Embedded Files
Fully drafted novels and working manuscripts, all looking for a home.
Click on a title to read an excerpt.
"The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without life and the struggle that goes with love?"
-- Carson McCullers
Investment banker Harald Putzmann, convinced he is destined for greatness, finds himself well-known for all the wrong reasons after losing 50 million of the bank's money in the 1991 S&L crisis. Starting over on an inherited farm, circumstances drag this city slicker kicking and screaming from Berlin's high life to rural living in distant Swabian Alb. After encounters with incontinent crows, suspicious neighbors, a horny elf, and the girl next door, Putzmann achieves his destiny in ways he never could have imagined.
Originally published 2003 by the [now defunct] Blue Eagle Press.
A paternity suit. Sad stories and shit cases, but I had bills to pay…
Tampa, 1949: Private eye Bob Russel takes the case because he needs the money. Shipping tycoon Mark Ryan insists that Javier Garcia made his daughter Molly pregnant but seems more interested in how much money he can extract from Garcia Seafoods. The housekeeper knows something and wants to talk, but she ends up dead. A crooked union boss and enforcer for the Vega gang is extorting Ryan. Young Javier vanishes, only to turn up as a floater, while the Vega and Cuento gangs go to war over the bolita rackets. Russel picks his way through a minefield of an expanding gang war and a client who kills to keep a dirty secret under wraps. Russel uncovers the frame, but will he live to take it to court?
Fourteen eggs were all the Stasi needed to coerce Margot into service as a spitzel, an informant in 1981 Dresden. A month later, her Stasi handler directs her to betray her best friend’s family. Husband Emil reveals his long-held idea for escape, taking both families to the West through Czechoslovakia while Margot tells the Stasi the route is through Berlin. Four adults and three small children in a stolen van, traversing Europe’s thickest forests, one step ahead of Czech cops and border troops. Will they make it over the border into the west?
Below are novel projects in progress
They stared and waited as if the newcomer might sprout wings and fly around the yellow skylight the way a junebug orbits the porch lamp. Maybe he’d turn his head all the way around like that little girl in The Exorcist. Nothing exciting like that ever happened in Guilford.
A hippie comes to church in rural Guilford, Virginia in spring 1997, initiating a chain of events that transforms the town and its residents. A mix of Eudora Welty's funny South and Larry Brown's Rough South, the residents battle old ghosts, new problems, and eventually find redemption.
Read also the short story "The Company She Kept," and "Sunday Visitor," chapter excerpts set as short stories.
Heinz squinted southward through the haze across the water. Jagged mountaintops stood silhouetted in the distance, maybe a dozen kilometers away.
So that's what Switzerland looks like.
A chance encounter with widow Sanna in a Friedrichshafen cafe launches a quick courtship and marrying too soon, but at seventy-five, the clock is ticking. Both Heinz and Sanna fight their own demons, between growing up in the East, and living with precarious privilege in the West, trying to make the best of their autumn years.
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