My BOOKS
THE JACKSON RIVER BRIDGE
Alone on a bridge staring into the dark water…
He was not born Noah Waters, but constant rejection often has a way of encouraging one to walk away from everything they have known while giving birth to the person they are meant to be. This is Noah’s story…
I was a sixteen-year-old runaway when I worked my way to the edge of the Jackson River Bridge and peered at the moonlit water swirling below. To be fair, I wasn’t an ordinary sixteen-year-old. I had an affliction akin to autism that left me with fragmented memories of my childhood, memories that inspired nightmares filled with demons that tormented me while I slept and awoke me screaming in the dark void of my room.
Even I understood that I had few choices, and all were bad. There was nothing for me on the side of the river I had come from, and I had no reason to believe that the other side of the river offered anything better. Logically, jumping seemed a way to break the tie.
The stalemate only broke when I heard a voice emanating from the darkness. The voice belonged to a man wearing a hooded garment that shadowed his face, a man who chose to live on the grounds of an old monastery with a dozen cats.
The moment he stepped from the darkness my life began to pivot. I first learned to trust him, then love him. He put me on a path toward a future I never imagined possible that night as I stood on…The Jackson River Bridge.
THROWAWAYS
Jake Savage Mysteries - Book 1
Jake Savage is photographing lionfish in the Gulf off of Key West. He frames a specimen in his camera and takes a few shots. Then the light is dimmed by a shadow. Looking up, he sees a young girl floating on the surface, her hair fanning out in the water. In a few minutes, she would be completely out of his sight, a tiny speck in the vast ocean. He doesn't want to go to her, to help the tortured remains of a once living human being. He has seen ravaged bodies up close and dreads the idea of seeing hers. But he can't leave her to the whim of the wind and tide. She deserves better.
Jake isn't an amateur sleuth. He isn't a reluctant sleuth. He isn't a sleuth at all. He isn't trying to solve a crime but to give the victim the respect of caring, something the police seem incapable of. He is driven by the lie that if he can give the dead girl a name, and arrange for her to be buried with dignity, he will quiet his own demons.
He asks questions, too many questions, and slowly and inexorably enters a world that he is ill-equipped to navigate: A world run by the wealthy, powerful and privileged. A world in which children who have been cast aside by their families and society—throwaways—are preyed upon by sex traffickers and men with deviant appetites. A world in which murder is a means to an end.
It is up to the well-intended Jake Savage to survive long enough to find his way back to the world he knows—or what's left of it.
Set in Key West and with a cast of memorable characters, Throwaways is a mystery thriller with an edge that will entertain and enlighten.
THE GENE POLICE
Shep Harrington Smalltown Mysteries - Book 1
The brutal murder of Jennifer Rice. The evidence: DNA found at the scene, DNA that belongs to a man long thought dead, and a shadowy fifty-year old photograph of a woman holding a baby taken at a near-by farm.
Shep Harrington is drawn into this legal quagmire by the arrival of his friend, and now client, Reggie Mason, a black state trooper, who admits that he obtained the DNA illegally. All Reggie wants Shep to do is to ask former residents of the farm it they remember anyone taking pictures or if they saw a woman with a baby. But simple requests are not easily contained. As Shep soon learns, the request brings him to the top of a slippery slope with an ill-defined edge. Question begets question, and the slide down the slope proves inevitable: What happened to the baby? Who is in the photograph? And who killed Jennifer Rice?
The answers lead Shep into a confrontation with the so called gene police, a confrontation fifty years in the making.
CHAIN THINKING
Shep Harrington Smalltown Mysteries - Book 1
Syndey Vail, once a beautiful soap opera star, now has a passion for championing the rights of animals—but she keeps the controversial methods of her cause as shrouded as she keeps her partially disfigured face. Sydney enters lawyer-cum-detective Shep Harrington’s life in a cloud of dust and vanishes just as quickly, leaving behind two very different but strangely connected things: a chimpanzee and a murder.
The chimpanzee is the young Kikora, whom Sydney liberated from her confining cage in a testing lab at DMI—a mega-medical conglomerate led by the hard-driving Howard Doring, who “apparently believes that the human animal has every right to exploit all living things.” At DMI, she and other chimps were used to test a new anti-obesity pill. The murdered victim, killed by a blow to the head, is Dr. Celia Stone, the DMI researcher in charge of Kikora.
Soon Shep realizes that Kikora, left in his initially unwilling care, is not only stolen property, but the longer he keeps her, the more threatened his own freedom becomes—and the more often tough questions race through his head. What makes an animal property? What is the source of “human” rights? What about an animal whose only difference from humans is 1.6% of DNA, that can empathize and suffer like humans? The questions confuse Shep, who’s never had to think hard about them before.
And the only answers he seems to find lie in the big brown eyes of a chimp called Kikora.
Chain Thinking is a whodunit with a heart and a mystery with a message. Once the mystery is solved, there’s a whole lot more left to think about. Shep finds his answers. Will you find yours?
LONESOME SONG
Shep Harrington Smalltown Mysteries - Book 1
Reilly Heartwood, a famous country singer, is dead. His sister doesn't recognize the dead man’s body. The local reverend has refused to permit burial. Reilly’s death is ruled a suicide. And no one has bothered to investigate.
What the hell is going on here? That’s what Shep Harrington, a 32-year-old divorced and disbarred lawyer, wants to know, and can't quite answer. The deeper he probes, the more he’s drawn into reconstructing the final minutes of Reilly’s life, the more he’s compelled to confront his own past, and to ultimately learn the startling truth about his mother, Reilly, and himself.
Shep comes easily to his new role of amateur sleuth. Because of his own recent experience, he’s deeply distrustful of authority, having just spent three years in prison for a white-collar crime he didn't commit. Yet, in digging out the particulars of Reilly’s demise, he is neither bitter nor uncaring, and the book manages adroitly to be an engaging whodunit set in a small town.