I Swallowed the Cosmos and Spit Out the Stars

Words flow fluently through a poetic stream where the muse paddles in both directions, where he deems most rewarding. His intention is to capture an audience full of dreams where the author can captivate his own. There are many turns and bends in the water, but somehow the shore beckons him on solid ground. Mike invites his audience to open up the pages and become familiar with the author’s visions of friends, family and experiences in life.

Tesoro

After the brutal murder of her friend, Mattie, three years ago, Eva was left wondering what happened to Mattie’s baby. No longer able to resist the desire to know if the child is safe and healthy or met the same fate as her mother, Eva starts to investigate. Her questions take her on a dangerous path that alters the course of her life. Will she find the child, and perhaps love, along the way? Or will she meet the same fate as her friend did?

The Legend of Jane Coleman

This is a story of a stowaway girl on the passenger ship LYON, who was one of the colonists at Roanoke Island. It chronicles her life from ages fifteen to sixty-one, and it describes her hardships in both England and Virginia. The stories’ span of time is from 1587 to 1633.

The story is derived from the passenger list of the people that made up the third attempt at colonization of the New World. The passenger list had two people on it whose first names were either made illegible to historians or purposely omitted by John White, who was the governor of the expedition.

The two names were (blank) Coleman, listed as a woman passenger, and (blank) Marvis, listed as a child under the age of sixteen. Jane Colman was actually both persons who were written on that list.

Last Train Home

A collection of stories from the margins of American life

Wayne Creed’s debut collection pulls no punches. These are stories about people surviving on the edges—Eastern Shore watermen whose lives have collapsed, the junkies and car thieves marking time, and the wheelchair-bound and forgotten trying to carve out meaning in a world that’s moved on without them.

Written with unflinching honesty and surprising lyricism, Last Train Home maps the forgotten corners of life where loneliness mingles with grace, violence brushes against tenderness, and the desperate search for connection plays out in dive bars, detention centers, and abandoned churches. Creed’s characters—ex-nuns and altar boys, teachers and drifters, boxers and bell ringers—navigate worlds where the American Dream has curdled into something darker, yet somehow, improbably, moments of beauty still break through.

Raw, lyrical, and uncompromising, Last Train Home announces a bold new voice in American fiction—one unafraid to look directly at what we’d rather turn away from. From fishing villages to the streets of Moscow, Creed finds in the darkest corners the beauty and persistence of the human spirit. Last Train Home offers no easy answers—only the hard truth that grace sometimes arrives on the last train, just before the station closes for good.

The Odyssey of a Bad Mother

I’m going to spend 2026 in 1982; come join me.

The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes place in 1982 in Bellevue, Washington, right outside of Seattle.

Come reminisce about the time of Pop Rocks, Tab, Hall & Oates, Heather Locklear, E.T., Reaganomics, and the changing of the family dynamic.

Set against the backdrop of Bill Gates’s rise and MS-DOS and the European expansion of Microsoft, finally to their home in Redmond. The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes a look at three flawed women in the affluent Parkside community who are all deemed bad mothers.

They come together in a desperate quest to find answers to the kidnapping of one of their sons, a local boy, Ryan McKinnon. With no clues, no answers, and little hope, these three bad mothers forge the path to finding what happened to him.

During a time when the police were on overload, a time in American history when children’s kidnappings were becoming prominent in the United States, and with respect to the milk carton campaign, The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes a hard look at the police and their fight to bring Ryan McKinnon home.

What happened to Ryan McKinnon that night at the movies when he went missing?

With Ryan as the narrator of the terrifying tale, his story sheds light on compassion, empathy, and psychological insight on what it means to struggle, self-preserve, fall apart, and pick yourself up again for the greater good!

A Southern Noir

Hunter Landon, a private investigator in Birmingham, Alabama, lives a life defined by faith, family, and unwavering values. This seemingly idyllic Southern city is his home, a picturesque backdrop to a devout existence alongside his wife and children. But when a new case lands on his desk, Hunter’s world is brutally shattered, which challenges everything he professes to believe.

