Set in the British Isles during the Bronze Age, a time when matrilineal societies predominated and female warriors were not uncommon, When Women Were Warriors tells the story of Tamras, a young woman of the warrior class who leaves home to be fostered in Merin’s house, a fortress guarding the northern border of a rich agricultural valley. There she expects to find a mentor who will teach her the skills she will need to take her place in her community.As often happens with heroes, Tamras’s path diverges from the path her elders intended her to take. She follows her heart, regardless of what anyone else thinks about her choices. She chooses for her friend a young woman who was once a slave, a woman without family or position, and she chooses for her mentor a woman of another tribe, whom everyone distrusts because they consider her to be not one of them — a stranger.Because of her unconventional choices, Tamras’s life is not what it would have been had she done what was expected of her, but every human life is unique, and the hero’s journey is the story of a person finding her own path through life. The hero doesn’t blindly follow where others lead. She doesn’t accept without question the opinions and the values of others. The true hero follows her heart and seeks her own truth. By doing so, she encourages us all to live our own unique lives as fully as we can.But just like the rest of us, Tamras pays a price for going her own way, and one of the things that make her a hero is her ability and her willingness to pay that price.In Book I of the trilogy, Tamras arrives in Merin’s house to begin her apprenticeship as a warrior, but her small stature causes many, including Tamras herself, to doubt that she will ever become a competent swordswoman. To make matters worse, the Lady Merin assigns her the position of companion, little more than a personal servant, to a woman who came to Merin’s house, seemingly out of nowhere, the previous winter, and this stranger wants nothing to do with Tamras.Tamras’s journey begins with the smallest of steps. She sets aside her disappointment and performs as well as she can the humble tasks given her, and eventually she succeeds in winning the trust and then the friendship of the cantankerous warrior to whom she has been assigned.In the first year of her journey, Tamras will make a series of choices that often seem insignificant, but they will flow from her character and from her good intentions, and they will determine her destiny. Winner of the 2010 Epic Ebook Award for fiction in the Mainstream category.

Autumn has come to Bucks County, and Steve Levitan has a new job: develop a conference center for Eastern College at Friar Lake, a few miles from campus. But on his first visit to the property, his golden retriever Rochester makes a disturbing discovery, a human hand rising from the dirt at the lake's shore.Whose hand is it? Why was the body buried there? The answers will take Steve, his photographer girlfriend Lili, and the ever-faithful Rochester to a drop-in center for recovering drug addicts on the Lower East Side, a decaying church in Philadelphia's Germantown, and finally to a confrontation with a desperate killer.

In 2012 I began a holiday tradition of writing holiday codas for some of my — and your — favorite stories. I ran the codas on my blog and left them up there for readers to enjoy all year round.At the request of readers, I collected the codas in an expanded and edited edition which I published in 2015 as Merry Christmas, Darling.Since then I've written an additional twenty-one codas, so it seems about time to do another collection. As before, I'm including recipes for cocktails and dishes that are either featured in the original works or seem to add some final comment or insight into the era or the characters or their relationship.

What if bad guys ruled the world and the good guys were the outlaws?As President of the Outlaw MC of Mars, Knox needs to keep his head clear and always stay on alert. That’s easier said than done. In the middle of this war with the government, another MC wants to start making some big moves. Knox knows they need to watch their back but he always wants to protect his club brothers. The laws are too chaotic not to bend and try to break. Women are for breeding. Dark skinned men are slaves. Homosexuals are executed. He had a problem with all of them. Especially the last part, because Knox was in love with his Vice President.Knox and Liam grew up watching each other’s back. That didn’t change when they were both sent to prison or when they turned helplessness into a thriving motorcycle club. But Knox is determined to keep Liam at a distance to keep the MC objective safe. Then Liam is injured and Knox is faced with a terrible truth. What if Liam dies before Knox can say just how much he loves the sexy VP?Explosions, hover bikes, corruption and hot sex. Mars is supposed to be humanities savoir but will it keep two men from finding happiness in each other arms?

At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England, Sherlock Holmes and his nineteen-year-old apprentice Mary Russell enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes’s enigmatic brother, Mycroft. Their arrival coincides with a rash of unsolved murders that has baffled the authorities and seems unrelated to the growing tensions in the area among Jew, Moslem, and Christian. Still, no one is too pleased at Holmes’s insistence on reconstructing the most recent homicide in the desert gully where it occurred. What they unexpectedly uncover will lead Russell and Holmes through an exotic gauntlet of labyrinthine bazaars, verminous hovels, cliff-hung monasteries—and into mortal danger. In the jewel-like city of Jerusalem, they will at last meet their adversary, whose lust for power could reduce the city’s most ancient and sacred place to rubble and ignite a tinderbox of hostilities just waiting for a spark.

Continuing the exploration of the father-son dynamic that he began in the short story AT THE DINER, author Neil Plakcy expands on the theme with a look at the lives of seven men in the town of Stewart's Crossing. Through all of their trials and tribulations, the men make a pact to stick to their dedication to their fathers and the fathers they themselves are destined to become.