Tom Milton

Works

Voices in Ramah

Emma Fernández lost her daughter in a school shooting in which a man with an assault weapon killed eleven children and their teacher plus the security guard. She copes with her loss by committing herself to the mission of getting Congress to ban assault weapons. She testifies before a House committee to support a bill that would ban such weapons, she joins two national organizations with gun-control missions, and she participates in a major demonstration in Washington to end gun violence. But Congress does nothing, and in the meantime there are almost two mass shootings per day in America. Finally, she devises a monstrous plot to get Congress to do something.

A Residue of Hope

Marika Bonetti is preparing dinner when she gets a phone call from the police informing her that the EMS has taken her daughter, Jessica, to the emergency room of the local hospital. Dropping everything, Marika drives to the hospital, where she learns that Jessica is in a coma from a drug overdose. As she prays for signs of recovery she wonders what she did wrong as a mother that has made her daughter repeatedly get into trouble. After all that has happened she still loves her daughter unconditionally, and she has a residue of hope for her, but her faith is challenged.

Blind in Granada

Jim Wyatt, a prominent state senator from Minnesota, is kidnapped on a visit to New York City by an Islamic human rights group who mistakenly believe he is a CIA agent. They are followers of a Muslim cleric who was convicted and imprisoned for inciting violence, and they give Jim a deadline to persuade the government to release the cleric, or else they will kill him. Convinced that the cleric is innocent, Jim tries to get him released, and while in confinement he examines his life and develops a relationship with the leader of his captors, a young woman named Zoraya.

A Contrite Heart

As she is leaving for work one morning Catalina Rinaldi confronts a young man standing on the sidewalk in front of her building who addresses her with the alias she used in a crime against the military government in Argentina, many years ago. She is startled by the encounter, especially since the guy speaks English with the accent of someone from Argentina. So what does this guy want from her? Does he want to arrest her and take her back to Argentina where she will be justly punished for her crime? Does he want revenge?

Milos and Amira

Milos and Amira are refugees from the war in Bosnia. Milos is a Serb, a Christian, and Amira is a Bosniak, a Muslim. They are living in Yonkers with their families, and they have just begun their freshman year at St. Catherine College when terrorists destroy the World Trade Center. They meet in a religion class, and they fall in love. When acts of violence between their cousins, who are consumed with ethnic hatred, escalate into a war between their families they try to make peace, believing that their love will prevail, but soon the war gets out of control.

The Lost Summer

After her sophomore year of college Brigid McBride spends the summer with her best friend Laura Hughes, living in New York City and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. It's the summer of 1968, and they are sharing an apartment in the East Village with a Jesuit seminarian who is their mentor. Brigid is in love with him, and Laura is in love with a conscientious objector who fled to Canada to escape the draft. After they argue over tactics Laura departs to join her boyfriend while Brigid remains at the apartment in the hope of getting the seminarian to love her as she loves him.

The Lineman

Danny O'Dwyer, who works as a lineman for the electric company, has an accident that makes him physically unable to continue working as a lineman. In losing this job, which he loves and has done for twenty-six years, he loses his identity and begins a downward trajectory that threatens to ruin his family despite the efforts of his wife Paola to help him and to save their marriage.

The Last Resort

Elsa Romero, a college professor, is attending a demonstration in New York City to protest the government's immigration policies. Karl Reinholdt, a white nationalist, is standing across the street from her, displaying a sign that says MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN. In response she displays a sign that says LOVE WILL PREVAIL. When a girl is suddenly killed by a gun shot, Elsa and Karl are brought together by this tragedy.

The Godmother

Gina Moretti begins to worry when her goddaughter, Marisol, doesn’t come home from work at the usual time and doesn’t respond to text messages. With help from the local police, Gina and her husband determine that Marisol, who was adopted by her brother and his wife but was abandoned by them four years ago, has been lured by someone she met on the internet who claims to know where her birth mother is, and her trail leads to the city with the highest murder rate in the world.

Eden Valley

Lena McLean, who raises goats in a beautiful valley, confronts the discovery in the region of rich deposits of the sand used for oil fracking. The community is divided between those who want to sell their land for sand mining and people who want to preserve the environment. Taking a strong position against mining, Lena becomes the target of a large global organization that wants to exploit the frac-sand deposits.

