Jennifer Z. Major
When The Stars Turned Away
(Dual time novel-unpublished)
World War Two is finally over.
After years in the Balanya Road Internment Camp, a Japanese civilian POW camp in Malaya, Meg Blackburn arrives in Australia to await news of her father’s fate. Branded a traitor by her fellow prisoners, Meg is adrift in a sea of grief and heartbreak and has no way to clear her name, or find out where her captors took her son.
War photographer Owen Avery spent the war years documenting enemy crimes, and his hatred of traitors knows no bounds. When Owen overhears former POW Meg confess to someone that she loved him, Owen assumes the worst and accuses her of betraying her country and her fellow prisoners.
Meg is reunited with her father and goes home to Scotland, but not before Owen unleashes his misguided wrath upon them both. Owen’s friendship with an American gives him the one chance he’ll ever have of recanting his accusations, and giving Meg a gift nearly lost to history.
At the height of the War on Drugs, after her husband was murdered in a Colombia jungle, Val Avery was found mere hours from death, but never learned the identity of her rescuers.
Ten years later, after leaving her fiancé at the altar, Val goes to Vancouver to start a new life.
Home from undercover work in Colombia, Mateo Quiñones has never forgotten the woman he rescued years earlier.
Shortly after meeting Val Avery, Mateo realizes who she is, but frightens her away before he can explain that he led her team of rescuers.
Needing to form a plan to bring her back, Mateo turns to the only person who understands heartbreaking mysteries, his best friend, Kaz Kawamura, whose golden-haired grandmother disappeared from Balanya POW camp, when her young son Sam was kidnapped by the retreating Japanese Army