Welcome!
Recently my previous website up and disappeared. Many pages, blog posts, trip reports, and a thousand links — poof!
This is its short sweet replacement.
Books
The characters in the 19 stories that comprise Restless Dreams, a collection of short stories, share a certain resemblance: tired eyes, a slow trudging step, and the distracted air of someone with lots on her mind, some of it unspeakable. But despite sore feet and an aching heart, each yearns for better days, aims for what is right, and makes it all work somehow. She’s a cop, a mom, a saleswoman, nanny, teacher, hairdresser, teen. None have it easy, but they don’t give up their restless dreams of a more perfect life.
Motivated by her mother’s long-ago unsolved abduction, Stella Lavender has joined the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation only to be severely challenged by her first assignment: undercover drug agent. Stella works nights, buying drugs from paranoid drug dealers, gathering evidence to send them to prison or turn them into informants. She’s great at the job because, as her boss says, “you don’t look like a cop.” But the physical danger and the necessary betrayals are getting to her. When she sees a chance to work homicide, she’ll always take it.
Cold Heart, the sequel, finds Stella Lavender still working as an undercover drug agent.
One afternoon Stella gives a hitchhiking teenager a ride to her babysitting job in a wealthy neighborhood. Horror awaits them–the father lies dead in a pool of blood, and his toddler is missing. Stella joins the murder investigation as the puzzle quickly grows. Most importantly, where is the toddler? A dizzying array of plausible suspects provides more questions than answers.
Cold Heart draws the reader into a darkly delightful page-turner as Stella rummages through every strata of society in her relentless and sometimes unconventional pursuit of a cold-hearted murderer who won’t stop at just one victim.
About
I’m a cubicle escapee who always yearned to write something creative. I wrote short stories, took classes, and earned an MFA in a low-residency program from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine. I’m a member of Sisters in Crime, the Triangle Sister in Crime Chapter, and Mystery Writers of America.
My other passion is educating people about the benefits of the plant-based way of eating. There’ s information on my other website, everyday-plant-based.com.
I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
