Sunday's Child
The Pea Island Gold Trilogy
Tom Lewis
Review: The first book in the Pea Island Gold Trilogy by Tom Lewis, Sunday's Child, tells the story of a young girl's life on an island off the coast of North Carolina during which she finds love, disappointment, hatred, and even murder.
Sunday Everette, the child of a white prostitute and black drifter, was born in 1918. Living with her father and his co-workers at the Pea Island Life Saving Station, she is taught to swim almost as soon as she could walk. Her "fathers" taught her to fish, to handle a boat, and other tasks required of those living near the sea. But most important, they taught her their values. But as a young woman, her world would soon become bleak. Adolph Hitler, of Germany’s Third Reich, was threatening to take over the world. He had traitors in his own army that stole gold from the German banks and brought it by submarine to Pea Island where they buried it. When they came to get it, there were killings both at sea and on the island. After Sunday's father is killed by the Germans, she needs all her strength, talents and abilities to stop the mayhem there.
Sunday's Child is a riveting and frequently thought-provoking novel of a young woman's courage in the face of a world-wide adversity that has tragic local consequences and dramatically impacts her life. The book is deftly written, incorporating historical events into a story that races to an exciting and somewhat unexpected conclusion. As a stand-alone novel, it's wonderful. As the first of a trilogy, it's intriguing to speculate what may follow.
Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Sunday's Child.
Acknowledgment: Maryglenn McCombs Book Publicity provided a copy of Sunday's Child for this review.
Review Copyright © 2007 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …
Hitler's Judas
VP Publishing (Trade Paperback), September 2007
ISBN-13: 9780970579362; ISBN-10: 0970579365
Location(s) referenced in Sunday's Child: North Carolina
— ◊ —
Sunday's Child by Tom Lewis
Publisher: VP Publishing
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN-10: 0-9705793-1-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-9705793-1-7
Publication Date: April 2006
List Price: $14.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): Sunday Everette has a childhood unlike any other in the “Jim Crow” era of the South, growing up at the Pea Island Life-Saving Station among the barren dunes of North Carolina’s stormy Outer Banks. In sheltered isolation, guided solely by the influence of the Station’s heroic all-black crewmen, she blossoms into a strong and beautiful young woman with a spirit to match.
But Sunday’s secluded paradise cannot last. Her calm, simple days by the sea must inevitably give way to the fast-approaching storms of life. Unexpectedly, those darkening skies bring with them an unlikely mix of forbidden love, murder, and revenge—along with a Nazi submarine carrying millions of dollars in gold stolen from Hitler’s Third Reich.
— ◊ —