Curt, a fourteen-year-old boy, enters a public high school in the American Midwest in 1951. What no one knows is that he and his mother entered the United States illegally, which means he must, at all costs, avoid attracting attention. This is his first formal schooling, but a school counselor soon realizes the boy has genius-level intelligence. That discovery may ruin everything. Unfortunately, in addition to Curt’s superior intelligence, he also has an excess of curiosity. That leads him to fall in with some small-time marijuana dealers who are about to be in direct conflict with big-time drug dealers who are not above using intimidation and murder to get what they want.

E.E. “Doc” Murdock is a psychologist. Therefore, it’s not surprising that he sets his latest novel in a 1970s mental hospital. What is surprising is what a strange hospital it turns out to be. His protagonist is a psychology student at the local university who hopes to finish his degree before he gets drafted and sent to Vietnam. When he gets assigned to that hospital as part of an independent study program, he meets an old German patient who likes to tell Grimms-like tales of horror and murder (hint: the employee in charge of the patients is named Grimm). But is it possible the old man’s “tall tales” are actually true stories? And what role did the old German man play during World War Two? Was he nothing more than a low-level guard in an art museum, as he claims, where he was assigned to guard art treasure stolen from Jews by the Nazis. Or was he actually a high-level official in a nearby Nazi extermination camp? Either way, what is he doing acting like a patient in an American mental hospital? Just when you think you know where Dr. Murdock’s new novel is taking you, it changes and takes you down an unexpected new path. Is it a murder mystery, a romance, a study of psychological practice and mental health treatment in a bygone era, or is it a historical account of Nazi war crimes? Actually, it’s all of the above.

This novel tells the story of five years in man's life as he tries to hold onto the memories that shaped him. As his memory begins to fail, Aaron Young still wants to live a free and natural life. If only he could recapture the deep significance of his time in India during World War 2 when he flew on dangerous missions "over the hump" of the Himalayas into China. Although Aaron is with those who love him and want to care for him, whenever he gets the chance, he runs away to the beautiful red rock country of Southern Utah, the one place he feels free to be himself and not worry about people trying to cage him in.

The Robots of Cottage H is a psychological novel that explores three versions of reality created by the troubled mind of a young man named Scotty. Does the story take place in a mental hospital, in a ward known as Cottage H, a ward run by a sadistic “houseparent” named Trump? Or, is Scotty actually telling the story to a psychiatrist, making up the details as he goes along, using things he’s seen on TV or heard about in the downtown bars he frequents? He believes all of the characters in his story - including the psychiatrist - are actually robots that have made themselves look like humans. Are they? Hard to say. Maybe the whole novel is some kind of allegorical representation of our current “crazy” political situation. In the end, it’s up to the reader to decide what the “real” reality is.

This novel is a Bildungsroman Stockholm Syndrome story. Bildungsroman refers to coming of age, and Stockholm Syndrome refers to the complex psychological process in which a victim of a kidnapping chooses to stay with the kidnapper. So, is this new novel about coming of age while under the control of a kidnapper? It is.

Writers have been writing about war since the siege of Troy, but few, if any, have captured the first-person experience of war as deeply and intensely as My Vietnam War. Set in 1967 (the deadliest year of the war), this memoir-style novel depicts the psychological journey of a young man whose carefree days of studying at the university are ended by the draft. The story follows him from his initial rear-echelon assignment in Saigon, where he falls for a mysterious storytelling bar girl, to his eventual posting at an isolated front-line firebase in one of the deepest parts of the Vietnam jungle. What he experiences there begins his steady spiral down into PTSD.

This psychological novel is about a young man who, after being abandoned and left homeless, is forced to move in with his invalid grandmother in a gang-infested neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. From the chilling opening, to the existentially alarming conclusion, you will be carried along with the angry, but compassionate, young protagonist on his journey of learning and self discovery.

This is the most innovative murder mystery you will ever read. It features a gentle young man named Harp who lives under the Santa Monica pier after he was accidentally released from a mental hospital. When he wakes up one morning to find another homeless man lying dead right next to him, he runs away but soon becomes the main suspect in the murder. Harp must find the killer before the police find him. Sound like a familiar murder mystery plot? Not really. Harp is clearly not much of a detective, but his caustic, sarcastic, Bible-quoting mother is. The only problem is she's dead. But when Harp gets into trouble, she comes into his head to guide him (and harass him) as he searches among a wild assortment of Venice Beach crazies for clues about who the real murderer might be. She becomes a sort of second protagonist, always there in Harp's head to keep him on the straight and narrow (often by quoting the grimmest of Grimm's fairy tales, the only thing she let Harp read when he was a child).

Crueltown features LA detective, Drew Steele, as he takes on a new case while still recovering from life-threatening wounds he suffered in an IED explosion in Iraq where he was working as a private contractor. The doctors told him he would never walk again, but he proved them wrong. After multiple surgeries, he is able to walk again using a high-tech prosthetic foot (which provides a convenient place to hide a tiny gun). His first case back in LA seems routine - a missing Las Vegas casino boss - but the case turns decidedly dangerous when the missing man turns up dead with a strange message burned into the flesh of his forehead. When the autopsy reveals a grisly surprise in the dead man's stomach, Steele suspects it was put there to suggest the murder is somehow connected to drug trafficking in Crueltown, the criminal hideout in a toxic swamp near the LA-harbor. Crueltown is a Noir murder mystery that pits two brilliant minds against each other in a life and death struggle against a backdrop of the darker side of LA.