Dancing Bears

America is at a crossroads, and it may take a street-smart misfit to sort it all out. In this hilarious political satire, vignettes burlesquing the absurd and grotesque contortions of male chauvinism alternate with postmodern Lady Godivas parading alluringly and dreaming of retirement.

Exponents of sexism and exploitation confront each other and slap each other’s resting bitch-faces. Exotic dancers in a strip club speak their minds. Tales of a wayward wienermobile, perils of aging and youthful blunders, spilling the beans, leaving gossipy stink scattered like broken winds.

Tragicomic pratfalls of American ideals in an age of authoritarianism and rampant materialism take center stage, and a man who dreams of wearing a grizzly bear costume to go berserk in gives us the bird. The vixen narrator, lil Vireo, can tell no lies. She sees all and wears no disguise.

A romp through life’s Strip-Club of pretenders and deniers fooling themselves while slapped in the rump. Politician dudes using parade costumes as messages, and strippers taking off symbolic garb redolent with our times—revealing our naked carnival of phantasmagorical human desires and fears.

Dancing with a Stranger

David Fury, a talented football player with dreams of joining the National Football League, faces a series of tragedies that derail his aspirations. Following the death of his father, David’s mother falls for a man whose charming exterior masks a deceptive nature. As this stranger ingratiates himself into their lives, David notices large sums of money vanishing from his mother’s bank account. Suspecting the man is a con artist exploiting his mother’s affections, David’s concerns escalate when he uncovers the stranger’s affiliation with a racist group planning to disrupt a May Day celebration in Boston, leading to a dramatic confrontation.

Dancing with the Devil

In a desolate stretch of highway on the southwest side of Chicago, a young blonde woman known only as ‘Mary’ has been haunting the living for decades. From police officers to cab drivers, and from airline pilots to curious teens, many have reported chilling encounters with her. But there’s a twist: Mary has been dead and buried since 1936. Why does her restless spirit persist in making such frequent appearances even nearly a century later? Trapped in a web of dangerous political intrigue in life, what is it that Mary so desperately seeks in the afterlife? Why can’t she find eternal peace? As the sightings continue to unfold, this gripping tale unravels the mystery behind Mary’s ceaseless wanderings on this lonely, otherworldly expanse of Chicago roadway.

Dark Dragon

Against nearly impossible odds, Sigrun managed to lead the fairies of the Northwoods off the battlefield victoriously, and the villagers eagerly welcome peaceful times. They easily sink back into their old routines, but Sigrun cannot. Darkness creeps around her and without reason, she becomes increasingly edgy and violent. Afraid of herself, and what she might do to anyone around her, she isolates herself and refuses to see even her closest friends. She is plagued by intense visions of a foreboding cave within a treacherous mountain range, and it becomes clear a force is pulling her there.

Without a word, she disappears from the village in search of this cave. The journey is not without its challenges. The very land that she is treading on is evil and working against her in ways she could have never imagined. Even though everything she faces pushes her back – she knows she must continue.

It does not take long before Jae and Khalon realize Sigrun has fled the village. Knowing she has not been herself; they immediately depart after her. Facing hardships of their own they begin to wonder whether they will find her in time, or if she wants to be found at all. Evil snakes its way around her, lying to her and manipulating her, and leaches the power of the dragon for itself. All the while Sigrun is pushed further into a dark abyss. The Sigrun that they know, and love, may be lost to them forever.

Darkness Without Limits

Darkness Without Limits is a poetic, haunting and unforgettable novel about a boy’s upbringing in a small rural village from the age of ten until he is twenty. He lives a life in constant fear, of other people, of not having any future and of a darkness inside him that makes his world increasingly unreal.

After high school, the boy spends a restless summer with a group of outsiders that challenges his worldview and sanity. The novel follows his slow descent into darkness and his attempt to fight the evil inside him. Peter Legård writes with great insight into the world of children and youth and with the feeling that there are no ‘ordinary people’.

Despite the dark themes, this novel ultimately concerns our shared humanity and that there is always hope.

Darla

In Cat on a Black Moon, television anchorwoman Garner Olsen found herself ensnared in a deadly game when deranged ex-flower child Darla Dare targeted her. Darla’s vendetta was sparked when Garner’s husband, a federal prosecutor, moved to take Darla’s lover, Carlo, to trial for drug trafficking. After enduring stalking, kidnapping, and murder, Garner vowed to bring down the woman who shattered her life.

Now, in the thrilling sequel, Darla – an escaped felon with nothing to lose – leaves a trail of death across two states. But when she steals a truck, she unwittingly picks up an unexpected passenger: an 11-year-old runaway. Will the boy become her next victim, her accomplice, or the key to her downfall?

Darwin's Progress

What would a future traveler discover in an America that has taken its money-based society to the extreme? Michael Brown, our hero from the first book of the trilogy, is now 35 and sets out to explore this new world. In America, he encounters ‘pecuniocracy,’ a system where the rationality of money governs all aspects of life: contract marriages, commercial families, custody battles with financial stakes, and other bizarre phenomena stemming from the belief that money is the cornerstone of humanity and society. Through a series of thrilling adventures and unexpected twists, Michael must navigate and ultimately escape from this dystopian future America.

