1924 AND YOU ARE THERE!

Vinny Spanelli is a fatherless 17-year-old Phillies fan who goes to quirky Baker Bowl almost daily to watch his lowly favorite team. With his best friend Benny and Brooklyn girlfriend Rachel, he spends the season traveling out west, being the Phillies batboy, and getting into more humorous misadventures than you can count. Written in the language of the time, with occasional dispatches from Tigers beat reporter Calvin J. Butterworth, it’s a fun coming-of-age saga told through the colorful, re-imagined world of 1924 baseball.

 

 

BALL NUTS

Six baseball-crazy inmates escape from a Squallpocket, Maine hospital via a mysterious time warp and experience a wild, funkified, and re-imagined 1977 baseball season. Red Sox fanatic Carlton “Buzz” Gip shares the narrative duties with Mikey from Philly, Dodgers old-timer Sherman Wayman, Reds groupie Crazy Amy Gulliver, Bronx brother Friendly Fred and midwest schizophrenic Lester Creech (who roots for four teams at once). No Astroturfed ballpark or 1977 cultural icon (Star Wars, Groucho Marx, Elvis Presley, John Lennon) is left unattended. Meanwhile, Squallpocket’s reputable psychiatrist Dr. Sheila Grossinger and Seamus Headley, a corporate spook masquerading as the ward’s cryptic “sweeper”, are hot on the group’s trail…

 

MYSTERY BALL ’58

Snappy Drake, once a star-crossed Pacific Coast League pitcher, now ushers seats at Seals Stadium in the first season the newly arrived Giants play in San Francisco—and discovers a dead body in his section on Opening Day. Determined to find who’s trying to frame him for the murder (and subsequent ones), Snappy dons his best amateur sleuth cap and plunges into the search for the mad killer. An amusing spin on 1950s paperback pulps, Mystery Ball ’58 travels coast-to-coast and from one end of the Bay Area to the other, encountering colorful Beatniks, mobsters, corrupt city officials and Liz Doomis, a smart, fetching femme fatale reporter, while a heated National League pennant race tightens up around them…

 

 

TWINBILL

Two unique “replay novels” for the price of one! First, back in 1938, Hank Greenberg’s season-long correspondence with a 10-year-old baseball fan living in Nazi-endangered Austria is dramatically recounted in Dear Hank. Then, in The Bragging Rights League, journey into a history-flipped 1941, when a team of ragtag white ballplayers like DiMaggio, Williams and Foxx have to “prove themselves” in the all-black major leagues, where Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and others reign supreme.

 

 

 

THE INVASION OF NORMANDIE

A quick-paced comic fable about the power and menace of modern fame. When a world-famous pop singer/actress is shipped off to a rehab retreat in Colorado, two teenage sisters and huge fans of hers from neighboring Nebraska inadvertently find themselves sheltering her in their tiny town. A searing but entertaining commentary on the alluring toxic madness of celebrity and what it does to “ordinary” people.

Kirkus Reviews called it “a tale with an excellent premise about art, identity, and relationships…Enjoyably snappy.”

RED JACARANDAS

Three chilling, thrilling, and undeniably weird tales of Los Angeles: Two original screenplays wrapped around a short novel…

In AFTERSHOCK, an L.A. psychiatrist/author is displaced by an earthquake and rents a guest house on the grounds of an abandoned Spanish villa deep in Santa Monica Canyon, only to discover that her new abode has a chilling, haunted history that threatens to envelop her.

ONE EYE OPEN follows the journey of Leo, a homeless man living in L.A. whose life is a hazy string of wandering from encampments to food lines. Then in one pivotal moment while perched on the rail of a freeway overpass, a vision from beyond turns his world upside down and ultimately, his life.

In LOVED ONES, when TV actress Gina Coogan is found murdered on her Sherman Oaks doorstep, two of her most obsessive male fans escape for a golf weekend in the desert-with unexpected, twisted results.