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Former teacher Zeph Grafton has no intention of giving in to the manipulation of others, not from those who attempt to bully him, and not from those who profess to love him. When he meets guarded mail carrier Kess, manipulated in her own right by a stalker in a white van, the attraction between them is undeniable, mutual, and hard for either to ignore in spite of their complicated circumstances. Each feels something about the other they cannot put words to, but fate has more in store for them than a few quick passionate encounters. There’s a bigger, older picture taking shape on their canvas, made up of past misdeeds, noisy misconceptions and a lot of assumptions in need of correction. Luckily for them, Zeph’s joke-telling father Ike, a casino blackjack dealer, and his friend Buck Justice, a six-foot-seven culinary artist, are in their corner and doing their best to help put all the barking dogs to bed.
Book 5 in the Featuring Eris Renard series
News that Madeleine Heron and her husband Ishkode Mikom have gone missing in Montana sees Eris, his daughter Ursa, Winter, and Ronja on a journey north to find answers. Winter’s distraction at learning he’s about to become a dad makes things difficult for him when he begins seeing horrifying visions of a dead infant in his dreams, and the more time Eris spends with Ursa, the more evident his feelings for her mother Madeleine become to Ronja. Back in Colorado, a strange and terrifying menace has decided that something in the absent Ursa’s bedroom in the home she shares with her parents is worth his nightly attention, and the retired detective Wendell Forte, Winter’s friend, is asked by Eris to have a look into the situation while the house is empty. Meanwhile, in trying to solve the mystery of the couple’s disappearance, Winter and Ronja stumble across a helicopter crash and attempt to help the survivor, a deaf man whose hands suffer third degree burns. A wild series of circumstances connect those responsible for the crash to one of the missing indigenous women Madeleine and Mikom traveled to Montana to remind legislators about, and a rogue member from a nearby religious colony may hold the answers all of them need.
FINDING MADELEINE coming in 2022
Book 4 in the Featuring Eris Renard series
Eris returns home from the road to find his half-brother, new dad of twins, Clint, stressed and overworked, taken advantage of by irresponsible employees at the bar and burdened at home with twice the chores. Kansas friends Ben and Minda have moved in next door and welcomed Henny Bedayah and Ben’s former physician father Reid Cloane for a test visit to see how they like the area. During Henny’s first venture into new surroundings she finds herself caught up in a news-making event that puts her life in danger and soon affects everyone in both households, including Winter Slocum and his partner Milla who have traveled from Denver. In the midst of this, Eris is called upon by flighty bar worker Mattie, who claims ravens killed the pet of her new roommate, and Ben’s latest construction project opens a door both he and Clint wish had never revealed itself. Ronja and Bara receive news from an old adversary, and Eris’s daughter Ursa soon joins the crowd of both expected and unexpected guests, culminating in a visit none of them will soon forget in this fourth book of adventures featuring Eris Renard.
Book 3 in the Featuring Eris Renard series
Though five months pregnant, Ronja eagerly accompanies her sister Bara and their company of friends in a quest to find a child gone missing from a campground near the Rocky Mountain National Park. Ronja learns just how much of a caveman Eris Renard can be once they reach the site of the disappearance and encounter a dark and menacing force of nature alien to all of them, even the experienced trackers in the group. Ronja, Eris and Winter are about to reconsider everything they think they know about natural order…and babies.

Winter Slocum
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#2 in the Featuring Eris Renard series
After gruff Winter Slocum, finder of missing persons, gets a new case he calls on the assistance of former conservation officer Eris Renard and the family of friends the two of them developed while rescuing the beautiful Haugen sisters in Eris Renard. Ronja and Bara are back, along with Clint Long Elk and Harold Heap of Birds to help Winter solve the disappearance of a Denver woman’s secretive husband and two children.

