The Athlete

A novel about a young Amish man who may be the greatest natural athlete ever. He is discovered by a disgraced former major league baseball player who introduces him to others in Major League Baseball management to start him on his way. But the player wants to protect his identity and shield his community from this effort to play professional sports. An assumed name is used. His exploits become legendary, first in baseball and then as he migrates to football and later basketball. He learns lessons about modern fame and riches while also learning lessons about intrigue and betrayal. As successful as he becomes, he struggles over a decision about what he really wants for his life and for those he loves. While the public tries to learn who this mystery athlete really is, he is led to make a stark choice about his future.

Look Back Detective

Twenty-five years after Hatchel Breeze’s most infamous homicide case, another one is thrust upon him, and this one involves his family. As he investigates, he comes to believe it has the marks of the first case and revenge all over it. But things are not always as they seem. Detective Hatchel Breeze, a hometown boy and lifelong cop and detective and now assistant chief about to retire, is called to investigate his last case. What he finds is a family he does not know and enemies all around. One misstep and his most cherished family members’ lives could end. Yet as always, he persists to find the killer before his final retirement date, revisiting his mistakes and lost loves along the way.This is the second of three Hatchel Breeze detective novels.

Trapped but Not Forgotten

Sandra travels from Chicago to Gulf Shores, Alabama, all alone and never tells a soul where she is heading. Taking a wrong exit off the highway into a vicious storm. Fearing now for her life, she ends up in a diner. Not aware she will be trapped in the diner with eleven hostages, including an infant. Will Sandra and the hostages survive? Will it end in total hell?

Foxfire

It is June 1940. With the German occupation of Norway complete and Paris falling, Europe is in chaos. Refugees are fleeing in all directions, finding all exits blocked. There is one way out: the Arctic harbor town of Liinahamari, a forgotten port on Finland’s northern coast. Among the refugees fleeing up the Arctic Ocean Highway are the Crown Princess of Norway and her three children.

A ship, The Queen of the North, will be waiting for the refugees at Liinahamari, arranged by personal order of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who has developed a fondness for the Crown Princess of Norway that will last until his death. The Queen of the North is scheduled to depart on August 16, 1940. The ship will also be expecting an item of significant interest to the US Navy. Smuggled from a Swedish armament works by an unlikely group of Anglos, Swedes, and Poles, an object is to be concealed in its hold that could very well change the course of the war in the Atlantic...

Based on real events, Foxfire is the story of a military operation that actually took place in 1940. Part spy thriller, part love story, and part celebration of an extraordinary landscape, Foxfire will take you on an epic journey up the Arctic Ocean Highway to a place now lost to history.

Fatal Omens

The European “war to end all wars” was a catastrophe decades in the making. The prophetic voices of alienated writers and artists in Central Europe were at the turn of the twentieth century divining the end of modernity while seeking cultural and spiritual renewal. Cracks in the optimistic liberal order of the European Age were coming apart and ceding to darker forces.

Against this backdrop, historical novelist Stephen Almássy foregrounds the lives of Archduke Charles of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia and Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. Their marriage before the Great War culminates during the war when they become the last Emperor and Empress of Austria-Hungary under the Habsburg scepter. The old Central European dynasty, the last outpost in Europe of the imperium sacrum, falls on the day, November eleventh, 1918, when the war comes to an uncertain end.

Burnt Cove

When Rose O’Reilly White, a respected member of the small-town Deer Isle, Maine, community, died at age 97, she left many secrets, some monstrous and others magical, including her first love, a young woman who died in a tragic fire in 1942. This woman was her teacher; Rose was a teenager. Another secret was her later long involvement with an African-American woman. A third was her poisoning and killing a Catholic priest of many years ago after Rose learned he was a serial pedophile and wanted to prevent him from abusing other victims.

Rose’s husband, Bill, another respected member of the Deer Isle community, knew and accepted all this. But unlike others who die leaving secrets, Rose left a key to open them, and her filmmaker son Jack brings them to light as he sets out to produce a documentary of her life—an endeavor that reunites him with his first love, with whom he had a daughter unbeknownst to him until they are together again.

A novel unlike any other, Burnt Cove artfully blends horror, supernatural, dark fantasy, time travel, love, death, and mystical resurrection.

