So far...

My internal narrator has died and haunted her Good Samaritan in my novel, The Shadow's Testimony. Mitchell Caulfield pulls Evvie Harmon from her shattered coupe, but her life is beyond hope.  Rejecting the beckoning light on a stubborn impulse, her spirit is locked out, stranded and clinging to her last comfort - the stranger who held her hand as she died.  Evvie discovers, from her unique vantage point, that Mitchell entertains a murderer in his midst.  But she can only warn him while he's deeply asleep, the only way she can communicate with any of the living.  Through her subliminal meddling, Evvie reignites this dormant killer and must struggle to find a way around her limitations to stop further bloodshed and rescue her hero from harm's way.  

If you've ever wondered about that shadow darting at the tail of your vision, or the importance of the dream you can't quite remember, Evvie tells all, as only someone who knows firsthand can. (approx. 90,000 words)

The Liar's Margin

Guilt wears track shoes.  Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn’t matter.  It runs, tireless, to catch you, and it brandishes a sledge hammer.

When the landscaping crew rings the bell, ashen-faced, with news that they’ve found something in the yard, Jason Getty, alone and terrified, burns through the hows and the whys.  He’d been so careful.    

Deep in distraction, Jason runs up the foreman’s heels.  The gardeners have uncovered a body, a skeleton in the mulch bed at the side of the house.  And Jason has no idea who it is.  The other dead body is still just where he’d planted it - on the far end of the property - and it’s had him shredding his hapless fingernails for a year and a half.  

Killing a man and burying him in the backyard had been a bad idea.  And while killing was contrary to Jason’s nature, getting it wrong was him all over.  

With the threat of a police investigation swarming across his lawn, Jason’s over-taxed brain sets to work on a plan B.  And on a night when a desperate killer, a kindhearted cop, and the nosy next of kin all drag their shortcomings to the scene of Jason Getty’s foolhardy bid to dodge the law, everyone’s distance from the hard truth will decide who lives and who dies.

My one and only piece, so far, of Flash Fiction (short stories clocking in at under a thousand words) is titled Mojave Endgame and is a snapshot of a man arriving in a small desert town with a deadly agenda.  A double-cross curls in on itself and it's up to you to decide which cop is more crooked.

My most recent completed work of fiction is a short story called, Heritage and the first sentences set it up it better than anything I can think to say for it:

    My mother always said never to keep a man for more years than you could count on your fingers.  That was a faster-paced game for her than for most.  My mother had managed to lose two of her fingers in completely separate escapades.  Her long, abbreviated left hand and the mischief glittering in her eyes made the joke all the richer.  Everyone's scars are interesting, but hers always hinted at epic…

In Heritage, a daughter struggles to reconcile the memory of her cloak-and-dagger mother with her instincts about the red flags cropping up in her own marriage.  Is she paranoid?  Or is she as right as her mother taught her to be?  Blood and water, nature and nurture; can anyone escape who they were born to be?