Books

 Shadow Song

When a conglomerate buys out her small-town company, Ashley finds herself with few job options. She spies an ad for a portrait painter at a nearby lake resort, but when she arrives for her first day she discovers that instead of painting sidewalk vignettes, she’s been tasked with operating the resort’s amusement park rides. Not only that, but she’s now the supervisor of a group of teenagers, who she’s expected to train on a discipline she knows absolutely nothing about.

She considers abandoning the impossible task, but decides to stay and at least bluff her way through the first day. The naïve man who hired her stands watch as she fumbles her way through the first day’s training and he, in fact, compliments her expertise and offers her a resort residency on the spot, complete with a cabin all her own. Thereafter, Ashley splits her days between convincing vacationers to sit for a watercolor and teaching the newbies the intricacies of ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl operation. Fortunately she makes friends with one of the itinerant ride handlers a week before he and his crew are set to move on to the next carnival, and he schools her in the intricacies of his trade. To Ashley’s surprise, she falls in love with the job. Good thing, because a new painting competitor has appeared farther down the boardwalk, and he’s suddenly stealing all her business.

She steadfastly avoids him, avoids even introducing herself, and begins taking a roundabout path through the woods so she can avoid the boardwalk and him. The path is where, one night, late for work, she tumbles headfirst over a fallen log—which turns out to be a dead body. When she reports her discovery, the police decide that she is the prime murder suspect.
An unlikely ally helps Ashley steer the course of her ordeal, and the private investigator her dad hires provides her clueless attorney some much-needed backbone. But can she and her team convince the jury of her innocence?

Second Chance

 

The final breakup of Leah’s band was brutal. Now she’s unemployed, with no life skills and no future. She packs up the belongings she hasn’t already sold off for rent money, kisses her mother goodbye, and takes to the road with no destination in mind. Driving all night, she pulls into a rural truck stop, where a stranger points her toward a town called Chance. She checks into Chance’s old hotel for the night.

And then she decides to stay.

She reinvents herself as a saloon waitress and falls in love with an intoxicating singer.

Then everything falls apart.

Was Chance just one more doomed choice in a long line of stumbles? Or will she at last put up a fight and stay?

 

Find My Way Home

 

Tonight, July 21, 1969, man will step on the moon for the first time, but fourteen-year-old Sabrina doesn’t care. Instead of watching the moon landing on TV with her father, she ditches home and takes to the road with an older boy she meets that night on a blind date. It feels good in the moment.

Guilty, she calls home the next morning to reassure her parents she’s okay, but no one bothers to answer the phone. Nor does anyone answer the next few times she tries. Finally she gives up.

Ditching her indifferent companion in Reno, she sets off on her own—homeless and jobless—then finds both in a kindly diner cook named Hank.

Eventually she earns her GED and even enrolls in college on a scholarship. Life is good. All the pieces fall into place.
Then why does Sabrina wake up every night with nightmares?

She has to find out what happened. Find out why her family abandoned her seventeen years ago.

 

New Kaitlyn

 

Fed up with her dead-end job and dead-end life, Kaitlyn makes a rash decision: pack up and move to a small town she’s never heard of and lead a group of neophytes in her company’s new venture. She questions her choice at every turn, from the oddly-friendly landlord to the three bikers she meets on an evening stroll, to the universe’s most detestable boss.

Then, to make everything even worse, she falls in love with a man she can never have.

The Apple

Aubrey Bonnay would hardly consider herself a criminal. Not a criminal like her dad and certainly not a criminal like the person who just killed him. Her crimes, if one could even call them that, haven’t hurt anyone. Besides, she has more urgent matters to deal with, like saving her mother from a police detective who’s convinced that Mom unsheathed a hidden knife and stabbed Dad to death in the garden at midnight.

The line of Dad’s aggrieved victims stretches all the way to the next town. Then there’s Aubrey’s brother, who always hated Dad, and her little sister, whose life he’d broken.

The only thing Aubrey for sure is that she didn’t kill him.

While Aubrey comforts her grieving mother and confronts a duplicitous faux fiancé, the FBI comes calling, waylaying her carefully-laid plans to help her mother escape the police’s clutches.

And a phone call out of the blue topples the family’s carefully constructed lie.

Once In a Blue Moon

Grandma’s basement is surely haunted. What else would explain how Jemma has suddenly assumed Grandma’s identity and teleported back to the nineteen forties, with big band music blaring out of juke boxes and young men shipping off to war.

Just when she’s resigned to accept her new identity—seamed stockings, Chesterfield cigarettes, and a ragged existence; just when secrets begin to unravel, Jemma is transported again, this time to the sixties and the sad, broken life of a woman named Beth. Mom.

Once In A Blue Moon is the story of three women: Jemma, Maggie, and Beth, and how one night of aching loneliness changed their futures forever.

 

Radio Crazy

 

 

Shelby Soderberg moves to the hinterlands to be with the man she loves. Despite her misgivings about the barren landscape, she and Michael relax into their new life together. Until she catches him in the local restaurant parking lot “making friends” with a busty blonde.

She sheds Michael but not her job. Where would she go? She gets to know the ranchers, some of them nice, some of them nasty. One summer night, alone in the office, one of the nasty ones shows up. He would have killed her, had she not killed him first.

Panicked, she flees and finds herself in a nowhere town that seems just far enough away. She lands a job as an overnight disc jockey, taking song requests and soothing listeners with her gentle patter.Then the stalking begins, innocuous at first, then more ominous. Eerie requests are phoned in to the station until Shelby realizes the man she thought she’d killed didn’t actually die.

Shelby is done hiding. It's either she or him.