Seeds of Secrecy

Jack Nussbaum learns that he and his family are being stalked. By a monster who, silently and invisibly, kills those in whom Jack entrusts his family’s safety.

In Watertown, New York, Jack grew up in the massive, four floor, 170-year-old Winthrop House. To keep him from pocketing his hands, Grandma Bett made him keep thumbtacks in his jeans pockets. Jack fought fiercely against such deranged edicts. Bett never relented. Which is why, at 40, Jack is okay being Jack “Wussbaum,” a man in hard retreat from any potential sources of conflict.

One night Jack swallows his fears and confronts a strange woman watching his house. She’s tipsy enough to confide that her boss -- a shadowy figure with a colossal grudge – has been watching Jack for years. “You’ve never noticed your second shadow?” She passes him two mementoes from the most shameful and private episodes of his youth. Jack buries the evidence – along with his head -- deep in the sand, until his wife Sarah is brutally attacked by a man who tells her, “This is on Jack.”  

The attack on Sarah is the first thrust of a larger assault, the actual nature of which Jack cannot begin to grasp. To survive, Jack must unravel secrets – some as old as the walls of Winthrop House, others out of the futuristic labs of the wizards designing new stealth weaponry, such as a gun that shoots pulses that collapse a healthy man’s heart over distances and through walls. 

Stage after wrenching stage, Jack is driven to an impossible choice. 

Seeds of Secrecy is a novel about secrets that generate more secrets, and how the spawn of secrets tend to corrupt even more thoroughly than those that generated them. 

An e-version of the book can be purchased here. Both e-version and a printed edition can be purchased from Amazon.

To download the opening chapters of Seeds of Secrecy, click here

Fantasies on Wry
- new book of stories

A tasty layout of twelve fantasy-rich stories in the vein of Saki, John Collier and Roald Dahl. Here the miraculous is championed, and over-reaching greedheads meet their comeuppance in suitably fantastical ways. Served between thick slices of wry humor.

Available as an e-book or a print-on-demand paperback from Amazon.

Descriptions of the stories can be found here.  

Free downloads of three sample stories can be found here.