A Duchess for St, Uguzo

Holly Hewitt is at a low-point in her academic career. Working in a coffee shop to make ends meet, her life takes an unexpected turn with the offer of a trip to pursue her studies in St Uguzo, a small duchy nestled in the foothills of the Alps. Rooted in the past, with its unique history and traditions, the  duchy's tranquil beauty is about to be destroyed by an ambitious stranger with a secret agenda. A man is found dead in a lake. The duchy's famous cheese, its main source of income, is poisoned. In this unfamiliar, and often mystical, environment, Holly joins her new friends in a fight to preserve a place that has become more important to her than she could ever have imagined. And when she agrees to help the handsome historian with transcribing a World War II diary, she realizes her presence in St. Uguzo was no accident.

Holly Hewitt has an unexpected offer to visit the duchy of St. Uguzo for a few days as a guest of one of its citizens, now an internationally known opera singer. Almost immediately with her arrival things begin to fall apart. While she is befriended and supported by a few of St. Uguzo's citizens, she seems to have arrived at a time of several tragic events for the Duchy. Since the duchy is famous for its cheese, and that cheese is its major source of income, a serious problem with cheese production threatens the duchy's survival. And since the duchy is small, these events affect almost everyone, including Holly. Perhaps it's the effect of an unusual energy center in the Duchy that stimulates Holly's latent intuition and forces her to find inner resources and courage she didn't know she had. She's buoyed by the hope of an unexpected romantic interest, but also has to face the prospect that her hopes for her career and her love life just may not work out. Both her future and that of the duchy seem very much in doubt and there seems an impossibly slim chance to save it all from catastrophe.

Susan Garzon is former anthropologist, linguist, and teacher of English as a foreign language. She lived for eight years in Latin America including Chile, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. After moving to Oklahoma and teaching linguistics, she retired to be with her husband and cats and to find time for reading and writing fiction. Susan passed away in 2023 with the hope that her last creative work would still see the light of day. Susan's previous fiction included Reading the Knots and Unraveling the Threads