Midnight Sons and Daughters Debbie Macomber HARD LUCK, ALASKA Hard Luck is a fictional town situated fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle, near the Brooks Mountain Range. It was introduced in Debbie Macomber’s MIDNIGHT SONS series (Brides for Brothers, The Marriage Risk, Daddy’s Little Helper, Because of the Baby, Falling for Him and Ending in Marriage—first published in 1995 and 1996 and reprinted in three volumes in 2000). The town was founded in 1931 by Adam O’Halloran and his wife, Anna. By the time of the Second World War, its population was fifty or sixty people, all told. During the war, the O’Halloran sons, Charles and David, joined the armed services. Charles was killed; only David came home—with a young English war bride, Ellen Sawyer. After the war, David qualified as a bush pilot. He then built some small cabins to attract the sport fishermen and hunters who were starting to come to Alaska. Eventually, he built a lodge to replace the cabins—a lodge that later burned. David and Ellen had three sons born fairly late in their marriage—Charles (named after David’s brother), Sawyer and Christian. Hard Luck had been growing all this time, and by 1970 was home to just over a hundred people. These were the years of the oil boom, when the school and community center were built by the state. After Vietnam,