Novels

40 years after “The Freeze”, a catastrophic climate event which covered the earth with snow from the poles to 40º in both the southern and northern hemisphere, the story begins to follow Jenny, the wife of a homesteader who has chosen to brave the new frontier and head back into the territory that was covered when the cold came down from the north.

Jenny and her new infant son discover that Jack her husband has been shot by a group of men who are hired by a cabal of the families of exiled US politicians and South American Governments to reclaim the Northern Lands before the predicted thaw returns the land to productivity.

Jenny and Jack are joined by a cast of characters including the children of their murdered neighbor, one of the men hired to kill them, and Agnes the old woman who with her now dead husband was squatting on one of the US Army's bases and the daughter of one of the original founders of their town who has spent the last 20 years as a slave soldier for the South American Union Armed Forces, but now has returned with a plan to help the Homesteaders save their lands and heritage.

The story follows how the main characters overcome adversity to fight and win against much more powerful forces and make their homes once again safe for their dreams of the future.

• Near Future Post Apocalypse
• 106,000 Words

There are over a thousand different types of mushrooms in North America alone, they are distributed from coast to coast and can be found in most environments. None among us will not recognize them when we see them. Some mushrooms can be eaten, some can kill, but one mushroom will lead a man to find a killer.

The Mushroom Hunter is an 86,000 word novel about an ex-government scientist, Dr. Johnathon Turpin, who has moved to Wyoming and converted an abandoned mine into a mushroom farm. It traces a few weeks in the scientist turned hermit's life while everything around him is unraveling. Turpin is forced to deal with changes to his routine lifestyle, the largest of which is the impending arrival of his estranged daughter. Amanita, who he named after a poisonous mushroom, has come to confront him about his abandonment of her as a child and the recent death of his ex-wife.

The mystery begins when Dr. Turpin discovers Stephen Stanton, the learning disabled son of his nearest neighbors hiding in his truck. The boy is clearly frightened by something he has seen. Turpin enlists the help of the local sheriff who discovers that the boy's pants cuffs are covered in blood. The discovery leads Turpin and the sheriff to find the bodies of the boy's parents, slain in ritual fashion. Turpin must use his knowledge of both mycology and human nature to connect the pieces and clear himself as a suspect in the murders.

He needs to accomplish this while sorting out his daughter, the boy and his own troubled past. Turpin navigates a story filled with characters including Ned, the sheriff who is trying to come to grips with his own impending death, Bobby Delacroix, owner of a hunting lodge, Bill Warner, owner of the Lazy-W Ranch, Theo Grant, Warner's head hand, a pair of government agents, and a mysterious stranger with links to his forgotten past. The story addresses the issue that no matter how hard one tries, it is impossible to escape either one's past or avoid one's future.

• Contemporary Thriller/Mystery
• 87,000 Words

What if the best chance for the preservation of liberty in the free world was a washed-up spook, a band of misfits, and four newly recruited homeless men?

This unlikely band must act as soldiers in a hidden army fighting a war that will forever alter the future of humankind. The war will be fought in the courts, on main street, and in the media. The war for them, however, begins in a dirty alley in the worst part of town; a microcosm of society at large, where the strong take advantage of the weak, and willingness to do the unthinkable means survival.

It begins, very small, as an alley turf war, then soon explodes to every corner of the world. On one side of the alley is a man on a discarded flattened paper box, on the other a circle of four homeless men. None of the passers by notice, none of them will remember the men's faces. This is exactly what the Box Man knows will happen. It is all part of a plan to create perfect killers; killers with nothing to lose who are invisible ghosts until they ply their deadly trade. They are those abandoned by society. They are pawns in the Box Man's deadly game.

The Box Man is Alexander Bromley, former government operative who now sells his knowledge to the highest bidder. In the alley, he wears the soiled uniform of “The Company”, a secret society with no allegiance to flags or constitutions, but only to its own plans for the world.

Bromley, though a disciplined master of his game, a man for whom total self control is a pathway for sanity, doesn't know everything about the four men he has recruited. This lack of information may cost him his life. He is about to discover that “The Company” is not the only organization in the game and that everything he knows is based on a lie. He will soon have to make the hardest decisions of his life, decisions that will effect not only his future but that of every member of his team.

From the first recruitment of Bromley's homeless men to the end of their planned assassination of a powerful senator, the Box Man will have to come to grips with the ghosts of his own checkered past and change himself, his family, and the world around him.

• Commercial Contemporary Thriller
• 91,000 Words

What if there were two Americas, separated not by an invisible demarcation on a political map, but by a real physical barrier, a barrier that was created by a single reclusive mad scientist? Would the man be a villain or a saint? Would the cultures on either side of the barrier preserve the similarities of their past union, or would they become different creatures entirely.

These are the questions that have plagued Dr. Andrew Brown since he started his academic career. As the preeminent expert, at the Cedar Rapids Institute of History (CRIH), Dr. Brown specializes in trying to understand the event that did more to change culture and history than any single event in the history of mankind. His life is governed by the barrier itself, a 2800 kilometer, impenetrable sphere with a center near what used to be the city of Denver.

Barrier Studies is a lonely academic discipline that focuses on the effects of the day an impenetrable shield instantly rose to isolate the central united states from the

Adventurer is a story about what happens when the only other group of people who seem to have continued trying to find what happened when the barrier went up knock on his door.

This is the day that the government contracts him with an offer that he could never decline. They have found a way to punch a hole through the barrier. At long last, he will get a chance to explore a culture more distant to him than the inner most jungles of Africa were to the great Victorian explorers.

Adventurer is at first a detective story about how Brown travels inside of the prison system of the new government to uncover secrets that have been hidden for longer than his life times, then it becomes a great adventurer as Brown takes a step across the barrier, that insiders consider a shield against the influence of the outside.

Adventurer is a completed novel of c. 121,000 words. It is a work of science fiction that revolves around a single big idea and the sociological changes that single event would cause. Most of all it is a story about how good people react to threats against individual freedoms.

• Near Future Science Fiction
• 121,000 Words

What if the story of manned space travel was more like the quest for flight in the days of building airplanes in bicycle shops than the government controlled moon missions. What if a society could be built where success or failure was directly linked to individual performance? What if you had amassed a fortune and decided that you wanted to change the future of humankind forever?

These are the questions faced by the directors of Transworld Megacom, that my novel The Colony answers. All the rules are rewritten as the directors rebuild human society from the ground up. They first recruit Colonel William McKay, a disgraced military officer to head security at the recruiting facility called the Econodome. There, recruits are scientifically selected based on the same principles of individualism to which the directors attribute their own success.

The Colony follows three descendent's of these recruits, Meri, Gert, and Jimmy as they compete for a position on the Exploration Corps who will be the first to reach planetfall on their new home. The story follows them through training and up to their final test, a survival exercise where they will match wits with the natural dangers that exist on the first planet outside of the solar system inhabited by humankind.

On this planet, colonized by the governments of Earth, they learn to depend on one another both as they fight for survival in the wilderness, and fight to understand a society created for and by a pervasive central government. Meri, Gert, and Jimmy discover that the leadership of the second world is a greater threat to the safety of their new home than even the directors of TWMC could have predicted.

When Colonel McKay discovers that the government of the planet is building a weapon capable of destroying entire planets, Together, with his best pupils and a band of freedom loving Outposters, he will fight and perhaps die to protect the only society he has ever known.

• Science Fiction
• 120,000 Words