Showing results by author "William Ferrier Jr" in All Categories

Vietnam, 1968. A hilltop in the Central Highlands. A gun crew of six. PFC Jack Lowe arrives at Firebase Blackjack with black boots and orders assigning him to Gun Two — an M102 howitzer crewed by men who do not look at him, do not welcome him, and do not explain the rules. The section chief gives him a title and a prohibition: You're Number Three. Don't touch anything until I tell you to touch it. Over twelve months, Lowe learns the gun. He learns the weight of a thirty-three-pound shell carried ten meters in the dark. He learns the difference between HE and illumination by feel. He ...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Finally, a Vietnam novel that honors Mexican American service and sacrifice." San Benito, Texas, 1970. Lottery number 216. One year in hell. One promise to keep. Roberto "Beto" Garza is nineteen years old when the draft notice arrives—wedged between a Sears catalog and his mother's magazine, delivered by a mailman who knows his father. Number 216 isn't safe. Isn't certain death. Just suspended animation while the government decides his fate. Three weeks later, he's married to María Delgado with a baby on the way and orders to report to Fort Polk. Firebase Echo. Radio ...

Two men. Two forecasts. Four hundred deaths. In the summer of 1944, a Black meteorologist from New Orleans and a Japanese American physicist from San Francisco have never met—but their work is about to collide in a disaster that will haunt them both for forty years. Samuel Delacroix earned his way into the Army's weather program despite every barrier Jim Crow could build. Now stationed in England, he's forecasting missions for the same military that won't let him eat in its mess halls. His predictions help keep bombers in the air and pilots alive. Until the day they don't. Kenji Yamamoto ...

Blood & Adobe: The Untold Story of the Pico Dynasty and the Making of California From frontier soldiers on the 1775 Anza trail to the neon rush of modern L.A., Blood & Adobe follows the meteoric rise—and courtroom collapse—of the Pico family, the last Mexican rulers of California. Governor Pío Pico, fearless general Andrés, and their multiracial clan built a cattle empire the size of Delaware, outmaneuvered the Bear Flag revolt, and briefly turned Los Angeles into their personal capital. Then drought, U.S. land courts, and ruthless financiers stripped it all away. Part epic biography,...

Lost in the Valley of the Oregon Trail What if a history assignment could change your life forever? Twelve-year-old Matthew never cared much about dusty textbooks or wagon-train pioneers. But when a school field trip takes an unexpected turn, he finds himself thrust into the middle of 1840s America—where survival is real, choices matter, and the Oregon Trail stretches farther than he ever imagined. Caught between two worlds, Matthew must learn to adapt quickly: crossing rivers, braving storms, and discovering courage he never knew he had. Along the way, he forges bonds with settlers whose...

Eight Navy SEALs. Five days on a hostile island. Forty mines that will close the Strait of Hormuz. One man who refuses to destroy them — because the children sleeping above the mines are the reason he can't press the button, and the sailors who'll die in the strait are the reason he must. Chief Mercer has a targeting laser pointed at a fishing village on Larak Island. Beneath the village: forty Iranian mines that will shut down one-fifth of the world's oil supply. Command wants him to mark the target. The airstrike is fourteen minutes away. There's a family inside the house. He puts down ...

January 1941. Lou Gehrig is dying. The man who played 2,130 consecutive games—who never missed a day, never complained, never stopped—can no longer hold a pen. His hands, which once drove 493 home runs, now tremble with the disease that will soon bear his name. With his wife Eleanor at his side, Lou begins to tell his story. Not the legend. The truth. About the mother who sacrificed everything and demanded he sacrifice more. About living in Babe Ruth's shadow while quietly becoming a better man. About the moment he finally chose love over duty. And about standing at home plate on July 4...

In 1942, two men turned paperwork into the most powerful weapon against the Holocaust. Colonel José Arturo Castellanos never intended to become a hero. As El Salvador's consul in Geneva, he was supposed to process routine diplomatic business—not forge thousands of documents to save Jewish refugees from Nazi death camps. But when desperate families began appearing at his door, Castellanos faced an impossible choice: follow orders and watch innocents die, or risk everything to fight evil with nothing more than ink and official seals. Based on the incredible true story that Hollywood has ...

THE GRANT In 1830, William Moore sails from Ireland to the Swan River Colony with a land grant, four servants, a dog, and seeds wrapped in canvas. He is given five hundred acres of ground already inhabited for forty thousand years. What follows is a fifty-four-year reckoning. Told through the spare, precise entries of Moore's journal, The Grant traces one man's attempt to farm, govern, and bear honest witness to a colony built on a foundation the law cannot name and will not see. He learns the Noongar language. He watches a burial across the river. He stands between fires on both sides of ...

He built the system. Then the system replaced him. For twenty-two years, Ray Lomax kept the machines running. State contracts. Government databases. The invisible infrastructure that moved millions of dollars and millions of lives through pipes he designed and maintained and never once questioned. Then, at 11:47 PM on a Wednesday, an email arrived. Subject: Meridian Systems — Workforce Restructuring Notification. The word the email used was deprecated. Not fired. Not laid off. Deprecated — the technical term for software that still functions but has been marked for removal. Present but ...

