Books

*Selected for Kirkus best Indie books of 2022!

In the summer of 1975, a group of young men known as “the boys” make their stab for freedom harvesting wild hemp, or marijuana, on the Kansas plains. Several are Vietnam vets, and all are somehow marked, at odds with their time. They see themselves as inheritors of the mythic West, like buffalo...

Jack Marshal, known as “the Lion,” is a prideful sinner and reckless womanizer. When his 15-year-old daughter, Bonny, winds up pregnant by an old running buddy, Jack is outraged. And when the man is found dead, Jack is charged with murder.

Alongside the coming trial play the many goings-on in a small Kansas town, summer 1960. There’s Ruthie, Jack...

Part mystery and part myth born of fact and rumor left buried in the Kansas dirt. The story opens with a murder as desperate as the voice that stirs from the dust in witness. This voice, or knowing, haunts a young man, Faris Clayton, who will play in events to come. Time and place, 1934, Elim, Kansas.

The action involves six gamblers initially...

The Kansas Murder Trilogy offers three stand-alone novels that spring from the nation's heartland: King Harvest (1975); Banks of the River (1960); and Skin for Skin (1934). While each story carries the general flavor of its time, the characters and circumstances are distinct, and all depict the fate of common people faced with the grim fact of...

Based on a true event, CASPION takes you on a singular quest, both heroic and tragic, through the great buffalo hunt and the vanquishing of the Plains Indians (1871-1876). Riding the crest of the bloody tide is Jim Caspion, a Civil War veteran turned buffalo hunter, a man of notable conscience and courage, ever haunted by the war, yet fleeing...

Joaquín Murrieta. To the Mexican people, he was a heroic patriot looking after their welfare. To the wealthy Gringos who owned California’s prosperous gold mines, he was a notorious bandit and murderer. He sought his fortune during the 1850s Gold Rush, wishing to raise a family, only to be confronted with prejudice and hatred that escalated to...

“Very, very interesting...” – William S. Burroughs

Imagine … a raven on the branch of a fruit tree speaks to you, complimenting you on the song you have just sung. You, Rodger Games, carpenter by day and guitar-player by night, are drawn by the wonder: the how, where, and why of its origins. A dialogue begins. But along with the mystery of the...

From novelette to flash fiction, snippets of three novels to a final essay, from voices old and young, mixing the ethereal and actual in tales of misadventure, guilt, murder, bigotry, the thrill and angst of a one-night stand, poignant as the breath of evil or memory in ache to breathe, where common lives bleed over into wonder, horror, and the...

Culled from nearly half a century, from youth to the verge of age, these poems vary in form and voice as fits the range of heart and terrain, from first cry to barroom shout...through whispered memory and wind sigh, while puzzlement and wonder mix with politics of faith and fate amidst the flux of our mortal play – a scrimshaw of one life so to...

While idylls typically evoke airy pastoral themes, these root to an older, tragic tradition. Threads of man, elements, and seasons play in and out, weaving quest, mortality, landscape, and dream in four poems penned over forty years ago then boxed away, now unearthed, dusted off, and let to breathe — “Old Lives,” a late-night soliloquy of the...