My new novel, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, goes on sale at Amazon.com on March 29. To my friends who cling to their tightly packed paper, I apologize because the new novel, like the last one, will be unavailable in print, at least for now. I'd like to sell paper novels. I own the rights to …
Category: Books
No Ordinary Indiscretion
In the past year, I've read a lot of chases. Hapless victims of fate, running for their lives. A young man trying come to grips with a mother both dead and outlandish. The Southwest. The Mid-Atlantic. Florida. Polly Iyer's Indiscretion begins on the coast of South Carolina and changes venues to Boston, where it …
What a Tangled Web I’ve Weaved
I'm sort of a mass of contradictions this morning. I want to get myself in the mood to work on fiction, but, so far, this has been one of those mornings in which I can't come up with a topic, and so I bide some time by reading my timeline, and checking the weather, and …
The End of the Tunnel
This is bound to be a unique kind of book review. First of all, the book I just finished, Shine, is the third in a series. Secondly, it's not fiction. Thirdly, I've known the author, Joey Holland, for most of my life, probably dating back to some swing set or playground slide or sandbox. …
New and Terrible Horizons
Being in an informal community of writers -- the ranks of the Amazon KindleScout winners are growing exponentially as more and more of the program's novels are released -- has led me down disparate paths. Jennifer Skutelsky led me up into the Andes in her Grave of Hummingbirds. As such, I felt a certain kinship …
Christmas with All My Imaginary Friends
This Christmas I'm thankful for my characters. Not the characters, mind you. As a lad, Christmas was full of "characters": the uncle who always showed up sloshed on Christmas morning and stayed all day long, and my father, who would drink with anybody but him, fleeing to parts unknown; the Christmas Eve parties with the …
A Weird, Wonderful Tale of the Road
It's no surprise I enjoyed Joe Clifford Fausts's joy ride of a novel, Drawing Down the Moon. Dating back to a dive into the Beat Generation about a decade ago, I've grown fond of "road novels." My first, The Audacity of Dope (2011), was about a songwriter leading bad guys (and girls) on a merry …
The Vitality of Extrasensory Youth
Lexi Sobado -- AKA "Alex," AKA "Lynx" -- is a remarkable young woman. She is immensely educated -- none of it formal -- and has extrasensory perceptions that warn her of danger. She has a newlywed husband deployed in the Middle East, extra-official relationship with an extra-government entity, and a serial killer after her. She …
A Triumph of Youthful Self-Reliance
James Morris's fine thriller, What Lies Within, conjures up suspicions that gnaw away at the reader's psyche, which is exactly what a thriller is supposed to do. Shelley Marano is an intelligent young woman from a working-class family, a high school senior getting ready for college. As tends to be the case in a thriller, …
Grab a Novel, Don’t Cost Nothing
It's not raining now. Well, maybe a mist. It's been raining. Last night it was heavy when I was driving home from Spartanburg. It's going to rain some more. A lot more. On The Weather Channel, it looks like a wall of fire is coming through South Carolina on Saturday. Any old rain is light …
Nightrider's Lament 