Books

Not since The Little Prince fell in love with a rose has a book captured the magic of a world where love longs for what it cannot have, recovers what it has lost, and the unimaginable flutters with luminescent wings out of crystal caves. 

Panache, an exuberant road gypsy, is on her way to the mountains.  Benjamin Pencil, The Man With The Glass Heart, has no use for mountains.  But their paths cross, their lives intertwine, and Benjamin follows her up, up, up, to where hills are smothered in poppies and a man can reach out and write his name in the sky.

Every small town has an eccentric or two, and Killdeer, New York, is no exception.  Morgan Mason attracts more than a few stares when he drives through town on his ramshackle tractor wearing a skirt.  His sister is mortified, his neighbor resents the Skirt Man’s interference, and a local preservationist is horrified by Morgan’s huge satellite dish.

A tragic house fire puts arson investigator Billy Nightingale and state trooper Sebastian Bly on the trail of an unusual killer.  While investigating the clues at the fire scene – and taking care of the mysterious baby who survived – they discover a dangerous and determined arsonist.  But despite her new family’s efforts to protect her, the young survivor must confront her horrifying past in a chilling showdown with a murderous mother determined to finish what she started.

“Weeping” is an arson investigator's terms, and also the state that befalls the grief-stricken survivors of a fire.  So it's with a raised eyebrow and incipient suspicion that New York claims representative Fritillary Quilter encounters cool, calculating, and unemotional Faith Browning, whose sister Dorsey has just burned to death in their family home. 

Someone has set a fire at the Zigfield Art Museum in upper Manhattan.  It’s a “locked room” kind of fire that couldn’t possibly have occurred.  Or could it?  Wylie Nolan, assisted by attorney Max Bramble, suddenly has to reconstruct one of the most puzzling fires of his career.

Meanwhile, at Wylie’s office building, someone is setting fires in the ladies’ room down the hall, trying to implicate Wylie's friend, attorney Miranda Yee. 

And on City Island, a final, more devastating fire takes one life and threatens to destroy another.

Cable-TV mogul Stanfield Standish wrote the book and broke the rules in the news and entertainment industry.  When his charred body is found inside the burnt-out remains of his classic 1930 Duesenberg sedan, his family files a $52 million damage suit.

Julian Solo is a research psychobiologist pushing the limits of scientific knowledge by delving into the “forbidden” area of life after death.  Unlike Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who created a living being from inanimate body parts, Julian seeks to discover a way for humans to enter and leave the death state at will.