NOVELS
Skeleton Key
One year after his world is devastated by a powerful hurricane, Jack Connor is stitching his life back together one thread at a time. In an attempt to reinvent himself—and deal with his lingering PTSD—he now manages an open-air drinking establishment named The Sandbar across the road from the dunes in Folly Beach, a shabby-chic tourist town twenty minutes south of Charleston. One hot July evening Connor is yanked into the past when a random customer is shot on the bar’s outdoor deck. What at first appears to be a senseless homicide quickly turns more complex and sinister, as the young man suspected of the shooting is found dead in his jail cell less than 48 hours later. Ignoring the nagging voice in his head that’s telling him to leave well enough alone, Connor dives in head-first and quickly discovers a tangled mass of drugs, corruption, money laundering, and a web of double- and triple-crosses. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2021]
Hurricane Blues
A year after almost being killed in a bloody double-cross (recounted in Carolina Heat), Jack Connor is hired by the state’s governor to find the killer of an elderly African American woman who was killed in the vestry of her church. As he searches for truth and justice—the hallmarks of his character—he encounters an increasingly menacing culture war fueled by ignorance, bigotry, and human blindness. Race and religion are powerful threads tightly woven through the state’s cultural tapestry, and Connor quickly finds himself tangled in a web of power, hate, and fear. In a region of the country where old skeletons lurk in dark family closets, he learns the hard way that uncovering the truths of the past can carry serious consequences. Hurricane Blues serves up a stark reflection of the South, a story of lingering Jim Crow prejudice and the bloody stain of racism. [Epicenter Press//Coffeetown Press, 2020]
Seven-Thirty Thursday
Former star athlete Rick Devlin left Charleston in the rearview mirror just days after his father was sentenced to life in prison for killing his mother. Now—thirty years later—he returns home to care for the reviled old man, who on his death bed insists the trial was a sham and the jury convicted an innocent man. Against his better judgment, Devlin begins to investigate his mother’s death, uncovering the roots of his family’s dysfunction and revisiting some painful memories from his past. It seems everyone has something to hide, including two generations of family lawyers, a corrupt state cop, a sanctimonious televangelist, the ghosts of several redneck butchers, and the specter of a young black boy who died a most horrific death. He also unexpectedly runs into his old high school flame, an intense heat that has lingered all these years. [Suspense Publishing, 2019]
Carolina Heat
Two days after solving the murder of a young TV reporter (recounted in “Palmetto Blood,”), Iraq War vet Jack Connor and his crew are called to Myrtle Beach to clean a hotel suite where a “John Doe” has taken his life. It sounds like a typical cut-and-dry job, but when the crew arrives on-site it’s apparent there’s nothing typical about this scene. Despite the fact that the deceased jumped to his death from the balcony, there’s blood virtually everywhere in the suite, along with two suicides notes. Not to mention a half million dollars in small bills that seems to be missing. Connor is hired by his boss to track down the cold cash, but in the heat of South Carolina nothing is simple. Along the way he runs headlong into a sting operation involving a crooked DEA agent, a beautiful PI who doubles as a pool shark, degenerate heirs of prominent Southern families and, of course, the Dixie Mafia show up in Connor’s path along the way. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2018, 2014]
Palmetto Blood
What did TV reporter Rebecca Rose do that got her brutally murdered and left in a dirty gutter in downtown Charleston? That's what Jack Connor – crime scene clean-up technician, recently discharged Iraq veteran, and the victim’s one-time lover – wants to know when he and his crew are called early one morning to sanitize her murder scene. The Charleston police are seeking answers to the same question, and when they learn of Connor’s romantic link to the victim they waste no time bringing him in for questioning as a “person of interest.” Still dealing with emotional and physical scars from the battlefield, Connor takes it upon himself to find Rebecca’s real killer, a search that leads him to start scratching the underbelly of the South Carolina lowcountry. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2017, 2013]
Pay For Play
In his new life, Stuart Logan had but one rule: no requests. Then again, in his new life he didn’t have much to worry about. He didn’t play the sort of music that inspired many people to want more. Nor did he play the sort of places where folks made a whole lot of requests—or demands of any sort, for that matter. Fact was, the people he entertained seemed fairly content just to sit and sip and listen whole Logan’s fingers plucked musical memories out of the thick, heavy summer night. [Morrow/Avon, 1992]
