IN THE WINTER OF 1940, SWEET AVIATION FACED HIGH STAKES: it must improve the performance and capabilities of the Curtiss-Douglas P-40B Warhawk. President Franklin D. Roosevelt has authorized the "Flying Tigers," led by U.S. Army Air Corps officer Claire Lee Chennault, to protect vital supply routes along the Burma Road and defend Chinese cities from enemy air raids. Because the P-40 is already outdated, the United States needs a more capable warplane to face Japanese Zeros and German Messerschmitts. Improving engine performance offers the quickest solution until newer aircraft become available.
After a holiday party, Casimir Sweet suffers a heart attack. By chance, his daughter, a physician, asks the company's test pilot to drive her father's car home. Mistaking the pilot for Casimir, Japanese saboteurs kill him. Casimir's 1934 Packard ends up in Lake Erie.
Angelica Sweet, an aviatrix and the company's president, must now save her family's struggling aircraft company. Sweet Aviation's survival depends on winning the government contract for the Hyperion Supercharger. With critical flight-testing hours still incomplete and the company's test pilot dead, Angelica must take matters into her own hands.
Determined to save the company, Angelica takes the controls herself. When sabotage causes a catastrophic engine failure, she parachutes into the idyllic German immigrant farming community of Wabaunsee County, Kansas. After landing in a tree, a head injury leaves her with amnesia-and marks the beginning of an unexpected journey of discovery and unselfish love.
Dr. Aloysius Kirsche, a skilled veterinarian and devoted guardian of nine orphaned children, lives an extraordinary yet quiet life as a true humanitarian. Under his care, healing begins with unexpected tenderness, and life flourishes. Angelica Sweet becomes something she never imagined she would become: a wife and a new mother.
As her memories return, so do troubling questions about her identity, the crash, and her former life. Caught between danger in the skies and love on the ground, Angelica must uncover the truth-and decide whether the man who rescued her can also offer her a future she never imagined.
