Melvin C Johnson

In this intense family tragedy set in an alternative history, the McKinnen family live in a United States where the Jim Crow laws are actual laws and each race is strictly segregated into different colonies. The McKinnens have been treated horribly for decades. Molly McKinnen the only daughter, has had enough, and she decides to get to the bot-tom of why they are treated with such indignity and cruelty. The more she uncovers about the unfair laws, the more oppressive things get for her and the family...and the braver she becomes. As Kevin Crow puts more and more pressure on her to accept the status quo, unexpected tragedies befall her family in a roller coaster of surprise and emotions. This dystopianalternative history of shocking secrets revealed and family-mysteries uncovered has a cliffhanger ending that will leave readers breathless.

In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.'s murder in 1844, his following splintered. Some followed a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly unwelcome in the Midwest. He had instructed Wight to take a small band of church members from Wisconsin to establish a Texas colony that would prepare the ground for a mass migration of the membership. Having received these orders directly from Smith, Wight did not believe the former's death changed their significance. If anything, he felt all the more responsible for fulfilling what he believed was a prophet's intention. Antagonism with Brigham Young and the other LDS apostles grew, and Wight refused to join with them or move to their new gathering place in Utah. He and his small congregation pursued their own destiny, becoming an interesting component of the Texas frontier, where they had a significant economic role as early millers and cowboys and a political one as a buffer with the Comanches. Their social and religious practices shared many of the idiosyncracies of the larger Mormon sect, including polygamous marriages, temple rites, and economic cooperatives. Wight was a charismatic but authoritarian and increasingly odd figure, in part because of chemical addictions. His death in 1858 while leading his shrinking number of followers on yet one more migration brought an effective end to his independent church.