SuperNova is my first novel.

Dylan Cooper has it all: A devoted wife, a house with an ocean view, a boat at the yacht club, and a secret— he’s afraid of the water. Since nearly drowning at camp he’s been inexplicably pulled toward the thing that most terrifies him.

After earning a mid-career sabbatical, he snags the paid vacation of a lifetime. He’ll be a deckhand on a superyacht in the Mediterranean. He’ll sample the life of the one-percent. But the crew must first deliver the boat safely across the open Atlantic.

When land disappears, so do Dylan’s structured environment, social status, and equilibrium. He has violent nightmares of sinking ships and sea monsters. Sleep deprived and weak, he loses his hold on reality.

As the last member to join the crew, he’s called NG, or New Guy. As NG burns brightly, Dylan fades from view. He wears his new persona boldly and revels in his newly found freedom. Will Dylan survive the passage and return to claim his previous life? Or was his fate determined so many years ago at camp?

Dylan is not the only one with a secret.  SuperNova isn’t the ship she seems. Built amid a storm of conflict and lawsuits, she’s a stunning girl but is deeply, dangerously, flawed.  Her equipment fails, her collision bulkhead leaks, and she harbours a stowaway from Dylan’s past behind a rusting double-dogged door.

The captain is a cautious man. He sees all, but keeps Dylan at a distance. The first mate is a talented pianist struggling with his mother’s expectations that he become a fisherman. Dylan adopts the role of life coach, but as NG, abruptly abandons the young man. The chef is a goddess in never more than two pieces of cloth. NG will seduce her with a clear conscience. The engineer sleeps beneath the yacht’s floorboards, horrifying the protagonist. The stewardess is as beautiful and cold as the deep Atlantic. Dylan saves her life but lives to regret it. The steward hates boats and provides a counterpoint to the senselessness of life aboard. And a young Newfoundlander rounds out the crew with vitality and reckless abandon. He projects the image of a simple life, that draws Dylan away from his chosen path. Can this unlikely group shepherd the vulnerable superyacht across the abyss? Can they save NG from his demons?

SuperNova sails the fine line between sanity and what lurks beneath.  Dylan is aboard for the ride of his life on an ocean crossing like no other.  Complete at 120,000 words plus schedules (ship’s specifications and drawings, captain’s log, sailing glossary), SuperNova is fast-paced literary fiction.  The first person narrative conscripts the reader with nervous energy and humour into a bizarre sea-going journey through the treacherous depths of the psyche.

LENNY’S GARAGE is my second novel.

Lenny is a man who defies the odds. He always comes out on top. He is a fast-dealing, high-rolling, exotic car dealer. He loves the deal. But Lenny is bored. The game gets dull when you always win.

Lenny hears of a young boy with Leukemia. The boy needs a bone marrow transfusion to have a chance at survival and the odds of finding a matching donor are very low. Lenny is intrigued by the odds, by the deal. He does an initial blood screening and passes to the next level. He’ll go through several more tests and beat the 400,000 to 1 odds and be a perfect match to be a donor.

But Lenny is damaged goods. He believes he killed his parents when he was six years old. He lives a dysfunctional life of self-indulgence, amorality, and hedonism, and is the centre of a group of similarly dysfunctional clients who meet daily to celebrate their superiority over the ordinary folk.

Lenny’s Garage will be finished in September 2013.

THE MANAGER is my third novel.

Aristotle Jones has been working for the same company since he was a kid. His father managed the first store. Aristotle became the manager of that store twenty-five years ago. As the company prepares to open its twenty-seventh location, Jones is set up to take a fall. The big boss has to install his son-in-law in a local outlet and the company is in need of a tax loss. Store 27 will be in Central America. It is scheduled to be a thirty million dollar disaster. Just what the accountants requested. Jones has been around too long to dispose of without compensation, so he’s offered a transfer to Store 27. He’s supposed to retire. He’s supposed to fail. But that’s not the way The Manager sees it.

The novel is well underway and scheduled for completion in September 2014.