A decade after the murderous events at Green Lake, former conservation officer Eris Renard finds his life’s direction has changed, not of his own choosing but due to the obsessions and brutal tactics of others. He meets a gravel-voiced finder of missing persons named Winter Slocum and through him a family of Scandinavian women with a traumatized deputy attached to their case. The reclusive Eris soon finds himself caught up in a far ranging rescue that reunites him with a half brother and a mother he planned never to see again. The past complicates the present, and to endure what’s being asked of him he’ll need to forgive some and open his hands to others. He’ll cope in his own implacable fashion, but first he has to ensure everyone survives someone called The Magician, and then somehow capture a kidnapper about to be abducted himself. By aliens.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please read the above synopsis carefully. This story takes place ten years after Green Lake. Ten. Years. Don’t expect anything to remain the same. A lot can and often does change in ten years, so please, no more complaints because you just finished reading Green Lake, found this book, and nothing was as you expected. Our beloved Eris has many more adventures to come. Just like you and I. So you’ve been duly warned, okay?

Sam Post just wants to help his new employee, the sullen diminutive Anna. He doesn’t know she’s sullen for a reason or that her autistic hyper-sexual brother may kill him for trying to do it.
5 stars ***** at Amazon

What if coronal mass ejections that cause auroras and screw up satellite signals also tamper with us? Science says the effects of solar streams pass right through our cells, but do they? A theory about crime gets a cop fired in THE DEVIL LIVES IN LAWRENCE
5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads!
A routine real estate showing in the history-rich college town of Lawrence, Kansas takes a dark turn and brings Eve Mellor and Shawnee pilot Nate Catton together to face events littered with symbols too confusing to understand–and a few decapitated bodies. Neither wants to believe the bloodshed is attached to him or her, but the evidence proving one of them right is confounded by a meddling detective, a missing head, and a stalker who can’t take no for an answer. Add to the mix a theory about crime that cost Eve her job and follows her everywhere, bringing back people from her past that she’d rather not think about, let alone face, particularly when Nate keeps bringing up nearby Stull, and the nation’s fascination with the place believers call one of the “Seven doorways to hell.”

