The Looking Glass [Paperback]

It is silent now, the blizzard has paused and left the moment still. I think about them both at such times -- roaming the shadowlands of remembrance amidst the shards of my broken heart.

--Exerpt from Hunter Bell's diary

The winter storms of the wide-open frontier reflect the anguish raging in Hunter Bell, a minister who heads to Utah's gold-mining towns after his wife dies in childbirth. A man with nothing left ot loose, he plays the card tables for money to care for his youngs daughter back home. But in the heart of a driving blizzard, Hunter makes a shocking discovery --and begins to see that a life tested by unthinkable cruelty can still be rich with faith, love, and hope for a better tomorrow...

#1 bestselling author Richard Paul Evans steps back to the American Old West with this powerful novel of love and redemption, part of a trilogy that includesThe LocketandThe Carousel.Chapter One: Quaye

There's no love left on earth

and God is dead in heaven

In the dark and deadly days of

Black '47.

Irish folk song

It's easy to halve the potato where there's love.

Irish proverb

CORK,IRELAND, 1847

Connall McGandley trudged wearily across the haze-shrouded countryside, his arms crossed at his chest, his pace pressed against the receding twilight. The chill air smelled sweetly of a distant peat fire and he willed himself to not think of its warmth. Dusk brought a bite to the fog and he had pawned his coat in the last town for the paltry measure of maize he carried in the sack flung across his shoulder. He had walked hungry since dawn with hope of securing relief for his family. There was no labor for hire and his coat had fetched only a couple handfuls of Indian corn from a shopkeeper who chased him out of his store after the transaction. He had encountered few on his journey, just the quiet, deserted bogs and abandoned hovels of a dying nation. The mlã