The Witness Tree by Lauran Paine Jr

The Witness Tree by Lauran Paine Jr

A Labor Day storm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, topples a rare witness tree--a 150-year-old white oak rooted near a famed Civil War battleground. Breanne Walker, a new preservationist at the National Military Park's museum, is roused from her bed to view the remarkable findings below the tree's massive roots--a diary dating back to the Battle of Gettysburg...along with a body in an unmarked grave. Breanne's boss tasks her with authenticating and connecting the two discoveries, but she is given only days, and she must work in secret so as not to alert the senior curator to whom the project rightly belongs. Succeeding in the task will validate her single-minded focus on her career. If caught with the diary, her professional life is over. But the further Breanne dives into its pages, the more the mysterious diarist seems to transform her life.

Lauran Bosworth Paine (born February 25, 1916 in Duluth, Minnesota-died 2003 in California) was an American writer of Western fiction. Paine wrote over 900 books, including hundreds of Westerns as well as romance, science fiction, and mystery novels. He also wrote a number of non-fiction books on the Old West, military history, witchcraft, and other subjects. Because his publishers only accepted a limited number of books under a single author's name, Paine adopted dozens of pseudonyms. Many of his books, published by Robert Hale of London and distributed solely in the UK, have only in recent years been appearing in the United States, usually as large-print editions.