Querying

FAMILY JEWELS

Science Fiction Whodunnit

112,000 words

After thirty years in exile, Benedict Quick never expected to hear from Octavia Laurie again, but when the Laurie estate necklace is stolen, the woman that banished him hires Quick & Easy Detectives to find it. The aristocracy freeze their DNA inside synthetic diamonds created from their cremated ash. The diamonds are added to a family necklace that represents their age, wealth, and power. And the oldest, wealthiest, most powerful lineage in the Galactic Cooperative just lost its family jewels.

Not that Ben or his partner, Enitan Easy, care. They won't take the job for Octavia. They'll take it for Julius. Julius Laurie, the last diamond on the necklace, Octavia's dead brother, Ben's lost lover, the third in a love triangle turned love hexagon that left no one happy. Maybe this is about the money. Maybe it's about old oaths and broken promises.

A lot changes in thirty years. A lot stays the same. In a galaxy where science has defeated aging for the wealthy, old slights sour, old grudges fester, no misdeed is forgotten, and no score goes unsettled. To rescue Julius, Ben and Enitan must out-think and out-run every treasure hunter, scavenger, and Ultranet blogger in the Coop, and they must survive a revenge that has been thirty years in the making to do it.

In Progress

KNOCKING BIRD

Contemporary Urban Fantasy

On what should have been a sit and spin assignment, Serenity McIntire discovers the encryption cypher to a transmitting numbers station. Cenosapiens--changelings--have infiltrated the highest reaches of the Danish monarchy. A mistake, a mole, and a magical conspiracy turn Greenland's rise as the world's new superpower into the return of the Old World Order. The global balance of power rests on a fulcrum of rookie agents, CIA outcasts, and a twenty-one-year-old woman named after a spaceship.

Receding glaciers reveal paired arctic and antarctic temples. The world's fading filament of magic flares alive. Superstitions, folklore, and nightmare creatures are resurrected into a world that turned them into Disney movies. Jesus Christ had a nice two thousand years to play, but now something older and angrier stirs. The men and women of the Cenosapian Identification Agency are all that stand between Lovecraft being a writer or a prophet.

Percolating

SAVASANA (CORPSE POSE) 

Alternate Historical Fantasy

Savasana has lost count how many times he has died. It is happening more frequently, and he is no closer to finding a cure. He exhausted every tome and manuscript in India and has traveled west to Sofia in the kingdom of the Bulgars in hopes the secret may be found among the libraries of the Athenaea.

He has not come alone. The monster follows. Savasana has never seen it himself, but the descriptions are the same. The Jwala, a creature of fire and ash that drains its prey of blood and consumes their hearts. When the Jwala comes, Savasana dies only to return in the corpse pose.

the Jwala followed him from Indian. He bears the guilt of each victim it claims. If Sofia's Athenaea do not give him the answers he seeks, he will throw himself into the Danube in hopes that whatever curse binds him to the Jwala will be severed by final death. Perhaps he will find peace, or perhaps he will awaken again in the corpse pose.