Edward Ifkovic Books In Order

Lone Star

In 1955 Edna Ferber is basking in the success of her blockbuster novel Giant. Director George Stevens and Warner Brothers Studio are in the final days of filming her Texas oil epic, and Edna looks forward to meeting Rock Hudson, Liz Taylor, and especially young James Dean.
But there is trouble brewing. James Dean, the new box office sensation and teen heartthrob, has been accused of fathering a child with an unstable extra named Carisa Krausse. The studio fears the negative publicity will jeopardize the release of the movie.
Then the actress is murdered, and James Dean is the prime suspect.
With character actress Mercedes McCambridge as her sympathetic sidekick, a shaken Edna investigates the killing, determined to clear Dean’s name.
Edna soon entrenches herself in the life of the often secretive maverick actor. But can she prove his innocence? The more she investigates the more she uncovers simmering rivalries, petty jealousies, and cruel infidelities the dark underside of glittering Hollywood.
A dynamite debut launches a series for Ferber as shrewd sleuth.

Ella Moon

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, one of the Victorian world’s most popular poets, penned the famous line: ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.’ Born on an impoverished Wisconsin farm, Ella Wheeler Wilcox hungered for fame and fortune. As a young farm girl, she caught the attention of East Coast editors. Her life became a tapestry of color and melodrama, an epic of American rags to riches. She scandalized her generation with verse that seemed too risqu for a puritanical nation, but her own married life was the model of Christian propriety. This fictionalized account chronicles her controversial life, not only the glittering heights of international celebrity, but also the nagging fears that tempered her vast and cherished success. Other notable works by Wilcox were a poem marking the death of Queen Victoria and a plea to World War I American soldiers fighting in Europe to ‘come back clean, boys’ to their wives and families and avoid venereal disease.

A Connecticut Christmas

These words immediately evoke warm images of stained-glass churches on snow-blanketed town greens, merry bands of roving carolers, sleigh bells ringing in the icy night, and candlelit fir trees decorated with popcorn and cranberries. Such a romantic world, a glittering Christmas card now vanished into the past, comes to life in this new collection of stories, poems, and sermons–forgotten writings that document Christmas as a much-loved tradition from the late 1700s until World War I.

Puritan Connecticut not only ignored the holiday but made it illegal, yet by the 1850s Christmas in Connecticut was not only legal but a festive time of illuminated trees, colorful presents, Santa Claus, lavish family feasts, and quiet homilies about the birth of Christ in a Bethlehem manger.

These early writings by Connecticut-born writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe–mostly sentimental, often maudlin, but oddly quaint and sometimes surprisingly charming–have mostly disappeared into the dustbins of old bookstores. Now this lost, distant world reemerges. Outside it’s snowing, the stockings hang on the fireplace mantel, and it’s finally Christmas Eve. It’s time for a little old-fashioned holiday storytelling.