David H Plylar

Sunset at Rocksprings David H Plylar

Sunset at Rocksprings The Legacies of Anna Katrin Who is Anna Katrin, and what, or who, are her legacies? In January, 2013, feisty 92 year-old Virginia Krause leaves her home in New York to live in Texas with her youngest daughter. Virginia's move coincides with the mysterious disappearance of her daughter's lover. As a World War II WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilot), Virginia often faced challenges flying bombers for the United States Army Air Force, but no challenge compares to the oppressive political conditions she confronts upon her arrival in the Lone Star State. She finds Texas dominated by an extreme right-wing, genitalia-fixated cabal dubbed Talibangelicals. Virginia joins a group of wealthy, aggressive middle-age women who are intent on combating the political power of the extremists. The leader is Sylvia Amberman, a charismatic conservative Republican businesswoman from Galveston. Louisiana Alvarado, a liberal Democrat, Sylvia's lawyer and lover, does battle with the Talibangelicals in state and Federal court. The problem: Can a small group of determined women advance the cause of liberty when Talibangelicals control Texas? "Only in your dreams, ladies," says Hieronymus Stinkend Limburger, the richest man in the state. Sunset at Rocksprings continues the narrative begun in Sunrise at Cotulla, the author's first novel published in 2008. Both books combine political satire, historical fiction, speculative fiction, and alternative history . Books by several popular authors influenced the style and substance of Sunset at Rocksprings: Harry Turtledove, the master of alternative history; Kurt Vonnegut, whose books helped keep the author sane in the 1970s; Carl Hiaasen, a novelist who knows how to do away with villains more imaginatively than anyone in the fiction-writing business; and Ayn Rand, who demonstrated how writers can put their own philosophy into sermons spoken by their characters, and who is one of a handful of people in the world who knows the meaning of "eludicate," a verb both Microsoft Word and Google still redline as misspelled. * * *