NOVELS IN PROGRESS

When cantankerous drifter Peter inherits his estranged father’s hoarder house, he hires Olena, an exuberant Ukrainian immigrant and professional organizer trying to rebuild her life while battling PTSD and haunted by the war back home. Their unlikely partnership will push both to confront the past—and what it means to build a future.

Peter is living out of a travel trailer that’s not winterized. He’s desperate to clear out his father’s house and secondary suite before winter hits or risk becoming homeless. As Peter and Olena work against the clock, they uncover a locked cabinet holding all his childhood possessions—evidence of a father’s love Peter long believed was absent, since their bitter argument forty-one years ago.

They declutter the suite, but haven’t yet tackled the house, when Peter learns Olena faces eviction. He must decide whether to offer her shelter in the newly cleared suite, or reclaim the space for himself. If he turns her away, he risks repeating the same mistakes that left him isolated.

 Olena’s journalist colleague, living in the occupied territories, asks Olena to edit a manuscript about Russian war crimes. Though still traumatized from the war, Olena decides to edit the book, despite the risk of retribution from the Russian security service.  

Widowed private investigator Peter Truman wants to find love again. But the ex-FBI agent and his adult children have been in the Witness Protection Program ever since he killed the sister of the master assassin known only as Vespid.

When Peter takes on Brenda Boniflora’s perplexing case, her whirlwind ebullience upends his mundane routine. And he likes it. All her valuable exotic tomcats were stolen from her Virginia cattery. When Brenda helps Peter track clues, he realizes that she’s a good teammate. GPS data on the cell phone steers them to the thieves’ hideout. The burglars have been shot. Stuffed in their mouths are Asian giant hornets—Vespid’s calling card.

Vespid’s true identity is uncertain. Interpol has no record of him. A master of disguise, he leads a secret society of assassins bent on supplanting the existing world order with their own version. The FBI renews its campaign to rehire Peter to help catch Vespid. Now Peter must choose between his family’s safe, witness-protected lives—and the woman he’s come to love.  

Lara Hunter’s obsessive-compulsive need for tidiness is tested when she’s forced to stay with her hoarder grandmother, who claims that a priceless Fabergé egg is hidden in her cluttered home. 

Fourteen-year-old Lara is a self-proclaimed house-elf and the “Queen of Clean.” Her obsessive urge to bring order out of chaos is channeled into her hobby as a cryptologist. When her uninsured father falls into a coma after a car accident—which Lara believes she caused—her family teeters near bankruptcy. Her mother, Helga, sends her quarrelsome daughter to stay with her grandmother, Baba. 

Lara believes Baba’s story about a hidden Fabergé egg and sees a way to her own redemption by finding the egg. She wants to convince her grandmother to sell it and pay the family’s debts. Lara discovers the first message in a hidden compartment behind a framed photograph. She decodes the writing, which points to other clues.

But Baba refuses to relinquish her pack-rat possessions. Lara cannot find the last clues buried within Baba’s hundred-year-old house when the rooms are filled to the ceiling with her clutter. Events come to a head when a snoopy neighbor learns of the egg and uses nefarious means to snatch the Fabergé egg for herself.

When Ricky Romero befriends a young Sasquatch, he doesn’t expect that six days later he’ll end up resorting to burglary. Eleven-year-old Ricky is an outdoors enthusiast with a propensity for rescuing injured animals, such as his pet raccoon. When he discovers a poacher’s trap line, he bribes his sister Lisa to help set free the animals. After driving their snowmobile to the Cascade Mountains, they find a trapped young Sasquatch. Once freed, its leg is so mangled by the trap’s jaws that it can’t walk. Ricky must choose whether to take the critter home or let the poacher kill it.

He convinces Lisa to help him nurse the animal back to health. Of course, they must hide the Sasquatch from adults—because grown-ups always mess up. Ricky hones his skills at creative storytelling as they dash from one deception to another. The Sasquatch Kid becomes Ricky’s friend, but is hard to hide. The boy’s widowed father finds the animal and gives it to the district ranger, who cages it inside an alarmed building.

Then, Ricky overhears a scientist say he’ll use the child Sasquatch as bait to capture the rest of its family. Ricky knows only one way to rescue his imprisoned primate friend from the Sasquatch-snatchers. He hires the school bully, an incorrigible burglar nicknamed Rattler. When Rattler sets in motion his master plan, things go terribly wrong.