An Angel For Duane & Gladys

Duane & Gladys, grieving over the loss of their adult son, try to find an adventure to take their mind off their pain. They buy the contents of a storage shed and get a Palamino in the bargain. They also get more grief of a different kind when the rightful owner turns up to help them console the horse over the loss of his owner. The adventure they were looking for heats up when a natural disaster hits their area, and a local cop finds discrepancies over the way their son died.

After their son, Sam dies tragically in a truck crash, Duane and Gladys are stunned. The outgoing, amiable Sam was a major part of their lives. He lived and worked on their small Idaho riding facility and was loved by his students. A friend of his, Turk, is a Viet Nam veteran, as Sam was, and Turk tries to console the couple. Gladys decides they need an "adventure" to stir things up a little, so she and her husband Duane buy the unknown contents of a storage unit. To their surprise a Palomino is tied to the unit's door handle so they buy the horse also. The horse owner turns up to ask for a job at their arena so she can be near her horse. A sleazy businessman follows her trying to get her belongings. Turk tries to hide his feelings for the horse owner, Teresa, but keeps them hidden. She becomes part of the family in a most unusual way. A retiring police officer finds disturbing facts about Sam's accident, which he declines to share with Duane and Gladys, till he separates truth from fiction in the way the accident happened. A local vet and the police officer's wife team up to save the day.

Joanne Wiklund, a journalist whose career included reporting, editing, feature writing and photography for both daily and weekly newspapers, has turned to fiction writing and teaching writing classes. She was a weekly columnist for The Dispatch, a newspaper in Moline, IL and a reporter for The Nashville Banner in Nashville, TN. "Fiction is fun," Joanne says. "But it still has to ring true when the reader settles in to discover the empathy, excitement and entertainment found in reading the story." Joanne lives in rural Northwestern Illinois near the bridge where Interstate 80 crosses the Mississippi River. She is a Charter Member of the Midwest Writing Center and the founder of the River Valley Writers, who meet monthly at the River Valley Library in Port Byron, Illinois. She is currently working on a sequel to An Angel For Duane & Gladys.