I am excited to announce the publication of my latest novel, Sting. I enjoy the journey of writing a novel, and this one was no different in that aspect. But it is very different in subject matter.
Sting is available in paperback and eBook format on Amazon.com and iUniverse Bookstore. It can also be ordered from any bookstore. I hope you will give it a read, and if you like it, post a review on Amazon.
The daughter of a mountain gatherer and healer, sixteen-year-old Shug Yokem knows every sound the mountains make: the creaking of limbs in winter, the prattle of rain in spring, the whisper of summer winds, and the crackle of fall's sun-dried foliage underfoot. She knows which plants will cure and which will kill. Until Cleo Sizemore shows up on her and her mother's doorstep, she has never had an enemy, let alone entertained the idea of killing someone.
There was magic in that wooden box that sat in the living room near the front door. I don't recall when my fascination for the box began or when I took notice of it being there. But when I was old enough to comprehend a few words of the English language, my mother told me it had stood in the same spot long before I was born, a radio, she had called it. A Sears Roebuck Silvertone.
The raincrows' warning rode upon a chill wind down the Kentucky mountainside to Katelin Stone that Indian Summer day. The rain would come, and her world as she knew it would end. There would be a new beginning for her. Her mother's death sets into motion the events that become her hell. Her father's surprise marriage brings into their home a calculating and money-grabbing woman and her troubled teenage son, who terrorizes Katelin with vicious attacks and cold-bloodied threats that force her to forsake Walter, her true love, and at sixteen to marry a man she hardly knows.
In an unfamiliar city, Jessica Langdon, an aeronautical engineer, has just seen her daughter murdered. Her vow of vengeance rockets her into a tidal wave of danger and deception. With only a set of initials and two words to go on, she takes an alias and tracks down the killers. Fear is her only companion until she meets Special Agent Hunter Rawls. But he wants her to stay out of his ongoing investigation of "the corporation," a mammoth organization whose powerful members will stop at nothing to achieve their purpose--- a plot of conspiracy that threatens a takeover of the United States government. And she will stop at nothing to stop them all.
Homer Ashley Fields has only one living relative, an aging grandfather, who for thirty-two years has lived in self-imposed silence rather than to answer questions about his mysterious past. At age twelve, Homer stopped asking; the scar on his arm a reminder never to ask again. That day, his grandfather sat down with a notebook and a pencil and began to write, over the years filling notebook after notebook and locking them in an old trunk. Homer suspects the answers to all his questions are on the pages, but he will not betray his grandfather's trust. When a stranger's appearance terrifies his grandfather into a near heart attack, Homer feels certain the man is linked to his grandfather's past, and contemplates breaking into the trunk. By chance, he finds two handwritten pages behind the trunk that reveal the horrible truth that took the lives of thousands and drove his grandfather from his home at age eleven to fend for himself. Now he must find his ailing grandfather's siblings, if they are still alive- before it is too late.
Jessie stumbled into the kitchen and glanced to the cat clock Hunter had given her, the eyes darting back and forth in sync with the movement of its tail. It was just six-thirty. Ordinarily, the whimsical clock produced a smile.
She tightened the belt of her robe and glared at the dirty cups and glasses piled in the sink. She grabbed a cup from the top of the heap, rinsed it, and filled it with coffee she had made more than two hours earlier, after returning from Scott Brooks'. Breaking into his house served only to open her eyes to just how irrational she had become.
I never played much with dolls as a young girl. Living on a farm with an older brother and his friends as playmates, I grew up a tomboy. A cane pole over my shoulder and a bucket of worms swinging from the bail of a Karo syrup bucket, I would pound the dusty trail with them to the catfish pond. But the year I turned twelve, dolls played an important part in my life, providing a memory I will always hold dear.
It was a dark, almost ebony jungle with black jagged mountains and dark clouds in the background. The only touch of color was a small yellow orchid on a gnarled tree in the foreground. The dark jungle, night sky, and the gothic mountain was definitely me, and the small touch of living color was about the right size.
Midnight Pass- a Stuart Kaminsky novel
One day back in the winter of 1929, the wind blew up quite a snowstorm, howling through the valley and racing over the river in a small railroad town in Estill County, Kentucky. I was just a small child, six or seven, the best I remember, and snowstorms were not unusual, but this one was different. More than likely, it stands out in my memory because of what happened that night.
In the days when the sun burns hot and the air stands still, the seas boil, wine turns sour, man and beast become languid, and dogs grow mad. The Greeks and ancient Romans viewed these days, early July through early September, as an evil time. They called them "days of the dogs." As a young child in Kentucky, I grew to fear the approach of July, when the air between land and sky trembled with heat, and the hay in the fields shriveled into itself to hide from it. "Dog days is here," my grandmother would warn, "stay away from bats, skunks, and dogs what foams at the mouth. They'll bite ye and turn ye into one of 'em. Ye'll beg fer water and scream at the sight of it."
When I shut the door to my room, all I could think of was that five gallon lard can Paul and I hid in an old abandoned tobacco barn off Barnes Mill Road. We had buried it beneath a mound of musty and mildewed hay piled in a dark back corner.
That afternoon as the school bus carried me the thirteen miles back to Opossum Kingdom, I still couldn't believe what happened in home room. So lost in my thoughts was I that the antics of rowdy schoolmates failed to pull me from them. Except for my obnoxious first cousin Patsy, who lived in town. I was glad when she got off the bus.
