A multi-talented folksinger storyteller, novelist, poet, singer/songwriter, teacher, writing and storytelling workshop leader, I enjoy bringing these skills to book clubs, schools, nursing homes, community events and libraries. I am comfortable with audiences and groups of all ages and abilities. I also give readings from my poetry, short fiction and the novels listed below:
Murder in Coral Bay (2014) takes place in the Coral Bay section of St. John, one of the world’s most unique communities. The murder of a loud and abusive tourist, the first of three violent deaths, is solved by three Coral Bay residents, despite the ineptness and corruption of the Virgin Islands Police Department.
All That Endures (2013) set in the 1960s, is a tale about a group of people, too young to be beatniks, too old to be hippies, who establish Walden Brook Farm, an intentional community in the western Massachusetts hill town of Keetsville, in fictional Wessex County. The novel is the story of how the residents of Walden Brook Farm and the members of the Keetstown community overcome their suspicions of one another during a time of great social change.
Poet’s Seat (2012) tells the story of Agent Nathan Hunt who makes a decision that will change his life and sets in motion a series of events involving the Mafia, the Russian Mob, the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and the small town of Graham, Massachusetts, county seat of Wessex County, where he has gone to ground as Eddie Sanders a janitor at the local community college.
Borrowed Trouble (2011) is set in Greenfield, a small town in Western Massachusetts, and the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire. A tale alternating between dark criminality and dark humor, Borrowed Trouble traces the moral progress of its main character, Grady Feaster, as he copes with the obstacles presented by family, friends, and adversaries.
Incident on Tuckerman Court, (2010) set in Greenfield, Massachusetts, is a mystery broadly in the mode of Flannery O’Connor, but with a perverse twist on her use of the grotesque in the service of faith. Thomas Rutherford, a political scientist teaching at the University of Massachusetts finds his unexpectedly shattered when his wife tells him she has experienced a life-altering revelation. Frightened and disoriented, he walks outside to gather his wits and is attacked by two men who beat him mercilessly, leaving him blind in one eye.
The ground of his marriage dropping away beneath him, Rutherford is forced to live in a two-dimensional world. One of his attackers, a man named Joseph, returns. Remorseful, Joseph vows an undying friendship that drives Rutherford to the edge of desperation as he fends off Joseph’s many poses and varying personalities.
The Serpent and the Hummingbird (2009) brings together a fascinating and diverse group of characters, including Jolene Falkner, a waitress in the Carolina mountain town of Lunsford, Thomas Dotson, a burned out MIT artificial intelligence researcher, Ward Crowley, a guitar playing disbarred lawyer who believes he is a victim of extra-terrestrial kidnapping, Edd Guy, a tobacco farmer turned preacher, Norma Jean Shelton, the daughter of a serpent handling preacher who stands on a corner in Johnson City, Tennessee, luring men into her father’s storefront church, and Rearview Man, who wanders Lunsford in camouflage, a bicycle mirror clipped to the brim of his baseball cap.
The novel explores the nature of faith, presenting a group of characters who cling to a variety of deeply held beliefs. All are finally brought together during services in the Rominger Church of the Holiness of God in Jesus’ Name, a Pentecostal serpent handling church.
Dr. Thomas Burton, an authority on serpent handling Pentecostal worshipers and a founder of the Center for Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University wrote that The Serpent and the Hummingbird contains the finest fictional account he has read of this belief and its practices.
The Cold Dark Heart of the World (2008) is a tale about the nature of male violence in the form of a supernatural thriller that draws on the oral storytelling traditions of southern Appalachian folk life..
I have six more novels ready for publication, Shadows and Acts, a historical fiction based on the life of George Berrell, an actor literally born in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater in1849 who wandered the country in his late teens and early twenties, returned to the theater where he spent most of his adult life, ending his career in motion pictures, including a major role in John Ford’s 1917 first full-length feature, “Straight Shooting.” Sexually abused by John Wilkes Booth, Berrell’s personal life never recovered from those experiences.
The second, A Place in Paradise, is a supernatural thriller set on the island of St. John in the US Virgin islands.
The third, fourth and fifth February Heat, Caribbean Ice, and October Fury, make up a trilogy of detective thrillers set in the early 1980s on the imaginary Caribbean island of St. Ursula, a British territory very near the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands. Much of the action in Caribbean Ice takes place on St. John.
The sixth novel, The Old World, set in the 1980s during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, is the story of a physician in a for-profit hospital who discovers that the top hospital administrator has hired an assassain to murder underinsured long-term patients in order to contain costs.
