Juana

Juana is the fourth of five novels in The O'Leary Family Series, following Caprock, Texas (book 1 in the series), which introduced Burn and Ciara O'Leary; Anne Marie (book 2); and Catherine (book 3).

Juana and her twin brother, Juan, are Native American (Navajo) children adopted by Burn and Ciara after the tribe removed them from their alcoholic, abusive parents as toddlers. Growing up as part of the extended O'Leary family in the O'Leary Compound outside Durango, Colorado, both children view themselves as more white than Indian.

This book follows Juana as she matures into a beautiful, exotic young woman. She graduates from Notre Dame's School of Law and journeys to Boulder, Colorado, to take the bar exam. While there, she meets and befriends Ian Blackhorse, a Hopi studying at the university's medical school. She talks her father into giving him a generous scholarship. They marry, have children, and he sets up a medical clinic just outside the compound.

When her son's school catches fire, Juan leads the kindergartner children to safety, where an alert newspaper photographer captures a photo of Juana hugging her son. The photo is picked up by other newspapers across the nation because of Juana's great beauty, causing her a number of problems, including being kidnapped by another photographer.

Ian's father dies of a heart attack in Flagstaff, Arizona. Returning from his funeral, someone in an older-model Buick tries to force her little sports car off the road. She outruns him and later finds out the O'Leary family has been subjected to a jihad from a Muslim cleric because Burn had refused to intervene to get the cleric's son accepted into the local private school. The O'Leary family members are forced to remain inside the compound until law enforcement is able to get the cleric to call off the jihad.