Winterkill
(Now Available)
Running from the past, hiding a secret-that's what Ben Dalton has been doing for
the last ten years. But he's about to crash headlong into an immutable fact: No matter
how hard he runs, his past is going to catch up with him. And when his secret gets out,
it's going to destroy him.
Ben's secret may seem relatively harmless: he was a Communist in New York during
the 1940s. But it's 1957, the Cold War is on, and this is small-town America. To make
matters worse, Ben is no longer a Communist and can't defend what he once believed. Friends
desert him, and he finds himself alone, scared, and without purpose in life. By moving
to the small town of Sitwell, New Hampshire, he hopes to make a new start.
But things are never that simple, and Ben encounters another of those immutable truths: He
can't walk away from his past without leaving an essential part of himself with it. As word
slowly leaks out about his past, he becomes trapped in a web of lethargy and denial. But
denial, it turns out, is useless. Once the secret is out, Ben and his family become the
targets of an escalating series of attacks that snowball over the years into blackmail,
attempted rape, arson, and ultimately, death.
Between assaults on himself and his family, Ben tries to get on with his life, but he's
defeated at every turn and sinks into a profound, possibly deadly, inertia. His wife Kate,
whose instinct is always to fix things that have gone wrong, spends her life agonizing over
Ben and trying to protect him. And while no one is paying attention, their daughter Nicky
crosses the threshold into adolescence. All attempts to rein her in are too little too late,
and her dawning adolescent rebellion explodes into full-blown insurrection. In the end, two
people are dead, three teenagers are missing, and the fine stitching that holds the family
and the town together begins to unravel.
Paradoxical Undressing ©
(A Work in Progress)
This novel deals with the choices that people make and how these choices change
the course of their lives. The main character finds himself struggling to cope with
the tragic circumstances that have befallen him, circumstances that are largely due to
poor choices he made one sunny September morning during a family outing to the beach. The
story is based on the premise that what a person thinks he needs most is the very thing
that has the most power to destroy him. The book is a work in progress and should be
available in 2004.
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