Library of Completed Novels

Officer Alan Morrison hoped that someone would finally win the damn drawing tonight. The Queen of Hearts game, sponsored by the American Legion, had been ongoing–the pot growing exponentially and then astronomically–for the past fifty-two weeks with no one choosing the envelope with the queen of hearts. . . If the person whose raffle ticket was drawn tonight didn’t select the queen, the person whose raffle ticket was drawn next week would win

automatically. Then the hysteria and frenzy, the drunken brawls and bad blood, the crying and shrieking would end. And finally, the town would be at peace. Yeah, right. Alan had only worked as a police officer in Liberty for two months, and there hadn’t been a moment of peace. Perhaps the contagious mania of the drawing was making

people do crazy, unlawful acts . . . —Excerpt from “Demolition Derby”

A manic fever grips the small town of Liberty, IL, as the Queen of Hearts jackpot surpasses one million dollars. Liberty, once a thriving coal mining town, has fallen on hard times, and its residents have invested their hopes and dreams in the weekly drawing. When someone eventually wins, hopes shatter and disappointment arrives. The characters in each of the thirteen stories deal with the loss of dreams that are far more important than the drawing, and if they’re lucky, the possibility of new beginnings.

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.

We are going to find that piece of shit, Jackie. And then we’re going to kill him. 

The call from her sister Tessa comes out of the blue after years of separation, but Jackie isn’t surprised. When either Jackie or Tessa finds herself in another dire predicament, she calls her sister for help. This time, Tessa wants Jackie to help her track down her ex-husband, Hudson, who has run away to elope with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Mia.

Born only eleven months apart, Jackie and Tessa are both seven on that fatal Christmas day in 1987 at their grandparents’ Double D ranch in Wickenburg. While their parents and grandparents heatedly engage in yet another bourbon-fueled argument, no one pays attention to their little brother Donny wailing in the back room. When Jackie and Tessa take matters into

their own hands, the day ends in tragedy. In shock and fearful of what will happen if they tell the truth, they swear each other to secrecy. That singular act defines the rest of their lives. 

Jackie and Tessa are thirty-eight and thirty-seven now, but the past continues to haunt them as they take a road trip to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to stop the wedding of Hudson and Mia. They race against time as they encounter one roadblock after another: Roger Milsap, a former hippie and drug addict; two tweaker exes of Roger’s who tie up Tessa and leave her for

snake food; a chase through the woods; and finally, Mia herself, who turns out not to be the perfect daughter Tessa thought she was. So Jackie and Tessa are forced to make one more trip back to the Double D, the place

where they always bury their dead . . .

If walls could talk, the mysterious Hospitality House could spin a story about three generations of women who live there . . .

Nicole doesn’t know what to make of Hospitality House when she and her husband move into the large, crumbling antebellum mansion outside the small town of Lebanon, IL, in 2008. The mysterious place certainly feels haunted by events of the past, with its gloomy interior, that looming balcony above, and a stone fireplace cavernous enough to walk into.

Victoria, a former nurse, has many of the same questions about Hospitality House when her husband Gordon, a troubled Vietnam vet, brings her to his ancestral home as his new bride. By 1968, newly widowed, Victoria takes in five teenage runaways as boarders to keep the place afloat. Led by the manipulative Wynona, the girls inevitably get into trouble, and it’s up to Victoria to help them.

Sandra returns to Hospitality House in 1988. One of the teenage boarders in 1968, she wants to come to terms with what happened during that turbulent year. Now a raging alcoholic, Sandra wanders the rooms of the house remembering the months of drug-fueled actions, Wynona’s insistence that a mourning woman haunted the house, and all the dangerous games Wynona instigated that culminated in the heartbreaking Treasure Hunt.

The three generations of women have more in common than the mysterious house, but will Hospitality House finally reveal its most precious secret of all?

 One of these days, my husband’s going to murder me. And he’ll get away with it. When Jenna makes that dire prediction when they co-own a beauty salon in a small southern Illinois town, Nadia doesn’t think Jenna’s husband, Buster, is capable of such a heinous crime. She knows Buster is abusing Jenna, but she can’t persuade Jenna to leave the man–until Labor Day weekend 2013. Nadia is the only eyewitness when Buster pushes Jenna off a boat on Rend Lake during a raging thunderstorm.

Ten years later, Nadia works at Les Cheveux, an upscale salon in north Scottsdale. After a second failed marriage, Nadia leads a lonely existence. She’s cut all ties with her past and immerses herself in her work. She has a loyal clientele that trusts her enough to tell Nadia their deepest, darkest secrets. “Your secret is safe with me,” she always tells the five women, even as she has recorded every story in her client record book.

But then Molly, Nadia’s sister, shows up unexpectedly. Beautiful Molly has always been unpredictable and volatile. Now Molly announces she has married Buster, who will be following her to Arizona when he gets out of prison. Molly has always been a compulsive liar, but Nadia does know one thing: Buster wants to finally eliminate the only eyewitness to his crime, her. 

Nadia needs to find a permanent way to get rid of Buster and his escalating threats. And to do that, she needs money. Nadia would never rob her clients, but she does know their deepest, darkest secrets, doesn’t she?

Claire has a knack for hosting successful Sunday brunches, but this one, the last, will be her masterpiece. It has to be perfect. She has spent hours honing the menu and refining the guest list. Despite the emotional turbulence of the past 11 months, everyone she invited happily accepted, including her almost ex-husband Lee and the hussy he left her for, her former best friend Lydia. The book club bitches, her former boss from Dress for Success who fired her, and the young man responsible for her daughter Kelly’s recent overdose will all attend. The neighbors who murdered her beloved dog, Lydia’s distraught and suicidal husband, and daughter round out the guest list. Yes, everyone who betrayed Claire during the worst year of her life will be drinking her mimosas and eating her very special spinach and mushroom frittata.

But people do not behave according to plan. Old resentments and past secrets resurface as the drinks flow and inhibitions fly out the window. To make matters worse, Kelly shows up uninvited with her kleptomaniac new boyfriend, along with Claire’s mother, Abigail, and her new partner. As the minutes of the brunch tick by, Claire begins to question her decision to use the highly poisonous death cap mushrooms in the frittata. These guests have wronged her and deeply disappointed her over the last year, but do they deserve to die?