Welcome to Laurie's Library of Completed Novels

Most people can’t tell a good wine from a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck, and based on that assumption, three suburban housewives learn how to run a high-stakes con.  From their humble start gluing their fictional Éclatant wine labels over Two-Buck Chuck labels, Reggie, Audrey, and Cynthia grow bolder and more sophisticated in the fake French wines they offer at their monthly women-only wine club parties.  With each party, the stakes get higher, the women get greedier, and their mistrust of each other grows.

The women are so busy with their kitchen operation--pouring cheap wine into expensive bottles--that they don’t pay much attention to how the Tigerette Pom Squad, with the skimpy outfits and risqué performances, is changing their three daughters’ lives.  Husbands, too, have gone AWOL for significant reasons, and while there is more money, it is never enough.  And never mind that what they’re doing is illegal.  Throw in a kidnapping, possible matricide, and an old boyfriend trapped in a Panic Room . . . Well, things get complicated. 

The Wine Club is available now on Amazon!

After years of separation, twin sisters Sam and Alex are overjoyed to be reunited when Sam moves across the street from Alex in Scottsdale.  But for Sam, one thing mars her happiness.  After a long struggle with fertility and having lost her only child to SIDS, her one remaining hope to have another child is to ask her twin sister to be her surrogate.  Alex would do anything for her beloved Sam, but being a surrogate for her twin sister tests the limits of her devotion and shakes the foundation of her marriage and relationships with her two teenage children.

The unorthodox way that the baby is conceived further complicates matters for both families involved.  When Alex discovers that Arizona law dictates that the woman who gives birth to a child is his legal mother, the tension and resentments escalate even higher.  Which twin should rightfully be the mother of the baby?

Across the Street is available now on Amazon! 

On March 22, 1982, a troubled, full-term pregnant woman escapes from the maternity ward of a hospital and climbs to the top of a 100-foot light tower in an abandoned railway yard.  Melody Arnold is convinced that her baby is dead, and neither reassurances from her doctor nor the fact that she is a nurse can convince her otherwise.  She jumps.  She doesn’t survive, but amazingly, when the paramedics arrive, a tiny foot is protruding from the woman’s stomach, twitching . . .

Thirty years later, Kat Flowers has just turned thirty and is working another dead-end job.  When she receives a birthday card from a father she hasn’t seen in fourteen years, its cryptic message prompts Kat to take a journey back to Chicago--and to a mother she never knew.  She shares the journey with the charismatic Zen--who has reasons of his own for returning home--and tries to solve the complicated mystery of her mother’s identity and why she made that tragic leap.  It is only then that Kat begins to understand herself.

The women in David’s life love him.  To each one, he seems to be the perfect man.  David’s mother Catherine, an aging dowager, thinks the world of her only son.  David’s girlfriend Tamara, an ex-soap opera starlet, thinks she and David would make beautiful babies together.  Another girlfriend Denise, a realtor, thinks David is the solution to her unhappy marriage.  And David’s third girlfriend Shania, a free-spirited jewelry designer, thinks David is kindness personified; he even likes her odd little dog, Jigsaw. 

Then David disappears without a trace, and as they search for him, the women find out about each other. Jealousy rears its ugly head, and they alternately compete against and rally around each other as months go by with no word from David. While the women try to hold onto their memories of the man they loved, they have to face the truth:  He might not have been the man they each thought he was. And it could be that Shania’s obsessed ex-lover, Odette, might know something about David that the other women don’t.  

Hollister McClane is a small-town, southern Missouri, gorgeous (if she does say so herself) heroine who has a knack for accidentally robbing banks, a convenience store, and a possible drug cartel.  She might inadvertently throw in a couple of grand theft autos, but truly, she wouldn’t hurt a fly--not even when that Ruger falls into her lap.  Savvy and self-taught, eternally optimistic and zealously patriotic, Hollister walks, runs, hitchhikes, and drives from one chance encounter to another across America’s heartland.

After accidentally robbing her first bank dressed as Uncle Sam, Hollister sees her newfound life on the run as a matter of Fate.  And it doesn’t hurt that she is a genius at disguises (if she does say so herself).  Hollister tries to do the right thing with her newfound bounty, but somehow, it keeps slipping through her fingers.  Also, there are a few obstacles along the way:  the law, the lovers, the three not-quite-ex-husbands, the babies, and always, world-weary Mama.  When Hollister finally does use that gun, unfortunately, she’s pointing it too close to home.

On one fateful night in October 1991, a local cult band, Phantom and The Riveters, gives the performance of its short career, and at the crowded after-party in a motel, the adrenaline still runs high.  Phantom, the lead guitarist, has more groupies waiting outside his bedroom door than ever before.  But when the party gets out of hand, the band flees the scene when a girl is found floating facedown in the pool.  They don’t get far before their van careens through a guardrail and explodes in a fiery crash.  For years, no one knows if any of them survived.

Twenty-four years later, Lance and Julie land the parts of Romeo and Juliet in Chicago’s Shakespeare in the Parks.   Their attraction is irresistable, and they quickly move in together.  However, their mothers, CeCe and Elise, are not happy.  It’s not because they think that their children are moving too fast and identifying too closely with the “star-cross’d lovers.”  They were both at the last ill-fated concert of Phantom and The Riveters, they were two of the groupies waiting outside the bedroom, and Lance’s and Julie’s birthdays are only days apart . . .

The Jones’ family lore has always been more heroic than ordinary, more about Greek mythology than flesh and blood relatives. But after all, the patriarch, the eminent Dr. Harold Jones, is a retired Classics professor who bestowed upon his children the names Apollo, Artemis, and Athena, and insists on referring to his wife and himself as Hera and Zeus. The Jones siblings had never questioned the lack of family pictures, heirlooms, and relatives until Zeus is diagnosed with brain cancer and takes matters into his own hands.  

Now adults, the three Jones siblings are dealing with their own life-changing problems when they are forced to come together and face the realities of their parents’ lives and death.  There are far more questions than answers.  When Athena finds a headline from a yellowed newspaper in the attic that screams, “DOUBLE MURDER,” it provides the meager clue that will eventually lead her, Apollo, and Artemis to Seminole, Texas, and a decades-old tragedy that might reveal their parents’ ultimate secret.

I just completed my newest novel, Queen of Hearts.  This book is of a bit of change-up for me.  It is a fictional collection of lightly-connected short stories based on a woman that wins a huge "Queen of Hearts" card lottery at an American Legion Post in a small town in Southern Illinois. 

It has been many years since I last authored a collection of short stories (1983, when I was 23 years old). I very much enjoyed writing about a variety of characters with individual stories unconstrained by a complex plot with a few protagonists.  I also enjoyed going back to my roots by placing the characters in and around the rural towns  of Southern Illinois where grew up.  I already miss it!

Stay tuned for more details!