Perhaps never before in the history of humankind has the disparity between Indigenous mind and Western mind been more on the pulse of what we must pay attention to in order to insure our survival. Deena Metzger has written a novel in which two people, who are from each side of this polarity, begin a loving relationship. Sandra Birdswell is a student of climatology with an uncanny ability to sense weather events. Her mother, who died in childbirth, is a mystery to her. Her father, John, formerly a Reservation doctor, faithfully raises her despite his limitations and obligations. She first meets Terrence, a Native man and a professor of climatology, at her university classes. Years later, they are drawn together by the powerful forces of their love, for the Earth, for each other, and their mutual need to seek out the broken links of their family histories.

After the Mankato Massacre of 1862, the Dakota Indians were banished from Minnesota. 14 years later, young Asa's life is changed by two visitors, each bearing secrets from the past which can no longer be buried. Maltman brings back to life a nearly forgotten episode in the history of the settlement in the American Midwest, which has been overshadowed by the Civil War.

Seven-year-old Jake learns to conquer some of his fears.

A “luminously written and harrowing” historical saga of three generations of German immigrants to the Midwest (Minneapolis Star Tribune). “Set in the 1860s and ’70s, Maltman’s superb debut evokes a Midwest lacerated by clashes between European and Native American, slaveowner and abolitionist, killer and healer, nature and culture. Asa Senger, a lonely 14-year-old boy, is at first wary when his father’s sister, Hazel, arrives at his parents’ Minnesota home after a long stay in a faraway asylum, but he comes to cherish the mysterious Hazel’s warmth and company. Through her stories, Asa learns of his family’s bitter past: the lore and dreams of their German forebears, their place in the bitter divide over slavery and, most complex of all, the bond between Hazel and the Dakotan warrior Wanikiya that deepens despite the violence between their peoples. Maltman excels at giving even his most harrowing scenes an understated realism and at painting characters who are richly, sometimes disturbingly, human. The novel sustains its tension right to the moment it ends.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “We all set our sights on the Great American Novel . . . [Thomas Maltman] comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail.” —The Boston Globe

Nightbirds is the graphic and violent story of a serial killer and two FBI agents who are trying to stop him before he becomes the most prolific serial killer in United States history. Driven by events that occurred many years before and a perspective that requires his own form of brutal redemption, the killer quickly targets and murders each victim, leaving behind a body and a signature in the trophy he takes from each of them. The principal characters include Lou Mark (a relatively young FBI agent with a unique gift), Tom Anglen (an experienced FBI agent who has worked in the Serial Killer Division for twenty years), their families, the victims, and the killer. Mark and Anglen track the serial killer from one city to another through the women he chooses, all of whom are strikingly similar in age and appearance. At each crime scene, as Mark and Anglen see what appears to have been consensual sex, followed almost immediately by a savage murder, they realize that they have to understand the legend of the nightbirds to catch the killer. The author is working on a sequel to Nightbirds, which should be available later this year.