work in progress

ASCENSION

Julia Kalas is discovering the truth behind the saying “Wherever you go, there you are.” Despite her frequently declared wish to stay out of the detecting business, when a stray corpse appears at the Buddhist retreat in the West Texas desert where she’s spent the last six months, nobody – including herself – can talk her out of trying to discover where it came from.

What she finds out in the process, about herself and this strange new world that federal witness protection has sent her to, is almost as troublesome as the fact that she seems to inspire murder everywhere she goes. Her ex-boyfriend’s marriage is even weirder than it first appeared, prison can’t hold the woman who wants to kill her, and her pre-WITSEC past keeps rising from the dead at precisely the wrong moment.

Something’s gotta give, and Julia finds herself having to decide whether it’s going to be her life or her sanity. 

ARBOR VITAE

It's the summer of 1987 in Austin, Texas, twenty years after the death of  Thuja Maarten's mother, the infamous tree biologist Sif Maarten. Thuja encounters a young woman on a university shuttle bus who bears an uncanny resemblance to her older sister, Sequoia, which kicks off a genealogical investigation that quickly turns deadly.