Lake never wanted for the rich and famous, Gabe learned, or the talented or the beautiful, just as it never wanted for the poor and the desperate, the ones who lived in tents or in small rooms in the back of somebody�s house, or who couldn�t afford to go anyplace but the State sanitorium at Ray brook a few miles away. The ones whose only distinction in their lives was that were sick and dying in the same place and in the same ratio as the rich and famous.

"It doesn�t make any difference to the conductor on the night train," Anne said one day. "Who you were in your other life, or just your life, rich or poor, plain or glamorous, famous or nobody. You come in by coach and leave in a box in the baggage car. Some people get longer obituaries, that�s all it really amounts to."

NovelBooks,Inc
Dorice Nelson
Ariana Overton