Jim Magner draws you deep into his conflicting worlds, artist and soldier, with crisp writing and a look at combat that fascinates, elates, and, at times, stuns. For the young lieutenant, Nam was where the action was—the ultimate test. For the passionate artist, war was destruction and death. Dramatic and poignant, often funny, and sometimes sad, A Haunting Beauty is a riveting, highly original memoir. Never before has there been a first person account of combat through the eyes of an artist. Combat has never been so vividly portrayed through two distinct identities. 

It’s 1953 in Tucson. Tom Sullivan’s thoughts are drifting more and more to the distant past, reliving the adventures he set out to find when he walked away from his home in Boston in 1894…just a kid.

Finally, he is compelled to write them down and the roughest. toughest hombres of the Old West, warriors and scouts, ride again to reclaim their rightful territories.

When a skeleton is dug up by the rowdy neighborhood kids, the legendary gangster John Dillinger joins the adventure.

March, 1953. A good time to be a kid in Tucson, Arizona. It’s the windy month and the afternoons are for kites—kite fighting—a rough, take-no-prisoners war in the sky. When the air is still, the Sky Pirates, six boys and a girl, take to their “desert islands” to hide treasure and fight other marauding bands in often-bloody battles for dominance.  

Another wind, a dark storm, blows through the neighborhood leaving some people dead and others missing. The Sky Pirates fight for their lives against local gangsters.  An old Apache doesn’t believe his father, the son of Chief Cochise, died of “pneumonia” in Washington, DC in 1876. Was he murdered? He needs to find out.       
    
Maggie O’Brien watches and waits. She has the story of a lifetime. She just needs proof.