Shining Star

Quirky writer Elena Jimenez begins an unlikely secret friendship over email with ultra-famous actor Ben Jones after a serendipitous first meeting. Over several years, the two forge an enduring bond centered around the joys and challenges of parenting. During this time, Elena painfully endures a failed marriage, which takes her years to recover from.

From day one, Elena and Ben share a palpable attraction, readily apparent to those around them. Elena finds herself longing for those exhilarating moments when she gets to see or hear from him again. Ben seems to inhabit an entirely different world defined by fame, fortune, and a jet-setting lifestyle. By comparison, Elena’s life appears mundane – a single mom navigating her writing career.

When Elena finally gathers the courage to explore her feelings, she’s catapulted into Ben’s dazzling world of celebrity. Will she adapt to the glaring spotlight, or will the trauma of her past undermine her shot at happiness?

Shira

Shira is a fast-paced historical thriller that gives the reader an inside look at the Israeli spy organization, Mossad, during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. The story is about a young woman who is recruited to join the agency by an aging spymaster who believes women can serve an important undercover role in the traditionally male-dominated organization. Shira is inserted into some of the Mossad’s most infamous operations, including the murder of an Iraqi scientist, the raid that freed 103 hostages at the airport at Entebbe, and the audacious smuggling operations at the Red Sea diving resort in Ethiopia. Along the way she has an on-again, off-again relationship with her college boyfriend who questions the morality of her chosen profession. Their differing points of view about how to deal with volatile Middle East hostilities occurring at the time (and still occurring) form the moral dilemma that drives the plot toward its surprising but satisfying ending.

Singing Down the Rain

Poetry can be viewed as a reflection, a song, if you will, of society in the time it is written, but at the same time, it is timeless in the continuum of past, present, and future. In the dance of words, the reader will follow the Rorschach Ink Blots in the dance of words to find meaning in the visual imagery presented here.

Stand Alone Still

Embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery and healing in this compelling exploration of resilience and forgiveness.

Have you endured unimaginable hardships, surviving what feels like hell on earth, only to realize that the path to salvation lies not in entering heaven, but in healing your own wounded heart? In this poignant tale, you will discover that the true meaning of home extends far beyond physical walls – it resides within the depths of your own being.

As you navigate the challenging terrain of self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others, you will uncover a profound truth: the battle lies not in the external world, but within yourself. It is through this internal struggle that you find the strength to grow and transcend the limitations imposed upon you.

Story 1: The Delights of Sean Jr.

Sean Jr. had a tough life—as his mother told him, he had the ‘forbidden illness’: lusting for men. His uncle took him in, yet Sean lived a criminal lifestyle ingrained in the family business. Thug life meant trouble was Sean’s middle name; the drugs and jail did not help much either.

Now Sean had two loving parents. Yet his uncle was in conflict, wanting to protect Sean from the evils of their family’s work while disapproving of his player lifestyle. Meanwhile, the body count from their criminal exploits continued to rise.

Storyteller in Times Square

Storyteller in Times Square opens with a visit to New York and the ruins of the World Trade Center. Thus begins a poetry collection that reflects in subtle and surprising ways the post World War II history of the United States. Without being either “political” or “ideological,” the poet employs concise and often disciplined forms of language to touch upon deeper matters of destiny and feeling.  Our lives, our deeds, our ideas—all of these have consequences for how we treat our land and each other. The moments of lyricism and humor help us to keep our balance. And the perspective is important, for these poems are about paying attention to reality. Can we pay attention to the voices of history submerged in our wake, swirling behind us? Perhaps that question in essence is what these poems ask of us.

Studies in Smoke

Studies in Smoke is not fiction. The shared event is actual and the resonance real. So is this.

This poetry remains faithful to traditional form. It is true to life and to living simply while thinking too much.

It is true to the cycle of uneasy, never settled sentiments that prescribe no moral, no message, no mysticism. In plain language and the fitting phrase, this work is authentic to the voices of inanimate shadings, to the shifting shapes that drift into evanescent experience.

This work offers the painterly touches not yet digitalized in the mind’s eye.

Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

Supernaturalis Mortem

In the year A.D. 390, magic is both omnipresent and feared in newly Christian Rome. In an effort to revive their faith, three witches cast a curse on local leaders of the Empire’s new religion, subjecting them to demonic hauntings, possessions, and eventual death. Will the Iracundus family be able to survive the witches’ curse? Can the witches succeed in their quest for revenge?