“A monumentally amazing story…”

– Ellen Balthazor, University of Wisconsin.

Deadly Assumption

When a young man witnesses the rescue of a woman’s body from the ocean, he is shocked to recognize the tattoo on her shoulder as belonging to his prospective fiancé, Sarah. Traumatized, he flees the scene, unaware of the ensuing homicide investigation into the suspicious drowning and its findings.

Having arranged his business schedule hoping for a reconciliation following their disagreement in England, he had planned on proposing to Sarah during her visit to Vancouver Island. Devastated by her loss, he relocates to Germany, committing to a life without his soulmate. Struggling with grief, he is persistently tormented by the circumstances of her death and how her body came to be floating off Vancouver, more than 100 miles from her intended destination. Homesickness eventually drives him back to England, where he learns the shocking truth about the homicide investigation and the twist of fate that forever changes his chosen path.

As the story unfolds, it reveals the dramatic impact the deceased woman had on those whose lives she touched, particularly the man suspected of murdering her. The characters are tightly intertwined in this generational, multicultural saga of suspected homicide, enduring love, emotional trauma, and the fight to recapture those closest to the heart. With its roots set in England, Deadly Assumption is a tale rich in history, encompassing Canada, Germany, and France, and spanning the period from the years prior to World War II into the 1980s.

Dear Reader

An impressive, moving, and assured debut collection of poems about the richness of nature, human emotion, and the human condition in general. Innovative and fresh, at times playful at times serious always with a keen eye for the tell-tale detail. Rooted in personal experience, the reader is exposed to and invited to share in the poet’s intimate emotional journey, joy, elation, wonder and sometimes fragile memories as well as his iconoclastic take on common Western myths.

Beginning with a welcoming message to the reader in the opening poem ‘Dear Reader’ that any personal interpretation is as valid as the author’s to the challenge of the last poem of the collection ‘My Ode to Joy’ to find the personal ‘addition to the sum of creation,’ this collection is sure to delight the reader.

Death Among the Pines

BJ Gleeson is sitting at a South Jersey bar with his new girlfriend when an old woman totters in and sits down next to them. Crying and mumbling, she opens a small box to show a bloodied severed finger. “It’s my daughter!” she sobs.

Follow Gleeson, a divorced family man and washed up baseball player turned teacher and amateur detective, as this event catapults him into a labyrinth of bizarre murders (which could be historical, gang related, or cult based) in the middle of a cold winter in the New Jersey Pine Barrens at the turn of the 21^st Century.

Watch as this complex and troubled man uses his historical savvy to point toward the solution of several vicious and bloody murders that have all occurred between the dawning of the new millennium and Easter of 2000.

Delta Refuge

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta lies Clarksdale, a small town steeped in the emotional strains of the blues and a history both vibrant and somber. Known as the birthplace of the blues, with legends like Robert Johnson, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, the region echoes with tales of poverty, civil rights, and the tantalizing allure of tamales and barbecue.

But Clarksdale isn’t just a relic of the past. After facing economic desolation in the mid-20th century due to a declining agricultural sector, the town underwent a renaissance. By the turn of the millennium, the blues’ magnetic pull had transformed it into a global haven for aficionados. Today, its streets buzz year-round with music festivals and venues brimming with live performances, attracting not only music purists but also those yearning for a taste of a distinct lifestyle.

Delta Refuge delves deep into the heartbeats of this unique community, weaving together stories of lifelong residents and those who’ve newly discovered its charm. Yet, when a natural disaster strikes, it tests the bonds of the townsfolk, prompting introspection and a renewed devotion to their shared home.

Deseret: A Defense and a Refuge

In this tale, people scattered throughout the world are woven together in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains. Forty years after Napoleon’s defeat, the development of modern warfare on the Crimean Peninsula sends reverberations across the globe, alerting all of the growth in technology, the precursor of the US Civil War in weapons and tactics, as well as the needs of multitudes of dispossessed and underrepresented. The shrinking planet is growing crowded. The bumping into one another becomes increasingly violent. Women and men stand to be counted, molded of numerous talents and abilities, striving for relief and equality, demanding rights and opportunity. Slavery, reservations, women’s suffrage, polygamy, and Manifest Destiny are swirled into the murky vat of the United States. Protesting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known derisively as Mormons, are challenged over religious freedom. Despite the continued criticism heaped upon them for their unique doctrines, missionary work and its effects spread throughout the nation and the earth.

The 1850s see the homeland of Deseret plowing against Bloody Kansas, Buchannan’s Blunder, Mountain Meadows, the Sevastopol Policy, the Pony Express, and the Transcontinental Telegraph. These ventures combine with similar troubles and shove the nation into the red-hot furnace of civil war.