Happy New Year

Another year, another step toward death. I’ll be 50 next year. Maybe this will be the time I finally get my shit together. It’s doubtful, but a man can dream.

There is fantastic news on the horizon. Besides my second book of short stories (which will be published sometime in 2026, there is a secret project I’m going to be a part of. I can’t give details now, but it will be a lovely surprise with some incredible names. Watch this space!

It’s strange to think back on those days when I worked on Goodnight Irene on the porch with the cat sitting next to me. I had no idea what I was doing or why, but I had these images in my head and I had to get them on paper. And now, book number 7 is in the works. Wild. I could never have dreamed I’d keep going. I can’t stop now — I’m so close to 10 books. And once I have ten, I just have to get to 20.

After this book of short stories, I plan to return to the world of novel writing. Short stories are great, but I understand that mystery readers like spending time in the world and diving deep into a mystery plot. Characterization, clues, and suspects tend to be better in novels. Maybe I’ll try and publish one short story with every novel. Or maybe I’ll slowly collect short stories and publish whenever they’re ready. Who knows?

As for the current project, I hit a bit of a stumbling block on story number 3, but I’m back on track. I might have a solid draft in 2 weeks. If you remember, I was concerned it would be a novel instead of a short. I no longer think this will be a problem. I’ve combined characters and cut some of the cast. It was great creating the whole town though. I feel very connected to the story. here is a reminder of the first two stories and the new blurb for the third.

In the summer of 1924, reclusive inventor Horace Cobb is found dead inside his fortress-like workshop. The door was locked from the inside, the windows sealed with iron, and no one could have entered or left. Yet Cobb lies shot through the heart—his killer apparently a six-foot automaton dressed as a cowboy, revolver still smoking in its hand.

Among Cobb’s bizarre collection of machines, the police discover a wax cylinder recording made only moments before the crime. On it, Cobb’s own voice names his enemy—before the automaton’s tinny drawl interrupts, followed by the crack of a fatal gunshot. The recording seems to solve the mystery outright, but Detective Rowan Manory isn’t convinced. Somewhere in those five minutes of wax lies both the explanation of the impossibility and the clue to the real killer’s identity. To find it, Rowan must pierce through layers of deception, suspicion, and mechanical trickery inside a castle where nothing is what it seems.

Someone is hunting fair-haired women in Chicago. When the pattern suddenly breaks, Rowan Manory is pulled into a maze of false leads, hidden desires, and the darkest corners of a killer’s mind.

The police department is split between old-school instincts and a new breed of psychological experts; the mayor’s office is desperate to avoid scandal; and the newspapers fan panic with every headline. In the shadows, gangsters and opportunists twist the murders to their own advantage, tightening the pressure on Rowan as the line between fact and fabrication begins to blur.

As the city panics and the bodies mount, Rowan uncovers a secret so twisted it can only end one way: with a crime that shouldn’t be possible, in a room no killer could have entered… or escaped.

Fantôme Fatale is an impossible crime set in the small river town of Red River, a place that prides itself on tradition, silence, and the comforting belief that certain things are best left in the past.

When a man is found murdered under circumstances that defy explanation—no footprints, no sign of entry or escape, nothing but absence where evidence should be—the town is forced to confront the possibility that the crime was not merely clever, but unnatural. Whispers of ghosts and old sins begin to circulate, reviving a history Red River has long tried to forget.

As the investigation stalls, a journalist returns home to examine the town’s earlier tragedies. What she uncovers is not a single secret, but a pattern: erased names, missing records, and a violence disguised as righteousness. Somewhere in that buried history lies the key to the present-day murders—and to understanding how something so impossible could happen in plain sight.

Fantôme Fatale blends locked-room logic with folklore, superstition, and the dangerous power of collective belief, asking whether a town can truly escape the crimes it refuses to remember.

Happy New Year!