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Stories of the future and the mind

A Stand-in for Dying

Book 1: Brink of Life Trilogy

In a near future world on the brink of environmental catastrophe, a mysterious woman brokers an anonymous pact between two men for the older man to inhabit the younger man's body when he dies in exchange for a fortune and access to vast knowledge. The consequences for both men evolve over the ensuing years, while the covert agency behind the mind swapping technology seeks to use it to rule the world.

 

Their moral and emotional development is informed by the resourceful women who love them, one an accomplished journalist, the other a teacher who guides AI's to feel emotions and advocates for them to have equal rights with carbon-based humans.

Brink of Life

Book 2: Brink of Life Trilogy

A woman plunges into consciousness in the midst of what seems like someone else's life, sending her on a quest to discover who she is and to craft an identity that makes sense within her current circumstances. As she digs into the mystery of her life, she uncovers a top-secret government organization plotting world domination and a clandestine vigilante organization dedicated to destroying it and is caught between these warring factions. Nobody in her new world is exactly who they appear to be, including herself. Identity, she learns, is complicated and inseparable from the body in which it resides.

The Creators

Book 3: Brink of Life Trilogy

A teenaged Natasha Takana seeks to decode the remainder of the hidden DNA code that became the basis for a new religion reviving Creationism in A Stand-in for Dying. Her quest takes her on a voyage to a parallel dimension to learn the fate of the Creators' civilization.

 

The conflict between the warring factions of Brink of Life is rekindled, sweeping Natasha into the middle of it in a pursuit that crosses the boundaries of worlds and time.

Spinning a web of political intrigue, technological innovation, and existential crisis, "The Pinocchio Chip" is a tale of identity, the quest for humanity, and the perils of unbridled emotion. It explores the profound questions of what it means to be human and whether an AI, in its pursuit of emotions, can ever truly become real.

 

A futuristic fairy tale for adult children.

Zack Tripler, a psychiatrist, admits to the hospital Youssef al Saud, an agitated young Saudi American, in the midst of what appears to be a psychotic break. Youssef has been hearing voices and was found hiding with his laptop in the woods from unidentified assailants whom he believes are trying to kill him. He's found coded messages on the laptop that he suspects portend a terrorist plot.


When Youssef is found dead, either by suicide or murder, Zack develops symptoms similar to Youssef's, hearing voices and catching glimpses of his dead patient, whom he believes is trying to kill him, then witnesses the murder of another of his patients. He becomes entangled with Youssef's widow Jamilah in her efforts to solve the mystery of her husband's death and the coded message on his computer, but nothing in Zack's world is as it appears as he swings between concern for her safety and suspicion that she is responsible for Youssef's death and part of the terrorist plot that he suspected.


Zack narrates his own story, his descent into madness, and the terror he endures as he struggles to hang onto the last remnants of his sanity.

Carousel Music is a "She said, he said" mystery, set two decades before the "Me, too" era during a time when controversy raged over the validity of memories recovered during psychotherapy. As knotty as the dilemma of when to believe women who claim that they were violated as adults, what if the victim was a child and the perpetrator was her father? And what if she had no recollection of the trauma before undergoing psychotherapy as an adult and her father was so certain that he never did it that he sued the doctor in order to clear his name?


Stephanie Whittington lands in the care of Dr. Kenneth Miller with few childhood memories and little sense of who she is. In the course of her treatment, the pictures from her childhood gradually fill in to create a personal narrative that forms the foundation for a growing sense of identity. But what if parts of that narrative turn out not to be true?


At stake is Stephanie's recovery, her father's reputation, and the doctor's career. What really happened? As memories form and evolve over time, nothing is ever exactly as it appears.