"Masterful character development and impeccable historical detail. Ferrier has created something rare—a Pearl Harbor novel that's as much about identity as it is about war." "THE WEIGHT OF WATER delivers on every level—psychological depth, moral complexity, and the kind of prose that reminds you why you fell in love with literary fiction. This is Pulitzer-caliber work." "Ferrier doesn't just write about the USS Arizona—he makes you feel the weight of command, the cost of transformation, the burden of becoming real. Unforgettable." On December 7, 1941, at 0755 hours, Lieutenant Thomas ...

What if Jesus Himself walked you through the opening pages of Genesis? Before Bethlehem. Before the Cross. Before the Fall. There was the Word. In Genesis with Jesus, the story of creation, Eden, and humanity’s fall is retold through the voice of Christ—the eternal Word who was present before the beginning. With reverence, clarity, and profound insight, this book invites readers to experience Genesis not as distant history, but as a living, purposeful story that leads directly to the heart of God. This is not a replacement for Scripture. It is a Christ-centered retelling—a theological...

She put the brush to her lips because they told her it was safe. Orange, New Jersey, 1917. Grace is eighteen years old, ambitious, and desperate for independence. When she lands a job painting watch dials with luminous radium paint—twenty dollars a week, more than her father earns—she thinks her life has finally begun. The work is delicate, beautiful, modern. The factory glows. The girls glow. The company says the paint is perfectly safe. It isn’t. Years later, Grace’s jaw is crumbling. Her bones fracture when she coughs. Her friend Mollie is dead—her death certificate stamped ...

Cole came home from the war. He has not come back. He doesn't sleep. He leaves restaurants without warning. He checks every exit in every room he enters. He stands at the kitchen window at three a.m. staring at a parking lot like he's still on watch. When his girlfriend asks how he is, he says fine. He says it every time. He means something else. Anna has been waiting for thirteen months. She kept the apartment. She paid the rent. She imagined the homecoming. The person who walked off the plane is not the person who left. He will not talk. He will not stay. He wakes up swinging in the dark....

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, most captains leave. Captain Rodrigo Delgado does not leave. He has 1.9 million barrels of crude and a schedule to keep — and the schedule is the only thing holding his life in a shape he can recognize. His wife died three years ago while he was at sea. He was twelve days from port. He did not turn back. His daughter has not spoken to him since. Now the war burns around him. A Greek tanker catches fire two miles to his northeast. A drone circles the ship for forty-two minutes. Ships empty from the anchorage one by one. Eleven days. One anchor. The strait ...

He didn’t conquer California. He named it—river by river, memory by memory. In the early 1800s, Spanish lieutenant Gabriel Moraga rode deep into the wild, unmapped heart of California. What he discovered would shape the future of the West—but what he left behind was something far more enduring than conquest: names that still ripple across maps, city signs, and courtrooms today. River-Maker is a breathtaking historical narrative that brings Moraga’s forgotten journey vividly to life—from the sweeping silence of the Central Valley to the tangled wetlands of the Delta, from ...

Anna’s Song Faith, Music, and the Quiet Between Applause By William Ferrier Jr. When rising country artist Lila Delaney stepped onto the Grand Ole Opry stage, she thought she’d finally found her dream. But one promise — whispered in a hospital room by a child with more faith than fear — would turn her music into a mission. Now, as fame and faith collide, Lila creates Sing It Forward Live, a movement that lets fans dedicate songs to the ones they love and raises hope for kids fighting cancer. From small-town stages to sold-out arenas, her message spreads like wildfire — until a ...

A haunting World War II espionage novel about the secrets that survive the silence. Lisbon, 1940. A city of exiles, double agents, and voices that refuse to die. British intelligence officer Tom Hale is recalled to the neutral port after a rogue transmission echoes the cadence of his brother’s last signal—sent from a plane that never came home. Ordered to shut down the broadcast, Tom discovers a web of radio operators, smugglers, and coded messages pulsing through the city’s narrow streets. Each frequency seems to carry a ghost—one that sounds too much like family. Across the ...

The President's Doctor: The Untold Story of America's First Black Presidential Physician What if the most important medical case in American history was treated by a doctor the country tried to forget? In 1881, when an assassin's bullet struck President James A. Garfield at a Washington D.C. railroad station, one man stepped forward to save the leader of the free world. Dr. Charles Burleigh Purvis—the only Black physician in the room—would spend the next 80 days fighting not just for the President's life, but for his own place in American history. This is the extraordinary true story ...

THE GRAND OLE OPRY: How Nashville and Country Music Found Each Other in the 1920s Volume 1 of The Country Music Chronicles In 1920, Nashville was a city where music came and went. By 1930, it had become the permanent home of country music. This is the story of how that transformation happened—and why it changed American culture forever. Before the Grand Ole Opry, before WSM Radio's 50,000-watt signal reached millions, before the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers became legends, Nashville was just another Southern city listening to sounds passing through. Country music existed only in ...