Books
Kin and Kind
The Hearthlight Saga - Book One
How do you love someone who can burn the world?
When Ray—a luminous, matter-shaping being feared by governments—chooses Russian baker Anya as the human he will speak to, she sees what the world does not: not a conqueror, but a lonely presence desperate to belong. A government plot drives him to rage, killing seventeen people. In the aftermath, Ray flees to the only place he is still welcome: with Anya and her husband in rural England. There he begins the slow work of redemption and becoming family: shared meals, fragile trust, and his adopted human children—who teach him what protection really means. But love gives his power something to lose. When a vengeful widower threatens their fragile home, Ray must choose between the easy certainty of overwhelming force and the harder mercy of restraint—even if it costs him the people he loves.
Kin and Kind is an 90,000-word adult upmarket speculative fiction novel blending intimate, character-driven conflict with global, existential stakes during first contact.
From the threat of cities burning to the bonds formed at a kitchen table, Kin and Kind is a luminous tale about found family, redemption, and the moral weight of loving someone who could burn the world.
Complete and currently querying for publication.
The Bright Line
The Hearthlight Saga - Book Two
Seventeen people died in Chicago. Ray nearly made it billions. Now Dr. Carson is building a weapon to finish what he began: The god-killer.
When NASA’s first exoplanet colony mission places Ray under the command of Major Leslie Boyle, his restraint is tested in ways no family dinner ever could. But when tragedy reaches the people he loves—and an attempt on his own life—the old temptations return: righteous fury and the terrible simplicity of power.
Ray must stop the weapons built to destroy him without becoming one himself. And when the people he loves become the easiest way to hurt him, Ray must decide: Is restraint a weakness that will cost his family their lives? Or is it the one thing keeping his soul intact?
Complete and currently in late-stage revision.
Love and Loss
The Hearthlight Saga - Book Three
Ray’s ever-growing family is ripped apart by a shadow from his past. Gathering the pieces, they flee across the world to find themselves healing among strangers.
But old enemies move in the darkness, bringing a suffering beyond anything Ray has endured. He is broken and afraid. His family, and the world, fears what he has become. And what he will do.
Complete and currently in late-stage revision.
Shimmers
It starts as a typical winter with a fever moving through the house and the Petersons trading shifts at each other's bedsides. But when the fever breaks, the world realizes that some people will never be the same.
The KDV-1 virus doesn't kill. It rewrites, turning one person in twenty iridescent, scaled, and, in the eyes of the unchanged, no longer quite human. Daniel changes, but his wife does not. Eleven-year-old twins Ethan and Ella change, but their older sister does not. An ordinary foster family must draw together on the wrong side of a town hardening into fear.
Intimate, tender, and unflinching, this is an upmarket speculative novel about transformation and belonging in the face of hate and fear. Who do we call family and who do we call human?
Work in progress