Fiction - published and upcoming

The Sussex Sportsman Club

Jack Ramsden and Cherie Barlow are searching for the poison that killed an entire river full of fish in Delaware. The source appears to be the Sussex Sportsman Club, a trap shooting range for the local elite. As they investigate the fish kill, Jack and Cherie soon learn that questions about the Sussex Sportsman Club from environmental scientists are most definitely not welcome. They stir up a hornets nest of trouble that includes a missing EPA investigator, a kidnapped child, an ominous warning for Jack, and a staged accident for Cherie. Jack and Cherie discover that the dead fish are just one piece of evidence in a much larger scandal, and uncovering it nearly costs them everything.

This is eco-fiction, with an environmental theme, a mystery, suspense, crime story, and a love story all wrapped around the beaches, marshes, and seascapes of the Mid-Atlantic.

Available from Amazon as a paperback book and a Kindle e-book.  An audio book will be out soon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FC2X9ZVM?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520

The Forge of Hephaestus

I write fiction for enjoyment and to keep my writing talent in shape.  Some might think this is odd for a scientist, but many scientists do write fiction as a sideline.  The most famous, of course, is Isaac Asimov but he is far from alone.  Andy Weir, author of The Martian, is a software engineer.  I look at it the way a concert pianist might play jazz clubs on the weekends.  It's fun, and hey, it's still practice.

​The Forge of Hephaestus will be my second fiction novel in this batch.  It is an account of the eruption of Yellowstone as a supervolcano.  This too has an environmental theme and an underlying crime story, but the essence is a disaster novel.  It was super fun to write, but I am doing some final edits on the text because I'm not sure that the scale of the disaster depicted in the story matches what will really happen the next time Yellowstone erupts.  Let me just say this: it will be bad.

The photo header on the top of this page is from NASA and depicts Olympus Mons on Mars, the largest volcano in the Solar System.  Volcanoes are exciting, and Olympus Mons has a part in the novel.  Should be out by the end of 2025.

The Fire Goddess

This started out as the volcano novel, and then morphed into an alien invasion story.  Astronomy professor Ted Wyatt is on his first visit to the big observatories on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii with plans to spend a quiet week collecting galactic spectrograph data.  A mysterious woman at the airport, a disappearing waitress at a Hilo restaurant, and an impossible photograph suggest that the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele is altering his plans.  Pele reveals that she and the other Hawaiian gods are actually a race of aliens that have been stranded on Earth with starship engine trouble for nearly 2,000 years.  She warns him that another starship is entering the Solar System, crewed by hostile beings bent on harvesting billions of tons of protein from the Earth, including humans.  Ted and his assistant Teri spot the alien ship near the orbit of Neptune with a giant telescope on Mauna Kea.  The military is skeptical when they report the object, but eventually multiple observations and an orbit headed straight for Earth convince world governments to act.  The best scientific and military minds desperately seek ways to defend the Earth against an extremely advanced and unforgiving enemy.  As they grapple with advanced technologies, human treachery, and an implacable alien foe, the people of Earth learn that it’s a tough old galaxy out there, and as always, the best defense is a good offense.