Revolutionary Voices from the American Presidents' Slave Houses

After securing independence, America’s Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to draft a Constitution. Article II, Section I vested executive power in a president, an office to be filled by the will of "We the People." The judgment of each president would prove critical to the grand experiment of American democracy.Yet, from 1789 to 1865, every single president personally accepted or permitted the continuation of American slavery—a vile and brutal system that used generations of enslaved people as free labor to fuel the nation’s economy, offering no reparations upon its violent end.Revolutionary Voices from the American Presidents’ Slave Houses offers a critical analysis of each administration, exposing the stark contradiction between the nation’s professed ideals of liberty and its presidential endorsement of slavery. The book centers the revolutionary voices of the enslaved and their descendants, who spoke truth to power through resistance and upheld a vision of a nation truly “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Presidential Doughnut Hole

The Presidential Doughnut Hole is a fictional account of a U.S. presidential election in which the nation is suddenly faced with a tragedy that leads to a political crisis not addressed by the Constitution and its amendments. The story details the political maneuvering and intrigue of four individuals, all competing for the highest office in the land. Their campaigns are affected by unexpected world events and become the target of plots by unscrupulous outsiders wishing to affect the election's outcome. All three branches of the nation's government—executive, judicial, and legislative—become enmeshed in a political process never before imagined. This book is a cautionary tale of a crisis this country may one day face if our elected officials do not plug this presidential doughnut hole in our Constitution.

Caffeine and Catnip

Madison Moss thought inheriting her aunt’s cozy coffee shop would mean a quiet life in Happy Valley. Instead, she’s juggling enchanted espresso machines, a talking cat with attitude, and a winged sprite whose caffeine habit should probably be illegal.

But when strange magic starts seeping into town, Madison finds herself tangled in family secrets, forgotten wards, and a brewing threat that could swallow Happy Valley whole.

Armed with a stubborn streak, a frothy latte, and a few unexpected allies, Madison will have to decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her café… and the magic that comes with it.

Song of the Summer Jazzman

Wilson Patch, a conventional upper-middle-class man from New Jersey, changed in college. He developed an ill-conceived dream of moving to California, living on the beach, and never owning an alarm clock. His dream gradually evaporates as forces he cannot control draw him back to New Jersey and New York City.

Along the way, he meets Lisa, Slade, and Grace, all of whom figure prominently in the novel. Wilson’s life gravitates eventually from fantasy back into reality.

He eventually travels to California, but via airliner on a business trip. This is about the disintegration of Wilson’s dream.

Call Me Karma

There are threads that keep us tethered to this world; there are rules and beliefs that play us all for fools. Call Me Karma follows the journey of learning that fate pulls strings for no one. That Lady Justice sees every rise and fall, and that perhaps we were selfish for assuming she ever served us at all.

Grief, love, denial, reflection—there is balance to nature; for every sin on the scale there sits a virtue on the other side. The roadmap of life rarely follows a steady path; not every success is permanent, and not every failure is damning. There is a strength in accepting these simple human truths and in understanding that some stories call for a bittersweet ending. These poems are yours to embrace or despise, to comfort those they reach, or to patiently wait on the bottom shelf until the right time.

The Devil's Grapevine

A young woman in the late 1930s became the mother of an illegitimate child. She was living in a small, pious town, which was very judgemental. The conception of her child was by an infamous rapist. Interpol had been chasing him across three continents. There had been hundreds of rapes. His crimes made headlines around the world, and he was soon captured, sentenced to death, and electrocuted. Only the girl, her mother, and the authorities were aware of who impregnated her.

When the boy was three, she and her mother decided she must become anonymous for fear that Roddy may find out that the blood of this monster runs through his veins. Changing her name, she and Roddy leave the past behind and end up in California.

Roddy, now ten, ends up working in an out-of-the-way truck stop in Grapevine Village. Many adventures and complexities lay before them. Love, death, a boy’s fantasies, the FBI. and warring trucking companies transporting Mexican farm workers without proper papers, who are fighting over who controls the rights to use the highway called “The Devil’s Grapevine.”

Roddy and his mother are caught between the FBI and the warring truckers, which ends in a gunfight that ends up burning much of the village to cinders. All works out in the end with the mother, the son, and a truck driver who rescues them from the gunfire and flames.