Romantic Comedy

The Cherokee believe when a person dies, their soul is reborn. Life is repeated. An endless cycle of lessons to be learned, love to be found, destiny to be fulfilled. For the past six months, in every flower, every bird, I’ve imagined my parents, relieved of their human forms.

Now, after five months at the Skye View Wellness Center, it was summer. A time for parties and friends, but that’s the last thing I want to do. So when my best friend Erin convinces me to attend a bonfire at Eagle Point, I can’t handle the crowd full of sympathetic stares or drunken class clowns who would use my tragedy as a way into my heart – or my pants. The solitude of the woods offers an escape, until I stumble upon a boy, unconscious and bleeding, his pockets stuffed not with identification but with poetry illustrating the beauty of dying. I’ve seen enough death. I will not leave this boy’s side.

Even after he wakes, when the only thing he can remember are visions of events that haven’t happened yet…

When federal agent Timothy J. Carter, undercover as an executive with an Ohio environmental firm, sets out to visit Stella Hunter, a disgraced academic, he expects to gain insight on possible causes of the recent outbreak of madness at a peaceful women’s rally in Cairo. His scarred face and a short footage of the riot are the evidence he means to use to persuade her to help him without probing his reasons. What he doesn’t expect to hear is that a product of ancient myths and legends is causing these deadly riots. And that another crackpot academic spent ten years chasing after this mythological deity. But twenty-four hours later, when a peaceful rally at the Mall in Washington disintegrates into murderous riot that leaves hundreds dead and thousands injured, Carter is forced to consider the unthinkable: What if the product of ancient myths and legends somehow made it on to the US soil…?

About the Book

At age fifty, after a twenty-year relation abruptly ends in divorce, Stan finds himself thrust back into the dating world. He discovers computer dating and takes to it like a pig to slop. By age fifty-five, he has dated more than fifty ladies. Stan tells the stories of a dozen or so ladies, the most noteworthy. The book unintentionally follows a vein similar to that of Must Love Dogs, by Clare Cook. What differs is Stan’s story is the look at Internet dating from the male perspective. Cook’s novel has a fairy-tale ending, but true stories don’t end like fairy tales. The last lady whose story Stan relates wasn’t a lady. She was a black widow! After they have lived together for two and a half years and talked of marriage, out of the blue, she tries to kill him! The story climaxes with some heavy courtroom drama. Stan concludes with his reflections of living for more than two years with a female psychopath.

The book can be divided into four parts. The first part is an introduction to set the stage for the telling of the author’s story. He briefly describes his roots and core beliefs, He then discusses his marriage and raising two daughters, then how his marriage unexpectedly and abruptly ends in divorce after twenty years.

This opens the door to part two. Thrust back into the dating world at age fifty in 2004, he discovers computer dating. He finds it the best thing since sliced bread. By 2008, he dates upwards of fifty women. He relates the stories of a dozen of the women he deems most interesting. Some stories are comical, and some are bizarre. Some touch the heart, and some are emotionally painful. By 2008, the author is so frustrated in not finding his next bride that he lowers his standards in searching the Net for a bride. His standards keep leading him to “good girls,” who are boring, so he decides to search for “bad girls.”

Like magic, part three opens with Stan finding a bad girl. A passion-filled relationship ensues, lasting eight months. When Stan discovers that she dropped out of school in eighth grade and has been married seven times (facts she had been lying about), the woman abruptly ends the relationship. Like magic again, he finds another bad girl. A two-year, eight-month passion-packed relationship blossoms. Mutual talk of love and marriage grows. Out of the blue, without provocation, this woman tries to kill Stan in premeditated murder involving conspiracies. Part three concludes with heavy courtroom drama resulting from the assault.

Part four concludes the book as Stan reflects on living for more than two years with a psychopath, and her conspiracies and motives behind the assault.