Books published by McCaa Books

In Vallejo, California, in 1954, a most extraordinary football season came to its conclusion for the Vallejo High School team. The team was undefeated, and Sports Illustrated wrote that the team was most likely the best high school football team in America. In addition, the magazine wrote that Dick Bass, the team''s star running back, was the best running back in the nation. The young men on the team had experienced something that only dreams are made of-a special time, a special season, and a season to remember. The Apache Gift tells the story of this incredible experience.

Like Homer''s The Iliad, Ida Egli''s new novel, Krisanthi''s War, is an antiwar epic that brings together the personal and the political and wanders back and forth from the 1930s to the 1980s. The war is World War II. Krisanthi is a modern-day Greek woman who chronicles the lives and the deaths of her family members who strive to survive during the invasion and the occupation of their homeland by German soldiers. Since the characters are mostly Greeks, they have names like Achilles, Penelope and Kalliope,and, since they''re Greeks, the Trojan War isn''t ancient history, but part of the living, breathing present. Krisanthi''s War is full of the sights and the smells of olives and goats, blood and wine, even as it explores the nature of orthodoxy and mystery. When liberation comes and the characters emerge from cellars and go into the Mediterranean sunlight the reader feels a sense of exhilaration and joy. It isn''t revenge or punishment that the author is after, but rather empathy and compassion. Egli offers no easy-to-follow recipe for how to endure in our own difficult times, but she does provide at the end of her narrative a recipe for Loukoumáthes, those delicious fritters often drizzled with honey that melt in your mouth. If you want to meet real Greeks, explore Greek history and fathom the nature of love itself, this book is for you.

"The body was bruised in several places. Dry blood and saliva were evident over parts of his face and near the mouth. Joe knelt down and read the piece of paper: mcgrath this here you last warnin. you and that black basterd rucker git outta town or you gonna be next." In Touch of Redemption, the second book in the Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker Detective Novels, the two men embark on a difficult journey-an attempt to find the murderers of Joe's father twenty-five years ago. It is 1948 in segregated Alabama, and Joe, a white man, and Sam, a black man, face numerous obstacles, the least of which is the racism and bigotry of the time, while struggling with the challenges of solving a murder case a quarter century old. The men face corrupt judges and law enforcement officials, and a secret fraternity of men determined to maintain the Southern way of life and 'the operation,' their illegal liquor business. All this occurs against a backdrop of a seemingly bucolic small Southern town, Montevallo, home to a college for women.