Lord Byron's Ring

Devoted wife and mother, degreed historian and devotee of Lord Byron, Sara Burden is her husband's heroine; Jack the only man who leaves her breathless. Their scholarly and popular teenage son, Drew, completes the idyllic family. Revered and envied in the Oklahoma badlands, the Burden's love affair is both lusty and lush, explicit and ethereal, and their union is seemingly impervious to life's entrapments. But while vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, their fortune changes quickly when a blackmailing businessman with enemies to spare swoops down from the Panhandle oil fields to threaten Jack's drilling ventures, only to turn up dead. Motives of revenge and greed darken the plot, soon leading Drew into the path of murder—and a medium who conjures Byron's ghost. Both haunting and thrilling, "Lord Byron's Ring" will keep you turning pages until the very end.

Devoted wife and mother, degreed historian and devotee of Lord Byron, Sara Burden is her husband's heroine; Jack the only man who leaves her breathless. Their scholarly and popular teenage son, Drew, completes the idyllic family. Revered and envied in the Oklahoma badlands, the Burden's love affair is both lusty and lush, explicit and ethereal, and their union is seemingly impervious to life's entrapments. But while vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, their fortune changes quickly when a blackmailing businessman with enemies to spare swoops down from the Panhandle oil fields to threaten Jack's drilling ventures, only to turn up dead. Motives of revenge and greed darken the plot, soon leading Drew into the path of murder—and a medium who conjures Byron's ghost. Author James Pumpelly leads readers into the extraordinary, imaginative dimensions of the family's intimacies—bound by a desperate need…and a dreadful secret. This suspenseful, hypnotically readable novel delves into murder, madness, power, love, spirit mediums, and the hypocrisy of religious dogmas. Excruciatingly intense and seasoned with mystery, romance, and action, this haunting, metaphysical thriller runs the gamut from dystopic to paradisical. "Lord Byron's Ring" will keep you turning pages until the very end.

Reared by traveling evangelists, James Pumpelly's sheltered years were a moth-swarm of questions and quandaries, until he was finally enlightened by life at a university. Before college, he was homeschooled, due to his parents' constant travel. As an adult, he calls home by many names: Texas, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Louisiana, among them. Pumpelly has been writing since the mid-seventies. His poetry and short stories reflect the uniqueness of station and local. When he's not writing, his hobbies include reading, cooking, gardening, and piano (the latter being one of his college majors). Pumpelly has stumbled through the fifty states and much of Europe and Asia, gathering impressions for his narrative. As the journey lengthens and the destination seems never nearer, he's accepted that the journey IS, in fact, the destination.