other novels and works in progress

In addition to Hunter Huntress, I have two additional novels ready for acquisition as well as a fourth in the works. Here are some sneak peaks.

Margel's Madness (completed in 2001)

My first novel, dark and semi-autobiographical, focuses on the lingering effects of severe emotional abuse inflicted by damaged—in this case, psychotic—parents and one victim's increasing, almost pathological fear of continuing the pattern and destroying her only child's innocence.

This was a hard one to write; at times leaving me so raw I'd have to put it away for months at a time (no doubt accounting for the eight years it took to finish). The result is a thought-provoking examination of parental power and abuse, and the uphill battle on the part of its victims to keep from carrying it forward into future generations.

Synopsis:
Tension is high in Mosquito Harbor, a sleepy hundred and fifty-year-old working harbor on Maine's Penobscot Bay, where the eccentric Cousins family and a collection of quirky locals are squaring off against wealthy escapees from urban sprawl determined on their own piece of coastal Maine.

Edgy, intense Margel Matthews, a 30-year-old single mother also "from away," is an escapee of a different sort. Raised with a stunning emotional brutality that surfaces at odd moments in her relationship with her own daughter—the free-spirited, four-year-old Simmi—she lands in town desperate for a peaceful haven in which to hold these increasing urges at bay, and finds herself befriended in the face of all townie tradition by Alva Cousins, the crusty 70-year-old town patriarch.

A clandestine deal to develop an important local homestead threatens to blow Mosquito Harbor apart just as Margel begins a dangerous emotional slide into a reluctant and guilt-ridden re-involvement with her family. Reeling from explosive revelations about the part she, herself, may have played in the unspeakable betrayals of her childhood, she's dealt a further blow when the body of a pregnant woman is ultimately traced to the family that has so generously befriended her.

Descending even further into a disturbingly symbiotic relationship with her child, Margel finds herself pursued by an offbeat local adventurer with an eye for her scrappy intensity. His attentions provide a much-needed emotional balm until the morning Simmi nearly loses her life while Margel is with her lover. Guilt-ridden, convinced of her own subconscious culpability, the horrors of her past crash headlong into the emotional pain and longing of the present, forcing the choice between a fleeting chance at happiness and her responsibilities as a parent. Read excerpt.

Matinicus (completed in 2008)

Okay, here's the deal. Matinicus is a real place—unspoiled, completely unpretentious and for centuries home to the same extended families of hard-living, gun-toting lobstermen I've shamelessly maligned in this, my latest novel. Trust me, they'll hardly care. Visitors are barely acknowledged and only minimally tolerated on the island; not that there's much for us, anyway—not in the usual sense. No stores of any kind; no restaurants or bars, banks or theaters. And, interestingly, no police. What happens on Matinicus stays on Matinicus. Literally.

Perfect place for a murder, right? So after several trips out there and a year of research (everything from early nineteenth century diaries and shipwrecks to lobster fishing and dendrology), I had my story—a rollicking, century-spanning double mystery peopled with taciturn fishermen, a seductive bed-hopping stranger, and a debauched university professor mercilessly hounded by the ghost of a child some two hundred years dead.

Synopsis:
Some twenty miles from the rugged Maine coast sits an island where the sea is both monster and muse—a place where the past rises to meet the present in dark, unsettling ways. An intricate weaving of the early 19th century and the present day, the double mystery of Matinicus traces the development of a stubbornly self-sufficient fishing community through the eyes of a disturbed and unhappily married island woman of the 1820s, a conflicted twenty-first century teenage girl, and a middle aged, womanizing university botanist—Dr. Gil Hodges—who arrives on-island to verify the existence of a purported 22 species of wild orchid.

Gil is a man plainly befuddled by women. He wants to understand them—he tries; he's had glimpses—yet he's clearly a magnet for the kinky, the unbalanced, the covertly homicidal. All the more so on Matinicus—a place almost obscenely rich in plant life and yet somehow still in decline, a dwindling community fractured by drug use and an increasing Wild West mentality fast losing the battle between the demands of twenty-first century life and the values that have traditionally held it together. Shortly after his arrival, centuries-old resentments re-ignite and people begin to die—deaths linked, via the island's disturbing past, to a mystified Gil forced to unravel the mysteries of an old diary in order to piece together an illusive and increasingly complex truth. Read excerpt.

Reese's Leap (in progress)

Synopsis:
Still licking his wounds three years after bungling the unraveling of a string of grisly murders on Matinicus, a summer afternoon's joyride lands Gil Hodges—botanist, semi-reformed womanizer and reluctant middle-aged sleuth—smack in the middle of another bizarre mystery.

Six longtime friends—two of whom hold a dark secret that unwittingly endangers them all—have arrived for their annual all-female retreat on Adria Jackman's rugged, 200-acre enclave of Mistake Island. Briefly freed from their complicated lives for a blissful week of hiking, sunning and partying in a rustic hundred-year-old lodge, the women reluctantly find themselves hosting Gil and his novelist buddy David Duggan when an unrelenting fog strands them on the island for days.

Libidinous temptations aside, Gil's secretly pleased at the unexpected layover. Currently researching a book on the biodiversity of the Maine out-islands, he uses the time to explore Mistake's deeply silent, forested interior. But the verdant, almost primordial glens and moss-covered trails are deceptively bucolic; the women a little too intriguing for comfort—stirring both glorious memory and profound regret.

"The island works on everyone—each in his own way," Adria tells him. "No one ever leaves the same." This proves prophetic when a manipulative ex-con appears out of nowhere, demanding answers to the death of his brother on the island two summers before. Convinced the women were there at the time and know more than they're saying, he begins terrorizing the group—culling the women one by one despite Gil's efforts to keep them safe—and exacting his own twisted kind of revenge.

When the complex and deeply unhappy Nora disappears—a dead ringer for the great love of Gil's life, a woman he deeply and irrevocably wronged—Gil is forced into the ultimate face-off between blind self-interest and emotional honesty.