Recent Articles
Trench Coats, Episode I: The Meeting — the journey begins!
In the first episode, Pia Sabel, heroine of The Geneva Decision, is hot on the trail of abducted children when a powerful bureaucrat steps in, threatening to slow her down. But she was there—she saw the heinous crimes—and will let nothing stop her. A few months earlier, she took the helm of her father’s security [...]
The Accidental Parent, Part II
What I Did Wrong Before Becoming a Parent—and You Can Too! The biggest mistake I made is the one everyone lauds me for: unplanned parenting.* I thought it would be easy. I thought I could figure it out. I thought I would have help. Wait, I take all that back. I didn’t think. Not actively. [...]
The Accidental Parent: What I Learned* from 37 Years of Mistakes, Part I
Part I: Never Take Parenting Advice from an Expert Who Has Not Bailed a Child Out of Jail Why? Because without hardship, anything they tell you is just theory. Thirty-seven years ago, I was adopted by a precocious three-year-old. She saved my life. I wrote about it in a blog post (How Adopting a 3-yr-old [...]
Review: Murder Has Consequences by Giacomo Giammatteo
If you’ve been reading my reviews for any length of time, you will recall that Mr. Giammatteo’s debut novel, Murder Takes Time, won the 2012 Seeley James Award for Best Indie Debut. It was a deserving book, but what separates career writers from flash-in-the-pans is the ability to keep writing great stories. Mr. Giammatteo has [...]
Review: Ghostman by Roger Hobbs
I don’t recall snorting crystal meth* so I’m not an authority on the subject. But I will tell you that the opening pages of GHOSTMAN are so vivid and real that I considered calling Roger Hobb’s family to plan an intervention. Maybe he made up all those details about crack and meth and has no [...]
Review: Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich
Notorious Nineteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel Nineteen books means you have a predetermined plot, repeat characters repeating their tired shtick, familiar clues on the same page number as the last book, and déjà vu chase scenes. If it were written by any other author, that would be a bad thing. In the hands of Ms. [...]
5 Reasons You Need RABBLE!
NYT Book Reviews are irrelevant – You NEED Rabble instead. As I write this blog post, Amazon lists ninety-one thousand, seven hundred ninety-eight (91,798) books in the “new releases, last 30 days” section. The NYT has eleven reviews on their books webpage.* The LA Times doesn’t mind making you scroll through all twenty-one of theirs; [...]
We Have a Winner!
We Have a Winner! You people never cease to amaze me. You drove my debut novel into the top ten on Amazon!* I’m always worried that people will buy my book and never get around to reading it, so I devised a plan to reward the readers in the throngs of new readers. By posting [...]
Review: Doha 12 by Lance Charnes
Thrillers are emotional and mysteries are cerebral yet there are many famous authors whose books lack both the emotional and the cerebral. Not with this book. Doha 12 will have you riveted from beginning to end. When I first glanced at the story description, I thought, Israelis and terrorists—not my cup of tea. But I [...]
How Adopting a 3-yr-old at 19 Formed the Basis for a Thriller: Making It Real
Main characters have to feel real or you, the reader, will abandon them. I write thrillers and I’m forever striving to write that perfect visceral character. Hemingway’s advice: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new [...]
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