BROTHER LOWDOWN
Three people with dark pasts meet when a drifter called Brother Lowdown comes to town. Simon Brith is a complex detective known for his intense reactions to females. Terra Donlevy is a cosmetics heiress who eschews anything feminine and harbors a violent abhorrence of most men. The oddly beautiful but twisted Brother Lowdown will target both in his terrible need for justice.
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DUMFORD BLOOD
The birth of Edie Jackson’s baby will at last make the population of tiny Dumford, Kansas a thousand people, a number they would have reached a month ago if the latest baby born hadn’t disappeared from its crib a day after arriving home. Edie’s brother, police officer Ben Portlock realizes someone in their secretive little town has a thing for killing pregnant animals and he’s worried, not just because his sweet scatterbrained sister Edie is close to her due date, but because his old flame Lura Taylor has come home to Dumford after spending eight years in prison for killing her father. Ben knows which direction wagging fingers will begin to point once the people in town realize there is someone among them with a taste for grisly death.
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BORDERLAND
With the help of womanizing fireman friend Nolan Wulf, widowed ex-cop Vic Kimmler packs up his bags and his two little girls and hits the road to take over a stud farm on the Colorado border. What no one told him is that the house he’s inherited is haunted, and the town wants Vic to use his skills and take over where his late father left off.
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NIGHTMARE
On a remote ranch deep in the Flint Hills at a clinic for women diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, patients are dying in extremely violent ways. The staff has invited Dr. Bryan Raleigh and his team, along with his journalist brother, David, to write about the clinic, and from the moment of their arrival they begin to unravel secrets about the family that owns the ranch, including a strange blood ritual practiced by the hemophiliac son and even more bizarre rites performed by the grotesque, voyeuristic wife of the clinic’s director. Soon David and the others begin to suspect the rude, imperious woman who never leaves the third floor may be somehow responsible for the deaths of traumatized patients dying one by one, and the closer they get to the truth, the bigger the threat becomes to their own safety.
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THE MOONS OF SUMMER
Guy Driscoll thinks he’s doing the right thing by giving up his job at a Chicago newspaper to get his promiscuous daughter out of the city and into the small town life Guy knew as a child. All he does is deliver her into the line of fire of someone who’s reached the desperation point and can see only one way to maintain his standing in the community. Vernon Diest’s family has tended the dead of Colson since its inception and he takes his work seriously, though Elma, his shy, thin, deaf mute step-sister has not been as well tended. Still, she adores Vernon and will do anything for him…to a point.
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THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Nurse Abra Ahrens is hired to care for a man she believes is HIV positive but it’s a lie perpetrated by his brother, her boss, the chief of staff at the hospital. He chose Abra because she has a reputation as a recluse and has no real relationships outside the hospital besides her mother, noted psychiatrist Lee Ahrens. That changes when Abra meets handsome next door neighbor, Zane Campbell, an ex-detective turned ocularist and medical artist. Like Abra, Zane doesn’t get out much, primarily because no one can understand his speech when he talks, thanks to the bullet in the face that ended his police career. His youngest son Eli makes fun and mimics his father, but is sobered by his older brother Holt’s news that a girl from their neighborhood has gone missing. Another neighbor, a mentally disabled adult named Chance finds a bike near a bridge and when Eli sees the bike he recognizes it as the missing girl’s. Neighbor Mark Vaughn, a car dealer with a criminal past would love for the swarm of police that descends to deal with the deafening bird problem caused by the people next door to him. Craig Peterwell’s dozen exotic birds screech, squawk and scream day and night, making sleep impossible for Mark and his wife Valerie’s baby daughter. When confronted, Peterwell becomes angry. Craig Peterwell has been getting angry a lot lately. He can’t understand why no one listens to him. He wants his wife Louise to listen but she doesn’t, and in the space of a few minutes on a warm summer evening Craig Peterwell sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life, and the face of the neighborhood, forever.
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GREEN LAKE
Suddenly widowed and now penniless Madeleine Heron is forced to move into her sister’s vacation cabin on rural Green Lake, next door to taciturn Native American conservation officer Eris Renard. Instead of the peace and solitude she hopes to find at the lake Madeleine finds herself witness to depravity, blackmail, and murder among the strange residents. And in spite of the danger, she falls in love.
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SATYR’S GRAZE
In half-hearted collusion with a neighbor desperate to find a runaway husband, architect Etta Baxter agrees to vacation on the mid-California coast in the sleepy town of Satyr’s Graze, where she steps into a magnificent stone house with a monster on the outside in the form of a gargoyle and discovers there might be a monster lurking on the inside as well. The possibility of a peaceful retreat vanishes as event after event places Etta at the center of conflict. She becomes part of a blood-soaked crime and meets a family she won’t soon forget, particularly when one of the owners, a wheelchair bound psychic named Toby, who has a tall, handsome twin called Noel, claims Etta has known all of them before, in lives lived thousands of years ago, and that someone or some ‘thing’ among them has unfinished business with everyone in the house.
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SLAUGHTERS OF THE RACE
While doing a stint for bank fraud the unlucky Joe Riggins meets kindly Chung Zhang whom he learns murdered nine women in a bizarre soul mate creating scheme for old money back in China. In prison the elderly man is his mentor, but Zhang befriended Joe for a reason, he realizes after women start dying again upon Joe’s release. As he begins to suspect the plan for his downfall is bigger than anyone can imagine, involving perhaps his own government, unexpected help comes in the form of cool, inhibited and very British restaurant owner Hester Haley and the unlikeliest ally of all, a cop who believes him.
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THE TIGER’S SPRING
Sequel to Brother Lowdown
Cosmetics heiress Terra Donlevy shuns the trappings of wealth and lives a simple life with a modest security system and a few dogs to keep her safe. Junius Redwine is newly out of prison and becomes increasingly insistent that Terra place a value on the life his son Leon saved when he prevented Terra’s murder at the hands of deadly Joshua Bern, also known as Brother Lowdown. For protection Terra relies heavily on Simon Brith, the troubled homicide detective who has made a habit of rescuing her, but things are changing between them. Simon wants Terra but she stalls at every turn, frustrating him almost as much as the latest case he and his partner Dan Cox have pulled. Someone is killing men and dumping their bodies in a windbreak. Known misogynist Simon zeroes in on tall, exotic Ivory Pandeen, exquisite with her black hair, dark eyes and long legs and if Terra Donlevy attracts one kind of man, Ivory attracts another. All of them want something from these two women and a few are going to be surprised to find out just what they receive.
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Four years ago, Breton “Eaton” Stone lost his little sister inside an abandoned amusement park. He’s gone back to look for her every day since. It’s how he knows about the Japanese film crew the new owner’s musician brother Moe Sexton is sent in to find. It’s how he knows about cameras placed around the park, and strange noises every night. He sees lots of people who shouldn’t be in the overgrown post-anyone-giving-a-shit wasteland and he’d rather none of them were there, because they’re only making his task more difficult. The good news is, with the unwitting help of all these strangers he’s going to find his sister. The bad news is that after he finds her, someone finds him. (Warning: adult material.)
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ROLLERCOASTER 2: After the Fall
Two of the abused young girls rescued from the abandoned amusement park are teenagers now, and though everyone believes their nightmare is over, for Audra Stone and Gretel Gooch, living in the real world with normal people may prove scarier than the corpse-filled room in the park’s tunnel. And there’s still the matter of the abandoned park, back in the hands of a Gooch, a chilling woman who shows no remorse for the crimes of her family and may even have been an offsite participant. A frightening force with ancient roots may be the source of the family’s evil, providing a harrowing conundrum: Once you destroy a monster in this life, how do you keep it from coming back in the next?
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***
Short Story Collections:
FIXING THE DOG, SEX SATURDAY AND MORE TALES
A collection of humorous, frightening and offbeat tales from the mind that brought you Green Lake, Eris Renard, Nightmare, Borderland, The Neighborhood, The Moons of Summer, and many other titles.

