FIVE STAR FIRST EDITION WOMEN'S EDITION

Addie by Lee Thompson
0-7862-3364-8, Historical Fiction, $25.95, Hardcover, 305 est. pages
Publication Date: October, 2001

News Release

The time is the mid-1880s when Florida south of St. Augustine is a virtual wilderness and Daytona, Miami, and Tampa are little more than dots on the maritime charts.

Addie Carson is a "beanery queen" with a dark secret. She has moved to a small town in Florida and ekes out a living from her canteen at the convergence of two primitive railroads near St. Augustine. She is popular with the train crews but disdained by most of the townspeople because she lives, unmarried, with a war veteran whose mental disorder is considered to be of demonic origin.

This is a period of intense and often lawless competition between the different railroad lines. Thanks to Addie's prevention of a disastrous train wreck, she meets Thaddeus Burke, the owner-operator of the railroad that links
the seaside docks at Mayport with St. Augustine, an ancient city booming with tycoon Henry Flagler's many hotels and real estate enterprises.

An attraction blossoms, tantalizingly unfulfilled when social persecution forces Addie to flee into the subtropical wilderness. Burke, despite his preoccupation with the construction of a cross-peninsula rail network, launches a search for her.

Addie unwittingly becomes a pawn in the plot to usurp Burke of his empire as she struggles to protect Jason who returned from the Civil War traumatized by the horrors he witnessed and his incarceration in the prison at Andersonville