pH ZERO
Army veteran Dom Donnelly didn’t have many options back home in the States after three tours in the Middle East. So he headed to Los Angeles, land of billionaire pipe dreams, a million dirty swimming pools.
But his day job as a pool cleaner was just a cover, an excuse to infiltrate swank Beverly Hills estates as an advance man for home invasion heist crews. One day, he’d have enough dough for his own mansion, the fantasy Spanish Colonial he dreamed of during the war. He never expected to find it here, in Glendale of all places. He never expected to find her inside: the mysterious olive-skinned beauty with a past more sordid than his own. When these two schemers come together, the results are sure to be highly acidic.
pH Zero is modern day noir in the hardboiled tradition of Jim Thompson, James M. Cain and James Ellroy. The postman always rings twice, but the pool boy doesn’t knock at all.
Now available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com.
COUCH LIFE
Darren and Deidre Spellmer thought they were the perfect thirtysomething married Brooklyn couple. They had stable jobs in tech and fashion, a stylish Carroll Gardens apartment they’d just finished fixing up, and no children to tie them down. Despite the occasional argument, they seemed to be weathering the dreaded seven-year itch.
Then came Peck Calhoun: failed writer, amateur insectologist, professional couch-crasher. Darren vaguely remembers him from college, a night of drunken debauchery that ended in the ultimate “Bro IOU.” Now Peck has come to collect. He’s not just crashing on their living room couch; he’s turning it into a veritable cocoon.
Can the Spellmers survive this curious chrysalis? Can their marriage adapt and renew? And what is that large organic orb attached to the sofa? It’s totally fu**ing with the feng shui. A comic novel of surreal proportions, Couch Life humorously mines the difficulties of personal change in our fast-moving, ultra-connected, depersonalized digital age.
Now available for purchase in paperback or eBook on Amazon.
Visit couch-life.com for more details.
SHORT STORIES
“Maybe Meekhatharra” - a washed-up prizefighter accepts a disastrous promotional bout with a boxing kangaroo. Originally published on Mulholland Books’ Popcorn Fiction site.
“Fixing A Hole” - a Mexican-American welder employed to repair breaches in the U.S.-Mexico border fence wrestles with guilt over his wife’s death and the recent disappearance of his teenage daughter.
“Safety In Numbers” - a depressed mathematician, recently laid-off from his job and abandoned by a mysterious internet date, devises the perfect automobile accident in his spare time.
“Lottery Story” - a young Southern boy’s first-person, Faulkneresque account of a poor janitor who wins the lottery and refuses to spend the winnings, much to the chagrin of the people in his small town.
