Rex A Knight

Selected Works

Fiction

Fourteen-year-old Chad Chapel has a dream: to someday find a great treasure. Previous efforts have only awarded him trouble. His parents--his mother especially--often try to dissuade his adventurous ambitions, but when ninety-three-year-old Anston Kagle innocently shares a story of lost gold hidden on "Sacred Ground," nothing will sway the young sleuth from its pursuit. Chad secretly enlists the help of his best friend, Rodney Meeks, and schoolmate Maggie Pearce. Rodney is daring and unpredictable. The Sacred Ground is said to be of Native American origin, and Maggie is a full-blooded Cherokee, giving rise to Chad and Rodney's belief that she is the only person who can show them what to look for. Maggie is dubious of the scheme but is intrigued enough by Chad's charm to join the effort. Set in a small village in rural Southern Indiana, the search leads the trio on a rollercoaster of challenging events, full of emotional highs and troublesome lows. Spiritual undertones--including the powers of prayer, ancient chants, spirits, ghosts, and curses--haunt the teens throughout their search. Difficulties and dangers far beyond their initial expectations plague their efforts. Yet they persist. Will the illusive treasure be found, and at what cost? The Sacred Ground does not reveal its secrets easily, and what is found surprises everyone.

Non Fiction

Riding on Luck: The Saga of the USS Lang (DD-399)

They called her the "Lucky Lang." Commissioned 30 March 1939, she ranged from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, from Scotland to the Mediterranean, before traversing the Panama Canal to engage the enemy in the Pacific at Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa. The Lang wreaked havoc along the "Tokyo Express" route and helped decimate Japanese air power.

Ye, though heavily involved in nearly every major campaign of the war in the Pacific, she survived it all with hardly a scratch, and one of her roster received the slightest enemy-inflicted wound. Over such an extended time and equal number of actions, no other U. S. Naval warship could boast such a record. Even the sum of her hull number's digits (399) adds up to 21, a lucky number to be sure.

This is her story, the complete history of the USS Lang as told by the ship's official biographer, himself the fortunate son of a former Lang sailor.

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Rex A Knight is a successful author and historical researcher. In the 1990s, He became a successful freelance historical writer, writing numerous feature articles for World War II magazine (Empire Press/Cowles Magazines and later Prime Media). In 1999, he self-published (Tichenor Publishing) in hardback a complete history of the United States destroyer USS LANG, entitled RIDING ON LUCK, The Saga of the USS LANG DD-399. This book was successful enough to be picked up by Hellgate Press for publication in soft cover in 2001. Later that year, he was allowed membership into the Author’s Guild, where he maintains active membership. He is a certified PADI advanced scuba diver, and has enjoyed many fascinating shipwreck dives, to have even spent time diving with legendary treasure diver, Bob "Frogfoot" Weller. His research and collection of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) artifacts is among the most important in private hands and has been hosted in exhibitions in a number of important museum venues. His educational background is in Sociology, having an Associate’s Degree through Vincennes University (Vincennes, IN) in Sociology for Community/Economic Development, wherein he became a technical writer and regional planner overseeing five counties in the state of Indiana. He is now retired and enjoying a return to his roots as a historical researcher and writer. He continues his historical research, with plans for additional historical biographies in the future. He has also ventured into a fictional work for young adults, a story about a search for treasure entitled SACRED GROUND (Covenant Books, 2024). Knight lives in rural Southern Indiana.