Holy Angels

Two phone calls minutes apart; two people he knows with incredible life-changing experiences. Are they miracles? Regardless, the calls make Robert Wexford reconsider a letter he initially discarded from his hometown parochial high school in Westport, New York asking for a donation to a fund drive. That decision sets in motion a chain of events that will have life-changing consequences for him and others.

Robert retrieves the letter from his former school, which warns it will have to close unless four hundred thousand dollars can be raised in the next two months. Inspired by the good news he's received, he decides to return to his hometown to enlist in the fundraising effort. His wife, Ellen, questions his motives, asking if he's doing it for pride, but he downplays her concerns. He reconnects with old friends and together they devise a plan that eventually takes Robert to the South and Midwest in search of donations. But not everyone in Westport is initially on board with the project, and one person hatches a scheme that could put everything in jeopardy.

Holy Angels illustrates what can happen when a community bands together with a common purpose. Many readers, especially those from small towns and cities, will be reminded of someone they once knew or an experience they had, in this engaging story about a small city's struggle to keep one of its bedrock institutions alive.

Marc Thomas attended Catholic schools in upstate New York in the 1950s and 1960s. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned a medical degree at the University of Rochester. After an internship and residency in San Francisco, he taught in the radiology residency program at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, obtaining an honorable discharge with the rank of Major. He then spent twenty-five years as a radiologist in private practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For the past nine years, he has worked as a contract radiologist based in Las Vegas.

Thomas and his wife, Geni, have been married for thirty-five years. They have two children, Lauren and Nathan, and two grandchildren. For the last two years, Marc has written an opinion column for the Finger Lakes Times based in his hometown, Geneva, New York. Holy Angels is his first work of fiction.