My Writing

Work Completed –

In RIVERINE BLOOD, Sheriff’s Detective Delia Chavez pursues a hunter of hunters on Oregon’s Willamette River and discovers a chilling connection between the victims and her brother, who disappeared twenty years before.

Fresh off her second suspension and shooting inquest, Detective Chavez learns that dead hunters are showing up along the banks of the Willamette. All are missing their trigger fingers. Hampered by a corrupt sheriff who’s been bribed to misdirect her investigation, Delia must find a deranged killer on a river she despises and fears.

Complications mount when military fugitive Robb Gatlin haunts that same river. Robb is on a misguided mission to rescue the woman who raised and protected him from an abusive poacher. He’s unaware that his protector and the poacher are dead, or that he’s being tracked down by his vengeance-driven former commanding officer.

The target rings widen on Robb’s back when he becomes Delia’s prime murder suspect. On a river search, she dispatches a vicious assailant, whom she believes was Robb. That night, Robb abducts Delia and takes her to the river, where his revelation gives her the shock of her life.

Work In Progress –

In SON OF TED, Sheriff’s Detective Delia Chavez hits a dead end. Concluding that she will never make Sheriff, Delia moves on to Quantico and completes FBI training.

Her first assignment takes her to Montana where she unmasks a quasi-religious cult responsible for a rash of snail mail homicides. A group that worships the Unabomber and holds a warped vision of his manifesto has groomed a bio-chemistry prodigy to weaponize a deadly toxin. Their aim is to wipe out the brain trust behind nanorobotics—a technological specialty they believe lies at the heart of the social breakdown Ted Kaczynski had ranted about.

Anticipating a SWAT raid on their compound, the cult leader takes Delia and his faltering prodigy hostage, bundles them into a van packed with pressurized containers, and speeds toward San Antonio, site of the world’s largest nanorobotics convention. Delia must somehow free herself and convince the conscience-plagued young scientist to help her thwart the release of twelve cylinders of aerosol-delivered poison—enough to Nagasaki the Super Bowl.

In HURRICANE HOLE, FBI Agent Delia Chavez flies to the Bahamas and reunites with Robb Gatlin, her twice-lost brother. The two weigh anchor for a leisurely vacation cruise on his charter fishing yacht. A tropical cyclone is on the way but the sinking barometer puts Gulfstream billfish on the best bite of the summer. Unbeknownst to Robb, his former SEAL team associates are bent on extracting vengeance on him for stranding them in the Amazon wilderness.

One moment Delia’s yelling “FISH-ON” and scrambling into the fighting chair. The next, she’s puking up seawater while clinging for dear life to a cabin door amidst the burning wreckage of her brother’s bomb-destroyed charter boat. Her brother is nowhere to be seen. Thirty yards downwind, a vertical fin slices through the peak of a monster swell, makes a slow turn and swims toward her. Robb once saved Delia from a watery death. Who can save her this time?

In LEFT COAST RITE, four misfit teenagers drive coastward to crash the high school jocks’ senior skip day party and end up running for their lives down Highway 101.

Bearing deep but invisible scars of private school angst, Jim, Zelda, Roppo and Gerry abscond toward a fading sunset, packing church keys and enough beer to buy their way into a legendary surfside blowout. On their way to Agate beach, Oregon, they carelessly cut off a logging truck and kindle an avenger’s compulsion that casts a shadow the length of the Pacific Coast, and turns their coming of age stories into tests of survival.