The Island Country

AMAZON: The Island Country
GOODREADS: The Island Country

Long Island, New York, just after World War II, when the country was great for some and not so great for others, home to the Smith Family: Philip, a racist Nassau County detective with a secret; his mentally ill wife, Eunice, speeding around the house looking for her coffee can of prescription pills; their oldest son, Philip Jr., aspiring pastor and budding monster; daughter Joyce, with a serious artistic talent that, in the great mall culture, she doesn’t know what to do with; and Oscar, an obese child who wants nothing more than to be a fireman when he grows up.

After surviving her own dysfunctional childhood, Joyce marries Roger, a beeraholic Customs Inspector with whom she would have two children: Griff, an enterprising lad fully comfortable on the other side of a line, and Stacy, a girl attuned to a dark frequency few can perceive.

Decades go by, marriages fall apart, children long to escape, and Joyce struggles to find happiness in her art and life in the only place she would ever know.

Excerpts from The Island Country

History of von Schatt (1913-1960)

AMAZON: History of von Schatt (1913-1960)
GOODREADS: History of von Schatt (1913-1960)

The man, the monster…

This history chronicles the origin of the von Schatt family: from the abandonment of its patriarch, Heinrich, on the steps of an orphanage in prewar Germany; through his apprenticeship on the high seas with a salty drunken smuggler; his flight from the Nazis to Sweden; his kidnapping of a child bride to America; his becoming the most feared Captain in the US military troop transport fleet; his concurrent role as husband and father of two dysfunctional Long Island families; and his lifelong obsession to uncover the secret behind a set of coordinates he’d found written on an old map.

Excerpts from History of von Schatt (1913-1960)