Library of Completed Novels

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!  

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 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.  

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.