Finding Billy Battles Trilogy

When a great-grandson inherits two aging trunks and a stack of meticulously detailed journals penned by his great-grandfather, he sets out to fulfill his great-grandfather's last request: to tell the story of an incredible life replete with adventure, violence, and tragedy. The great-grandfather's name is Billy Battles-a man often trapped and overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control. For much of his 100-year-long life Billy is a man missing and largely unknown to his descendants. His great-grandson is about to change that. As he works his way through the aging journals and the other possessions he finds in the battered trunks he uncovers the truth about his mysterious great-grandfather-a man whose deeds and misdeeds propelled him on an extraordinary and perilous journey from the untamed American West to the inscrutable Far East, Latin America and Europe. As he flips through the pages of the handwritten journals he learns of Billy's surprising connections to the Spanish-American War, French Indochina, and revolutions in Mexico and other Latin American countries. But most of all he learns that in finding Billy Battles he has also found a long lost and astonishing link to the past.

As Book 2 of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy opens Billy is far from his Kansas roots-and his improbable journeys are just beginning. It is 1894, and he is aboard an ocean liner sailing to the Mysterious East. Along the way Billy meets a mysterious, dazzling, and possibly dangerous German Baroness and the two form an unlikely bond that leads them from one perilous escapade to another-including Billy's inadvertent participation in an uprising against the French in Indochina, thus possibly making him the first American to become entangled in a country that will eventually be known as Vietnam

The year is 1914 and the world is in turmoil. In Europe, the Great War is raging. In Asia, fierce insurgencies are in progress against the colonial powers of Europe. In Mexico, a bloody revolution is ripping that nation to shreds and threatening to spill over into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Billy Battles and his wife, the former Baroness Katharina von Schreiber, have managed to live an uncommonly sedate life for almost ten years. But, with one telephone call their tranquil world is shattered. Katharina and Billy set off on a succession of wild adventures that will alter their lives for all time. Their new and violent world is one brimming with miscreants, secret agents, treachery, and tragedy. But most importantly, it triggers Billy's mysterious decades-long disappearance. Where is he? What happened? The answers are in The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book 3of the award-winning Finding Billy Battles trilogy