Novels

Comfortable in the gated community of Brandewoode, Michael couldn't ask for a better life. He works at computer security an easy commute away, golfs with his coworkers on weekends. He's head-over-heels in love with his wife, Brenda. Lately, though, his world has been assuming oddly sinister shapes. For weeks now a fog has blotted out the sky, bringing with it a thick, incessant drizzle. Brenda seems detached. Changes at the office arouse his suspicions. Neighbors, one-by-one, fall victim to a mysterious illness. A phantomlike menace stalking Brandewoode has taken to raiding Michael's garbage. And where are all those snakes coming from?

   Members of an archaeological dig in southern New Mexico are stunned when nearby construction unearths the remains of a girl dating several millennia before the earliest known inhabitants of North America. The discovery touches the lives of Will Stanton, a withdrawn graduate research assistant who is profoundly attracted to the prehistoric cultures he studies, and Emily Franklin, a plucky undergraduate new to archaeology and freshly arrived from New York. Steeped in the setting of the northern Chihuahuan Desert, A Dark Music is an unusual and magical love story.

Evelyn Moore, a clinical psychologist, has joined the staff of a mental hospital on the edge of the Maine North Woods. Now, attending  daily to the disintegrating personalities of others, she finds her own fragile identity, stitched together out of her troubled past,  beginning to unravel. Moreover, the hospital, known to the patients as "The House," awakens in Evelyn a growing and tangible dread. Does  the institution harbor some malevolence? But soon Evelyn's attention turns to Sophie, a young patient whose wild life has brought her to  the hospital in handcuffs. Sophie views the world differently. She doesn't speak to the hospital staff but communicates with  spirits. Here in this enigmatic insitution, where the boundaries between physical and mental realities continually shift and blur,  these two women look for their separate salvations through one another and through the alliance of spirits and patients inhabiting The House.

    There are warnings—some subtle, some not.  Dolphins communicate signals of alarm.  Unusual children talk to birds and speak of wind on the moon.  The setting—the forested coast of Maine.  The backdrop—global environmental crisis.
    Amos Thibault, computer expert with Maine’s Forest Service, is puzzled by satellite data he’s been gathering for a real-time forest inventory.  The forest, he discovers, is inexplicably changing.  And at Penobscook Bay, where the changes appear to be focused, he finds more: the woman whose studies of dolphin communications have drawn her to the same bay, the school of children with special talents, and the man in the three-piece suit, super-developer John Furst, with his grand plans for Maine’s forest and coast.
    The answer to the deepening mystery lies with a strange trio of medical researchers, whose activities finally unveil the principal player in the drama: the Earth itself.  As a frightening epidemic of catatonia spreads among local residents, all are eventually caught up in the growing puzzle.  Earth has been awakened, and a night of transformation is at hand.  The world will never be the same.
    Based on the Gaia Hypothesis—that Earth is a living thing, a massive, complex, and sensitive organism—The Hour of Blue suggests that Earth may also be capable of protecting itself—but not without consequence for those who would hurt it.  The novel combines science fiction, suspense, and the environmental issues of today.  Its haunting message is both a warning and a statement of hope.