The Complete Henderson's Ranch Stories (+audio)

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WHAT THE READER GETS:
>Your choice of formats: Kindle, Epub, Print, or Audio.
>Great deals, boxsets, and occasional exclusives.

WHAT THE WRITER GETS:
>25-70% more money.

DELIVERY:
>eBooks: delivered within minutes (seconds) by BookFunnel. May be read in BF app or loaded to the app of your choice.
>Audiobooks: delivered by Bookfunnel. May be listened to in their excellent app (our favorite).
>Print books: will deliver in 1-2 weeks from our printer.

Welcome to my world of Henderson’s Ranch stories.
Unlike most of my series, I’m unsure how this one came about.
In my first Night Stalkers book, The Night Is Mine, there is an almost throwaway line in which then-Captain Emily Beale discovers that her commander, Major Mark Henderson, flies with a photo of his family tucked into the dashboard of his Black Hawk helicopter (in Chapter 2 if you want to go looking).
Seven years later—Emily and Mark have since married, reproduced, left the military, and taken to flying firefighting helicopters (while launching multiple other book and story series). Anyway, seven years on, I was fishing around for a Christmas story to tell. Some strange corner of my writer’s brain unearthed that one reference to Mark’s family ranch. And I had a sudden desire to see what their Montana Ranch Christmas with the parents might look like.
Christmas and I always had a dicey relationship.
As a kid, every Christmas was spent flying from New York to Florida to see my father’s parents. Coming from the snow belt to Florida meant my sister and I ran around in shorts and t-shirts in the chilly Florida winters and caught desperate colds every single time. But it also meant seeing my grandfather, who was amazing. (It wasn’t until years later that I understood he and Grandma had been crap parents, which explains a lot about my father, but to us grandkids Pop Sam was amazing.) A major blow, he died when I was eight and the trips to Florida stopped.
Of course, my father’s parents made him completely nuts, so there was a massive shadow over the season both before and after that pivotal change. My mother wanted the whole show: massive tree, caroling, bountiful presents… Let’s just say that Christmas was never a comfortable season in my early life.
Years later, my two closest friends slowly brought me back to Christmas. At first we exchanged gifts in the driveway, but after a few years, we’d cook together, and eventually did a Christmas for the Stuck that were feasts for a dozen or more who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, make it home for Christmas.
It was my wife and young stepdaughter who taught me what Christmas was really about, the love and joy of simply celebrating the season—even in the meager years, the joy was huge.
This is all a long way of saying that sending Emily and Mark home for Christmas to his parents was a major challenge as a writer. And I can tell you that, as a writer, I look for that emotional grist, that hard story that has to be dug out and faced.
Of course, I was never expecting Chelsea to show up and take over to set the tone of an entire five-story and three-book series that was supposed to be a single Christmas tale.

Initial Publication: November 19, 2021
Published separately: 2015-2018
Print Pages: 362
Audio length: 9:23
Narrator: Read by Author