THE VISION AND OTHER TALES
A collection of tales by the author of Brother Lowdown, Borderland, The Moons of Summer, The Neighborhood and Green Lake. Join in for the mysterious happening in The Vision and stick around until the final gasp of The Last Secret.
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***
Written as S.J. STRAYHORN:
BLACK NIGHT
Some crimes are too horrible to forget, and some just keep happening over and over again. In a town where a frontier military fort was once converted to an orphanage for destitute children, dark deeds took place. A woman who lived there has come back to face down the ghosts that torment her but when her daughter falls for the ex-con next door she realizes the past is about to repeat itself.
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***
Written as DYLAN HARSON:
KANSAS BLUE

Former Cavalry Lieutenant Austin Bourke wants to break free from his past and leading a group of people who seek to take advantage of the Homestead Act in Kansas seems like the best way to do it, until he meets Danni Coopersand, a golden-haired woman saddled with a husband broken by the war and a half-breed Indian youth with a need for revenge against the white stepbrothers who slit his throat and left him to die. Together they travel across the plains of Kansas with a group including a Mormon family with more than one wife, one of them with a salacious past, and they encounter renegades, floods and savagery from Indians bent on retaining their way of life. At the end of the trail only the strong will survive, and in 1867 Kansas, where the horizon is endless and the sky goes on forever, the strong are damned few.
ABILENE

S.K. Epperson Barnes and Noble Page
During his son’s baseball game a tax attorney catches a glimpse of a birthmark on a man’s leg and his blood runs cold with the memories that come. When he was five years old he saw something he shouldn’t have, went somewhere he never should have gone and paid harsh consequences. His eighteen year old son knows something is up with his dad and confides in his quiet girlfriend, who suffered early trauma of her own and begins to suspect that her boyfriend’s father knows exactly what she went through as a child, may in fact have made the acquaintance of her family’s killer long ago, and now both are determined to go back and find the truth about what lies in Betsy Klausmeyer’s cellar.

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A search for diamonds on an island with a history of murder and insanity leads Sutton De Berg and her adopted older brother Gerard Brach to remember feelings they suppressed years ago. But Sutton’s father, the wealthy Edward De Berg, and her French husband, Paul Dubois, have nefarious plans for any treasures found on the island, and the ghosts that haunt the atoll will wreak havoc and take lives before its deeper truth is revealed, more dangerous than any of them ever imagined.

