Investigators Kiera Hunt and Aldis Morgenna have made their home in Las Vegas. The year is 2204; their four-year old daughter, Sofie, classified as a genius at age two with an IQ of 165, is busy making AI robotic pets for friends and family in a small workshop next to her parents' home office. Barney the Beagle is her first creation and gift to Aldis. Others soon follow.Aldis and Kiera are awakened early one morning with the news that their close friend, retired LVPD detective, Fra...

The Eternal Cycle is a collection of fourteen speculative short stories--science ficton and fantasy, and satire and light horror--and a selection of poems, gleaned from twenty years of publishing in the small press.

Linsee Kang, a part-time researcher for Perennial 23, a start-up in South San Francisco, discovers that the company is hiding the true nature of its work. She contacts the media but is ridiculed. Shortly after, she is fired, shoved into a limo in front of the building by several advanced male humanoids, and awakens in the hold of a cargo jet.She is transported to a remote facility in the Chihuahuan Desert in Northern Mexico, where the Superintendent has been bribed to keep her unde...

Eden Capiella, a young painter of abstract art, is being stalked by a homeless man; he tells her that her younger brother Lennie, a heroin addict, is dead then two weeks later accosts her again to tell her he is alive and if she pays him, he will tell her where Lennie is.She contacts Elvyra Prezly and Charles "Chuck" Paladino, the private investigators she met at the Organ Mountains Dripping Springs Trail. The Prezly-Paladinos had been behind her on the trail with their five-month ...

They met in the First Class Lounge at LaGuardia airport. Three days later he flew to Chicago to show her the sights; that night they became lovers. They had nothing in common: Aldis Morgenna, a bodyguard, had recently retired on a small pension; Kiera Hunt, an heiress, was a well-respected Swiss private investigator, and yet she trusted him to keep her innermost secret, as they felt destined for each other.He accompanied her to Luzern, Switzerland, where Kiera's former legal guardi...

June 2077. El Paso PI Elvyra Prezly has been hired to find a statuette, stolen from her client, Hermione Jalisco. "The Golden Monkey" is the only tangible link that Hermione has to her son, Javier, found drowned in a lake within El Paso's Ascarate Park two years ago.Elvyra and her fiancé/colleague, Charles "Chuck" Paladino arrive at Hermione's home, located in a senior community of manufactured homes, to interview her. The door is slightly open. She and Chuck step inside and are both hit w...

It is the dawn of a new century—with motor cars, electricity and telephones. The cowboy life is fading away, the days of driving cattle and horses to faraway markets are becoming evermore rare, and in 1901, Chili Wygant, then twenty-one years old, realizes that seven years after his family's death from smallpox, resulting in his nomadic existence as a saddle tramp, he needs to get off the prairies of Wyoming and pursue another way of life.He finds a job as a busboy...

A Deputy Sheriff with a talent for creating life-like sketches; a sixteen-year-old boy unsure of his future; and a stranger purporting to be the young man's real father, intersect with the disappearance of Tommy Harrison from the home of his legal guardian.Jake Mackey arrives in Lordsburg, New Mexico in a bright red 1907 Matheson Touring car. He stops at the Sheriff's office to inquire about the Hamilton family. When Deputy Malcolm McGregor tells him Suzann...

Malcolm McGregor was hired as Deputy Sheriff of Lordsburg, New Mexico in 1907. He was 20 years old. That year, his lifelike sketch of a thief on a Wanted poster was instrumental in the arrest of Jake Mackey in Yuma, AZ.Malcolm is flung into a maelstrom of crime in 1910 when the Sheriff goes on vacation: an intoxicated friend indiscriminately destroying property; bank robbers; illegal racers; and a missing child. And Sabine Cottard, the lead singer of a traveling choral group, who c...

Almost Human and Other Stories is an exploration of what it means to be human. How would you react if you encountered an AI humanoid with a conscience, or if the humanoid fell in love with you? What if you came face-to-face with a ghost or an extra-terrestrial? What is it like to experience precognition, and magic that appears when one least expects it? Suffer prolonged homelessness before unexpected luck and good fortune change the trajectory of one's lif...

When Edie Whidley doesn't show up for her mother's funeral in Stillwater Oklahoma on August 30, 2018, or her first teaching position in Salina, Kansas, her father, Stanley Jerome "Stick" Whidley uses his instincts and knowledge as a former police investigator to find her. By accessing the GPS in her cell phone, he discovers her last location was Hutchinson, Kansas.Before traveling there, Stick looks for clues at the family home where Edie lived with her mother, Lea...

Veronica Eberly woke up in a hospital bed in Santa Barbara with broken bones and a bad concussion. The nurse said she had been hit in a crosswalk by a drunk driver and had undergone surgery to reduce the pressure on her brain. Veronica remembered nothing of the ordeal—or her past.A few days later, the hospital's young social worker, Kevin Lawrence, interviews her and uses her driver's license to find out where she came from so he can search for emergency contacts.