Jewel (2009)

 

While watching his own children play at the park, Jason Hylden remembers back to a dark time in his life when events took place that were so disturbing, so brutal, that he has never brought them up to anybody.  He decides then and there that he is going to tell a story—Jewel’s story.

 

Within the confines of a small impoverished town’s oak groves and rural setting, a sinister urban climate is spreading like a disease.  The gang of kids that Jason runs with is beginning to watch the walls of innocence shatter and tumble to the ground around them.  The once innocuous gang is now escalating into violence, lustful obsession, and drugs—its leader, Harvey, slipping off the edge into madness.  Jason, the son of a prominent psychotherapist, was oblivious to it all—then along came Jewel Wylander.  Jewel, sullen and withdrawn, is new to the school.  She doesn’t have many friends, but worst of all, Jewel is showing up with bruises and cuts on her arms.  Jewel has a secret, a dark secret.  But when Jason discovers that his own mother is Jewel’s therapist, he begins to suspect that confidentiality and self-disclosure, supposed client privileges, may actually be masking the truth.  Despite her afflictions and the gang’s vehement opposition to their budding relationship, Jason quickly falls in love with Jewel.  As their relationship blooms, Jason finds himself the last person standing between Jewel and someone, or something, which seems hell-bent on her destruction.  In the end, it is his own fears he must overcome before Jason has a ghost of a chance of delivering Jewel from the darkness that plagues her. 

 

 

Spirit Asylum (2007)

 

During the dead cold of the winter of 1958, in a rural Minnesota town, the last patient of a rapidly deteriorating tuberculosis asylum knows it’s the end, the end of a life cut short.  Clara Berg, in her last flickering moments, quickly manages to scrawl a faint picture of a vision she witnesses with her final agonizing breath.  Is the message the ravings of a dying woman or her last coherent thought in this world?  Forty-nine years later, the world is about to find out.

 

The year is 2007 and the Clayborn’s have just finished remodeling a portion of an old asylum into their dream home, when they are catapulted into a nightmare.  After awakening in the middle of the night with a Vodoun symbol scratched into her belly, Mrs. Clayborn decides to go against her husband’s wishes and calls in a priest to perform an exorcism.  What ensues is a grisly tangle of murder beyond the grave and ultimate betrayal.  Can Eli Ross, sent in by the Vatican, rise to the challenge and put his personal feelings aside?  Will he be able to team up with Racine Brennon, the highly deductive sleuth from Boston?  The lives of people spanning two continents depend on it.  Together, with a highly flammable supporting cast, Eli and Racine battle against an unfathomable evil, a fast approaching sunrise, and their own beliefs.  While avoiding their own demise, they must collect clues inside the old asylum and solve a horrific mystery before there is no one left to save.

 

 

Broken Mirror (2006)

 

Eli Ross expected the internet dating scene to be a bit of an adventure, but he gets more than he bargained for when he meets the spiritually sensitive Dana Sullivan.  The experience catapults them both into a shadowy world of conspiracy theories and the paranormal, where the lines of truth and deception blur together.

 

When Dana sees her deceased mother in the mirror, it’s not an old cliché.  Is it a spiritual manifestation or a figment of a still grieving girl’s imagination?  Eli, a licensed counselor, thinks mental illness may play a part, but others think differently.  Mental illness aside, the mirror is certainly more than it seems and hurls Eli and Dana into the vortex of a spiritual storm.  The ensuing epic chess match of good vs. evil could rip the veil from an age old conspiracy theory thought dead and buried forever.  With mankind teetering on the edge of overstepping its bounds, how can a broken mirror determine where deception ends and the truth begins?

 

 

No Innocent Victim (coming December 2009)

 

Grimpen Kane, severely abused as a child, is many things: an abuser, a genius, and a serial killer who pledges his allegiance to the highest bidder.  His current employer is offering more than money for payment and they don’t even know it.  They want to bring the world to its knees and broker the deal for a one world religion, but Grimpen Kane has other plans altogether.  Has the desire for absolute power driven him to the brink of insanity or is Hell waiting on Grimpen Kane?

 

One by one, the third ranking official in each of the world’s four major religions are being, not only cruelly murdered, but tortured to the point of martyrdom by an indiscriminate killer.  As each murder is discovered, evidence points straight to the heart of an already delicate balance in the world’s religious structure.  In the political aftermath of these heinous murders, the world’s superpowers blame each other and are thrust towards the brink of all out Armageddon.  Out of the chaos, one demented man plans to achieve the unthinkable.  Bravely, only Eli Ross and his team of Vatican warriors stand between Hell’s monster and a world that is holding its breath – hoping to wake in the morning.  One way or the other, the world will find the truth - that on earth, there is no innocent victim.

 

 

And next In My Creative Queue:

 

Zealot (the novel)

 

Inhuman

 

When Darkness Walks

 

America Rising
 

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