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A woman and her two young daughters on a ship filled with starving, dying Irish emigrants encounters a bigger challenge than an unknown future in America when she is faced with saving the lives of two people, the captain’s wife, and a recalcitrant English lord fleeing a murder charge.
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Centuries ago, an ancient alchemist’s taste for young girls saw thirteen-year-old Lura Cartaun fleeing for her life. When he catches her, the old monster gives her a choice. Generations later her descendants are still trying to undo the curse placed upon them, a bind that finds child after child dying because of its name. The end to the bind may be in sight, however, with the appearance of another descendant, that of the evil alchemist, who comes to town and decides to do some grave digging. What he unearths causes the entire population of the town to be placed under quarantine, but it also brings two people together whose union has been centuries in the making.
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A golden-throated Brit and his sidekick cameraman try to survive an exclusive gala for the devil’s daughter during the Annual Convention of Witches and Wizards in Catemaco, Mexico.
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A man hired to guard a crypt is betrayed by his ex-soldier sister who knows only part of what’s inside and doesn’t count on there being something else hidden in the gypsy crypt that not only the relatives, but every warring nation on the planet would kill to get their hands on.
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Caleb Watchman steps out of a building and into another time, 1918 at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he rides in a model T, samples absinthe, observes people under siege from influenza and gains dangerous knowledge about the future. He returns home to impart one thing: There is always a bear.
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A death row inmate with only days left to live is recruited by the FBI to obtain information from a wealthy, arrogant Egyptian believed to be behind the murders of several hundred women across the border.
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After escaping a savage kidnapping, earnest girl of science Marti Zaroni goes to her wealthy Uncle Zito for protection instead of the police. She wants him to stop the diabolical men who took her captive and to rescue the unwitting boy who aided in her escape. Zito’s godson and right hand man Angelo Merona is pleased to see her. He’s in love with the stubborn Marti and will do everything he can to help her but first has to deal with his mother, who believes she’s possessed by a demon that has plagued their two families for centuries. Angelo doesn’t have to worry, with his unusual green eyes he’s blessed and no demon will touch him. But everyone around him is fair game Marti learns as she decides to take on her abductors herself.
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From 1871 to 1873 a series of murders committed by a family who called themselves the Benders took place in Kansas. The father, mother, son and daughter took in weary travelers and offered a warm bed to sleep for the night, but dinnertime brought more than a hot meal to the unsuspecting guests. Skulls were caved in, throats were slit. Anything of value was stolen and later sold. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves beyond the farmhouse.
In modern day Coffeyville, Kansas a fussy ex-police detective turned investigator is sent to determine the identity of a certain inn keeper and finds himself wondering if history is about to repeat itself in a very personal way, more meaningful to him than he could ever have imagined.
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A downed plane full of passengers is halved by two realms, one that looks a lot like the hot, dry desert of the southwest, and one that doesn’t, where the flora is blue trees with curly leaves and the fauna is something no one on board has ever seen, but which has obviously seen humans before and is craftily taking pick of the survivors.
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A determined billionaire takes people from refugee camps in the poorest areas around the globe and brings them to the U.S. to live in a grand humanitarian experiment that finds him strung from a tree, bloodied by the Taliban, haunted by an albino African witch, then kidnapped by a homeless man with a tattoo on his butt that reads No Embalming.

Gabrielle ends a relationship, buys a house, and the dead fifteen-year-old prostitute who previously owned the home takes over her existence, until Gabrielle makes a decision to do things her way instead. Of course she pays, and so do half a dozen others, until one of them, a man with a past, the man Gabrielle was going to marry, does what has needed doing for a long time. Sometimes crazy is the only option.

The Jester Takes Three – Wealthy tennis pro Jesse Coffey has had his eye on Wednesday “Wendy” Considine since she was seventeen and he’s unhappy that it’s taken an F4 tornado to finally make her look his way. His wealthy parents hate the idea of their star athlete son even breathing in townie Wendy’s direction. Her brother Sonny hates Jesse, Jesse’s friend Vince hates Wendy, and someone hates all of them enough to bring a gun to the party.
“The three of us hiding beneath the covers while their dad beat on the door was the realest, truest memory I had, the one part of the past I knew for certain happened. Then Jesse Coffey went in the backyard and found…well…you know. I never liked him, by the way. I’m just being honest.” -From the Grand Jury testimony of Bannon McKay