The Silver Locket

Esperanza Vargas is happily walking along a path that overlooks the Hudson River, feeling safe because she’s on a college campus, when suddenly from behind her a strong arm locks around her neck and chokes her unconscious. The next thing she knows, she’s being raped by four guys, who have blindfolded her, gagged her, and stripped her naked. When they finally leave her, she reaches for the silver locket that she wears on a chain around her neck, but it’s no longer there, and she can’t find it. The missing locket eventually turns up in an unexpected way and offers the possibility of a reconciliation.

Orphans of War

Rosario Suárez, an orphan of its civil war, returns to Guatemala with two missions: to teach in the school of her native village, and to find out what happened to her mother, who along with all the people in the village disappeared one night fifteen years ago. As soon as she starts asking questions she is told by a powerful landowner not to pursue her investigation, and she realizes that he will do anything to prevent her from digging up the past.

Invisible Wounds

When Nora Malone, a college student, meets her fiancé at the bus station after his discharge from the army, he has no visible wounds from the war in Afghanistan. But soon he shows symptoms of a problem, and now after three years of dealing with the acrimonious separation of her parents, she has to deal with her fiancé’s invisible wound.

Leave of Absence

Ronan Byrne has taken a leave of absence from his profession and has come to the Dominican Republic, where instead of finding peace in a coastal town he gets involved with two activists: Daria, who is trying to stop a foreign-owned power plant from killing children in the barrio with its unfiltered smoke, and Filomena, who is trying to stop sex tourism in the town and rehabilitate its victims.

Outside the Gate

Carol Delaney confronts a parent’s worst nightmare when her twelve-year-old daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers during a family vacation on a Caribbean island. As she works with police and the FBI and organizations whose mission is to rescue victims of sex slavery and rehabilitate them, Carol discovers another world outside the gate of the one she knew.

The Golden Door

Maya Méndez, an illegal immigrant living in Alabama, suddenly faces an uncertain future when the state passes an immigration law that will make it a crime for her parents to work and will prohibit her from attending a public university. For a while they are able to live with the situation, but the spirit of the law eventually catches up with Maya and her family, and out of its tragic consequences she struggles to find a mission in life.

Sara's Laughter

Despite warnings from her mother that if she waited too long to get married she wouldn't be able to find a husband, Sara waited until she found the right man, but now she is thirty-five and she is having trouble getting pregnant. Her hope is kept alive by a dream in which God told her husband she would have a baby. When something unexpected happens it looks as if her dream will come true, but when her plan is thwarted Sara loses her way and discovers a side of her nature she never imagined.

A Shower of Roses

Eva Koziol, a pediatric nurse, was happily working in a New York hospital when she fell in love with Marek, a Polish exile who works undercover for the CIA. They are married and living in London in the spring of 1981, and as Marek tries to foment a popular uprising in his homeland against the Russian-supported government, he draws Eva into a world of political intrigue where her love for him is severely tested.

Infamy

Fenly Aquino, an America security agent, arrives in Madrid to help a Spanish security team stop a terrorist attack. He is assigned to work with Raquel López, a former cop. Though they have cultural differences, they have in common the fact that they both lost a loved one in a terrorist attack. The current plot involves the use of laundered money to buy weapons of mass destruction that will be directed at an unknown target in New York City. They have only two weeks to stop the attack, so time is running out on them.

All the Flowers

Teri Ryan, a talented young singer with unshakable faith, opposes the Vietnam War on moral grounds as a member of her college’s chapter of the Catholic Peace Fellowship during the late 1960s. Her mission becomes personal when she tries to stop her twin brother from dropping out of college and joining the army to prove his manhood to their father. Supported by a pianist who has fallen in love with her, she struggles to maintain her nonviolent approach, but she is tempted to abandon it by the government’s violent actions against peaceful student demonstrators. In a dramatic climax her faith is put to the ultimate test.

The Admiral’s Daughter

Kristy McKay, a young woman from Mississippi living in New York in the early 1960s, is trying to expiate the original sin of slavery on which her family fortune was built. She is active in the civil rights movement in conflict with her father, a retired admiral who is a white supremacist. She suspects that he is behind the violence against civil rights activists in Mississippi, and unable to live with the possibility that her father is having people killed, she needs to learn the truth so that she can finally free herself from a legacy of guilt and hatred.

No Way to Peace

A novel about the courage of five women in Argentina’s war of terror during the 1970s. Their lives are observed by an American banker who has stayed in Buenos Aires after most foreigners have been evacuated. He meets a young woman, a refugee from another country who is living in Argentina under a false identity, and they fall in love. They try to build a life together but are drawn into the war between the guerrillas and the military.