Medea has always cherished her witch heritage, despite her family’s mistreatment of her. When her mother and grandmother decide to take action against the town’s mistreatment of them and their fellow believers, Medea initially supports their cause. However, when they unveil their plan for vengeance, Medea begins to question the morality of their actions.

As Medea attempts to convince her family to see reason and find a way to satisfy their desire for justice without resorting to revenge, she must navigate a difficult path that will affect not only herself but also her family, enemies, and the entire town.

Synchronicity

Fractured Identities offers an unflinching look into the complexities of desire, identity, and survival within a Hungarian Jewish family during the crucible of the Second World War. Brace yourself for a harrowing psychosexual journey that confronts the limits of the human psyche and morality.

At the story’s center is an uncle – a Jungian psychiatrist – whose career is stifled under the oppressive Nazi regime. Bereft of his practice, he grapples with the dissolution of his professional identity. Opposite him is his wife, a once-successful actress and singer. Constrained by her Jewish heritage, she challenges both her own and her husband’s sexual boundaries as a form of escape from the confinements of religious and societal norms.

Their niece, prodigiously gifted and strikingly beautiful, is raised by her aristocratic, war-hero grandfather. Throughout the war, she faces a relentless assault on her body and mind. Her identity oscillates violently, from a vulnerable Jewish girl to a fierce supporter of Nazi ideology, even as her capacity for scientific innovation and acts of heroism grow. Yet she, too, cannot evade the war’s corrosive ethical compromises.

The 12

An outbreak of twelve gruesome, unsolved murders from the 1800s seems an excellent choice for Jay Dalton to try out his hand at writing. Doing so as he is starting life over after a painful divorce in a peaceful, rural farmhouse, in which he had recently moved, seems delightful. All would not stay as it seems for long.

The quaintness of his old farm house quickly fades as he becomes more aware that he isn’t alone in his new abode. A series of journals Jay discovers provide unexpected research results for his book, even as they seem to come more and more ominously to life. But it is a series of “accidents” that are most troublesome, as it seems that someone intends for Jay to never finish his book.

As Jay digs deeper, he begins to suspect that the unsolved murders, the hauntings in his house, and his current peril may be more closely connected than he would have ever suspected. How good he is at putting the pieces together may just determine if he lives to write about it. 

The Air That We Breathe - Book One

Father Marcellinus warns the young monk, saying, ‘The air that we breathe, that is the creature that we become’ explaining how every influence, both good and evil ultimately shape us into the person that we are. Based on real events, this novel unfolds in a nineteenth century abbey and is about a young man who struggles to face the truth of who he really is, something that all of us must ultimately do in our own lives. The reader is invited into that cloister, so full of passions and conflicts.

Simon desires only one thing since he was a little boy, and that is to serve God as a priest. He dreams of wearing silken gold vestments and being enveloped in great clouds of incense, offering the Sacrifice to God. When he is seventeen, he leaves home and becomes a monk far north in the mountains of Pennsylvania. His faith is genuine, and he gives himself to his studies in order to become a Roman Catholic priest.

But not all is as he expected. A sexual awakening he had not anticipated, blossoms in him and boyhood dreams are shaken to the core as he wrestles with a side of himself he never counted on. He falls in love in a monastic world filled with holy men, mischievous souls, colorful individuals and also great scoundrels.

A powerful visitor invites him to Rome, something Simon never expected. There is a dark price tag, however, something Simon is unaware of.

The Allies

This book lay almost half a century at the bottom of an old computer before it was published. At the time, it was considered politically ‘inappropriate’ because it was too ‘anti-Russian.’ It was written in America by two political émigrés, refugees from the communist part of the world, who knew Russia as it really is and always has been, even during World War II, when it pretended to be a faithful ally of the United States.

American pilots, crew members of a B 29 bomber, are hit by anti-aircraft fire during a reconnaissance flight over Japan. They make an emergency landing in USSR territory. It would seem that they are safe on the lands of an ally, but the reality turned out to be frighteningly different.

Although this book is historical fiction and its characters are invented, they are woven into real historical events related to the Manhattan Project infiltrated from within by Soviet spies. During Gorbachev’s ‘thaw,’ Stalin was forgotten, and Russia was to be ‘an example and model of democracy’ from then on. Even then, this book was supposed to be a warning; now it is allmost a wake-up call. Today’s Russia, waging a criminal, aggressive war against Ukraine, Russia of Vladimir Putin, with its troll farms, armed green men, murdering disobedient citizens in labor camps, poses an even greater threat to the entire free world.