He plunges into a maze of love, betrayal, and cold-blooded murder, swiftly uncovering the decay beneath Birmingham’s polished façade. The polite society he knows is a thin veneer, barely concealing a sinister darkness. Confronted with these unsettling truths, Hunter faces an impossible choice: remain true to the man he is, or become the very monster he hunts to solve the case.

In a world where no one is who they claim to be, can a good man survive in the shadows he uncovers?

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.

Where the Water Falls

Seeking purpose in life is like finding your way through a dark room, as Hunter Strong finds out the hard way. Although he finds comfort in his routine, he senses a missing piece and becomes determined to find out what that is! With the help from his mentor, Marge, and his new friend, James, Hunter embarks on a bigger life journey than he thought. Along the way, he’d have to face the shadows of his past to find what he seeks.

Where the Water Falls is a narrative highlighting the vagaries of life. Without a set of instructions as a guide, this becomes a life-changing experience. Not only to the people in Hunter’s life but also providing a fresh new perspective to Hunter himself. The experience is in the journey; the destination is merely a junction or transition. Life keeps flowing like a river, even at moments where the water falls.

Ozark Justice

The year is 1938, and it’s a beautiful Indian summer day in the Ozark Mountains. Yarnell Cates, his wife Thelma, and his father are returning home with a wagonload of stove wood when they discover the sheriff’s car in their front yard. Sheriff J. D. Hawkins is there to arrest Yarnell on trumped-up charges concocted by the prosecuting attorney and his brother, the circuit judge. The charge is part of an ongoing feud between their families and the Cates. In a twist of fate, Yarnell is forced to kill the sheriff in self-defense. This act incites the prosecuting attorney to form a posse with orders to burn down the Cates’ home, slaughter their livestock, and shoot Yarnell on sight. A bounty of five hundred dollars is placed on Yarnell’s head, later increased to fifteen hundred dollars, driving Yarnell and Thelma to seek refuge in a cave in the mountains. Throughout the winter, they endure harsh conditions while evading the men of Sycamore County in a desperate bid for survival.

Redemption in the Majella Mountains

Ken’s grandfather always inspired him, as a child, to respect and love the outdoors and to find in nature the introspection and refuge to allow every person to solve any of life’s vicissitudes. Recalling his grandfather’s philosophy, the author carries the reader through the mesmerizing beauty of the Majella mountains in the Abruzzi region of Central Italy. There Ken has the protagonist first find refuge, and ultimately, find redemption from the helter-skelter corporate life he left behind. These two existences, ambition and introspection, clash and confront each other so that the reader sees the unforgiving life of ambition lived by a grizzled corporate veteran pit itself against the newly-found introspective existence of a young man whose soul is forced to reawaken and leave behind the societal ladder to success in favor of the more simple, but much more satisfying, life of ethics and morality.

For All Our Relations

The book is in two parts, the first, The Nilgiri Elegies, document my experiences as a veterinarian at the animal refuge in the Nilgiris, S. India, India Project for Animals & Nature, founded and directed by my wife Deanna L. Krantz. We provided free care for the domestic animals kept by villagers and poor tribal communities, vital to their economy and health; and faced corruption and death threats in saving the last of the elephants and other wildlife.

The second part are poems written over several years from the deep heart’s core of empathy and reverence for all life in a world in need of compassion and spiritual inspiration for all creatures great and small.

Four Seasons – Book One

Mark Marteau thought he had retired from the FBI after Red Widow almost killed him in his own apartment, but Hector, his partner and best friend, shows up on his property near Glacier Park, Montana to inform him his godson Dylan may be in trouble. But before Mark goes, he first must go back to a time over 40 years before, when it all started at a wrecking and salvage yard in East Pasco, Washington, where he is witness to the murder of his friend. The next story shows how Mark meets Hector following his best friend’s Dave Baker’s assassination by the order of Che Lopez.