SHORT STORY: A HAND IN MURDER

“After your cousin chopped off the guy’s hand, the guy ran away, bled out, and died,” my mother said. . . Read it all, published in Mysterical-E>>

SHORT STORY: THE LAST RIVER

. . . Pacheco’s rocking motion slowed. He turned away from the commander and watched the pallbearers slide Ragsdale’s casket into a hearse. They did it with all the tenderness of a pizza chef sliding another pie into the oven. They’d done it too often to make it look somber anymore. . . Honorable Mention, Writers of the Future>>

NOVEL MANUSCRIPT: COIN FLIGHT

Louie, a young salesman for a financial services firm, moonlights as a pickpocket and con artist. Begging on the streets of Atlanta, he can make $150 a night pretending to be a disabled veteran.

Sam Qureshi, an executive at the same financial firm, storms out under a cloud of suspicion. He launches his own business, a bitcoin transfer company, with a plan to defraud investors of $1 million. He knows about Louie’s double-life, and lures him away from the firm to be the perfect pitch man for the startup.

Sam designs the bitcoin company to fail. We’ll make more money from a flop than from a success, because the investors won’t expect their money back. When it’s just about enrichment, Louie is onboard. But once Louie learns that Sam’s intentions go beyond greed, can he stop him before it’s too late?

Coin Flight has won second prize in the 2016 in the Joanna Catherine Scott novel excerpt contest, part of the nationwide Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and an award for “Best Pitch” in the fall 2018 Atlanta Writers Conference. The manuscript is under review by literary agents.