My First Four Story Collections
~ 1. EAST COAST CHRONICLES ~
These are stories set in various locations on the US East Coast.
DEACON LOVES PENNY
Deacon Fredericks is 22 years old and a US Marine veteran, who has just moved to Virginia Beach and is waiting for his 23rd birthday when he will inherit more seven million dollars that was left to him in his grandmother’s will. One day, he meets a girl named Penny Jones, who is a recent Virginia Tech graduate with a big AI idea. All she needs is about five million dollars to actualize it. After she explains it to Deacon, he decides to partner up with her and get her idea developed. This is a story about two smart young people who work their way to the top of the AI business in a very short period, all of which was made possible by Deacon’s millions.
AKA CHARLIE MCQUEEN
Charlie McQueen, a mathematical genius and sports gambler, is on the run from a mobster he used to work for in New York. He settles down in a small town in Maine and starts an online sports book there. Everything is going fine until one day, someone shows up looking for him, leaving Charlie with just two options: either pack up and run or, with the help of a good friend, get the issue resolved once and for all and get his life back.
MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER
1. The Detroit Story
Parker Nash and Victoria Desmond have been drawn together as the result of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of both their parents. Parker is a gifted computer genius, Victoria, or Tori as she prefers to be called, is a young writer. Together they devise a plan to seek retribution for their parents’ deaths and finally bring about some much-needed gun control legislation in the US. This is the story of how they go about achieving this.
2. The Virginia Beach Story
Having achieved a good deal of success in persuading the major weapons manufacturers to remove semi-automatic weapons from domestic markets, Parker and Victoria set their sights on a new target, the radical Republicans in Congress, who are doing their best to undermine the government. This time Parker has something new in mind, which he hopes will do the job. If not they always have their tried and true formula to fall back on. All the while FBI Cybercrimes Inspector Robin Pierce is starting to put things together from her end. This time, however, the pressure is coming from very high places.
JULIET’S GIFT
Juliet (Jules) Deacon has a gift. She has the intuitive ability to unlock things. Whether it’s a school locker, a password-protected bank account or almost anything in between. Jules discovered this talent very early on, and kept it to herself until, in her early twenties, she fell in love and eventually teamed up with Travis Dupree, a young thief working with an art dealer in New Orleans, breaking into the homes of very wealthy private art collectors. Jules and Travis started out simply working to get rich and have a good life with each other. But as they travel that road together, they ultimately realize that Jules’ gift is worth much more than they ever imagined.
TED’S MILLIONS
Ted Phillips was a senior accountant in a blue-chip firm in New York. But he was unhappy with his life and was starting to hate the city. One day, for some strange reason, he bought a Powerball lottery ticket. Three days later his life changed dramatically. It was goodbye NYC, Hello Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with close to eight hundred million dollars in the bank. But he also left with the idea to send a message to some of the more greedy clients he had worked with over the years. With the help of a new friend, he might be able to achieve that. But his overriding challenges were to simply to make the kind of life he wanted and figure out what the hell to do with all that money.
FRANKIE CARLINO'S LEGACY
Frankie Carlino, a retired hitman for a Chicago crime family, is well hidden in the witness protection program, in New Haven Connecticut. One day he gets an idea for a legacy project and hires a young writer named Ryan Bixby to help him. But there are a few things he needs to take care of at the same time. Including holding onto the money he stole from his former employer, a finder who is on his trail and a crooked US Marshall who knows exactly where to find him.
~ 2. BIG SMOKE CHRONICLES ~
These are stories set in and around Toronto where I spent the bulk of my existence.
WHEN I’M SIXTY FOUR
Joe Maughn is a retired copywriter who needs spinal surgery for an E-Coli infection. After his surgery, he starts to notice a real change in his behaviour. He starts having vivid dreams and writing them out into three novels and one screenplay. Through an advertising buddy who was writing mysteries, he gets introduced to an agent/publisher who just loves his work. So at sixty-three, Joe is suddenly starting a second career, one which pays a lot more than his former one. The only thing that’s bothering Joe is just exactly where all these stories are coming from.
THE VIRGIN DETECTIVE
Emil Haven IV genuinely dislikes being a Haven. He has spent most of his adult life doing
un-Haven-like things, yet still hoping to win, his industrialist father’s approval. A moderately successful writer of crime fiction, Emil decides that maybe his father would approve if he tackled a non-fiction story. In his quest to find a story, he stumbles across an organized crime caper that’s just what he was looking for. But it inevitably opens up a can of worms that Haven just might not be able to handle.
THE LOCKER KEY
Jake Morrison is a well-known syndicated newspaper TV review columnist and a radio personality on an ‘all-guy’ station and likes his life just fine. But Jake has no idea what he’s stepped in when he meets up with an old school acquaintance who gives him a locker key to hold and it very quickly turns his whole life upside down. Because the contents of the locker is something that can make whoever owns it extremely & powerful. And Jake is just a regular guy who is standing in the way of all that. But with a little help from a new friend, he can get through this mess. He hopes.
