The Brass Ring
Ring explores the experiences of grief, despair, and resurrection, while spinning a yarn about the California wine world, cocaine, blackmail, and murder, from Napa Valley to Colombia, from Los Angeles to the West Indies.
The China Contract – 1st in the Nigel Hawkins series
Entering his life’s defining chapter, Detective Inspector Nigel Hawkins is torn by the choice between freedom and obligation, between fearing his loss of devotion and the pain of reliving his mistakes. The murder on Hawkins’s turf of a Nobel Prize candidate leads to a round-the-world chase that ends in the affluent surrounds of Montecito, California, and the tortuous confines of the capitalist mind.
The Killing of Chuy Muro
The time is 1963 in the rural Southwest, and farmworkers’ civil rights are a flashpoint of social change. The place is Richland, a rural town on the California coast. Eddie is at work, mulling over his seventeenth summer and his plans with Gene, his best friend since before they “could pee standing up.”
The Eunuch of Shanghai – 2nd in the Nigel Hawkins series
Self-made billionaire Li Chenqing, China’s wealthiest and most ruthless industrialist, has died. At his funeral, his elder son Tian Wu discovers that decades before, during the Mao regime, Old Li sold his soul—and much more—in a Faustian bargain for power. The son responds by casting aside filial piety to exact a heinous revenge against his late father’s legacy.
Loan Star
The year is 2020. Neil Manley, MBA, barely thirty and unwitting instrument of his parents’ death, returns from his Boston job to California to care for his off-the-rails sister McKenzie and her two kids, Thunder and Lightning. Now VP for tiny Malibu Bank & Trust, Manley moves himself, Kenzie, and the kids into a rented house in Oxnard, a town where romantic prospects for a young man are as common as cupcakes on the moon.
Palanquin
Palanquin, set in 19th-century India and Victorian London, opens with a fictional preface and introduction by the son of one of the story’s second-tier characters. This is followed by a short publisher’s note explaining the decade-long delay in the book’s release to protect one character’s sacred reputation. These three statements present the novel’s conceit, that it is a factual chronicle of actual persons and events as recorded in the collected papers and documents of the writer’s deceased father, and in others’ journals, diaries, etc. to which the son had access.