Love's never easy, even in easier times, like the 1950s and 1960s in the Ohio Valley. The steel industry was booming. Second-generation immigrant families were reaching for the American middle class. And Catholic schools-made feasible by selfless Catholic nuns-promised bigger lives for everyone, including Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine. As they spent years searching for their separate futures, though, they were also stumbling toward love just as their world came crashing down. For readers of The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni and Last Summer Boys by Bill Rivers, my historical novel Steel Valley is a story of love longed for, lost, and perhaps still within reach, just as our nation's mythic yesterday became our troubled today, our last summer of innocence.