In 1917, when all the world was waiting with bated breath to see if the United States would come the rescue of Europe, Lt. Ansel Quinn is assigned to the French Army Headquarters in Paris as a neutral observer. This sets off an unimaginable chain of events affecting his new wife, Isabel, in international intrigue, and a family’s struggles across the twenty short years between the end of World War I, a period that includes the influenza epidemic, the roaring twenties, prohibition, the great depression, and the start of World War II.

Thomas E. Simmons grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, attended Marion Military Institute, the U. S. Naval Academy, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of Alabama. Tom was once the commercial captain of a seventy-foot sailing vessel, has been a pilot since the age of sixteen, (3000 plus hours in the air), has flown professionally, and participated in air shows flying aerobatics in open-cockpit bi-planes. In the late 1950s, he served as an artillery officer in Korea. He is the author of The Man Called Brown Condor, Forgotten Heroes of World War II: Personal Accounts of Ordinary Soldiers Land, Sea and Air, Escape from Archangel, By Accident of Birth, The Last Quinn Standing, and the last of the Quinn Trilogy, No Promise for Tomorrow. He has also written numerous magazine articles, an example of which, “Growing Up with Mr. Faulkner,” was published in The Oxford American, a literary magazine founded by John Grisham.