THE BROTHERS BOTTICELLI
The three Botticelli brothers Harry, Angelo and Lou, are anything but private eyes. But when their dad’s final wish was to find and punish whoever killed him, they really have no choice. The cops think it was nothing but a tragic accident, but the brothers know better. So they team up to figure it out. As the pieces of the puzzle come together, they start to see that there is something dark at work, quite literally a blast from the past.
BLIND SIDE OF THE HEART
Tony Shaw, a famous mystery writer, was blinded in a car accident. Today, he is just starting to turn the corner off self-pity street, with the help of his wife Olivia and a young friend. But things get complicated when Tony starts investigating the life of a mysterious new neighbour. If he doesn’t do the right thing, it could cost him his marriage and his life. A lot to ask of a blind man.
THE PASSION OF JOHNNY VALLONE
Johnny Vallone is a writer for a crime story publication and a would-be novelist. Through a cousin of his, he wangles an invitation to a drug party where he meets and is very attracted to the dealer’s woman. She is attracted to Johnny as well, because she is trapped in a loveless relationship with the dealer. Together they work out a plan to get her free from him. But Johnny has never done anything quite like this before, and the last thing he wants to do is mess it up, because that would mean certain death for both of them.
~ 3. AMERICAN CHRONICLES ~
These are stories set in various parts of the United States.
SENOR MICKEY FARRELL
Mickey Farrell, is a high school graduate, wannabe writer and a pretty good auto mechanic from Madison Wisconsin who is out to see America and gain some life experience that will help make him a better writer, which is his real passion. In central California he helps out an older man stranded with car trouble and ends up working for him on his massive grape and fruit growing property. He eventually falls in love with the old man’s granddaughter, becomes part of the family, and soon finds out that he has to grow up much faster than he ever imagined he would.
THE AMANDA PROJECT
Jeremy Sand has an AI project called Amanda, that he designed and used to get his Master’s degree at MIT. Jeremy’s dad, Jordan, is an industrial spy with enough capital to fund the final development of his son’s AI program. Jeremy had his pick of blue-chip digital companies to work for but instead chose to work with his dad, secretly determined to get him out of the criminal world and get his program launched successfully.
THE MIKALOV CASE
Dale Hogan, a US State Department operative, has blown a major assignment. He had been assigned to safely move a Russian defector, a scientist named Anatoly Mikalov, to Washington for debriefing, in return for political asylum. But something goes very wrong and Dale, with help from his dad, Jim, a former State Department agent himself, has a strange mystery to solve in order to both salvage his freedom and preserve the balance of power in the world.
INTO THE HEAT
Bobby Granger, one of the US Special Forces’ sharpshooters, thought he was finished with that life. After his military career ended, he was working as a fashion photographer in New York. But one day Bobby’s past caught up with him. An old associate needed him to photograph an illicit arms deal taking place in the Bahamas. Bobby doesn’t realize it at the time but saying yes to the job will substantially change his life in a couple of different ways.
THE HUMAN LEAGUE
Recent MIT grads, Terry Moorehouse and Shawna Lennox are working to take Terry’s family marketing business, located in Plymouth Mass., into the AI world. They have a lot in common with each other, including a deep concern about the negative effect that unrestricted and unregulated AI is going to have on the world. And together they are determined to do something about it. The Human League is the company they form. It's dedicated to finding ways to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. And with a little help from some very important people, they just might pull it off.
As Terry and Shawna are preparing to leave for DC to show their AI fake detection software to a special Congressional Committee on Cybercrime, Terry is asked to investigate a crime being perpetrated on the daughter of a wealthy businessman in Stamford Connecticut. This leads Terry on a mission to stop the extortion, which is not exactly what he signed one for, but something he is more than willing to do with the help of his team in Plymouth.
FINDING ANDREW FLETCHER
Dexter Fox has a gift for hearing people’s thoughts. He uses this gift to make himself independently wealthy by playing and winning very big at poker. On his way home from a poker tournament in Canada, he meets Roxanne Doyle who is heading to New York City to find a job in the computer world. This is the story of how a young couple with a good deal of skill get into the business of helping locate missing people. Young Andrew Fletcher, who was abducted more than a year earlier, is their first case.
HURRICANE SEASON
Ryan Gamble had a great 10-year run at the top of the album charts and concert stage, which made him very wealthy. But he was sidelined by inoperable nodes, which brought his performing career to a standstill. After a year and a half of isolation, he decided to pay it forward and develop a new singer he had heard about from a friend. This is the story of how he goes about doing this, and how the project almost got derailed just as it was getting started.
~ 4. THE LIFE OF BIRD ~
These are stories of my early life in the 1950s & 60s.
This is a semi-biographical series of shorter stories set in and around the Southern Ontario town where I lived until the age of eighteen.
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