WHAT SNOO?

Plenty! My three latest young adult novels are finished and have just been kicked out of the nest in search of a home. Here’s a sneak peak:

THANK YOU FOR DYING

RISKY BUSINESS meets SIX FEET UNDER

Mary Murphy McConigle has a little problem.

She borrows eighty bucks from the Junior Class car wash proceeds, then heads to the Lucky Feather Casino to win back the money she owes and, within an hour, loses it all.

Make that Murphy has a big problem.

Accidental solution: sell the trinkets, balloons, stuffed animals and other gewgaws intended for the Junior Class Carnival to the grieving people at a makeshift memorial for little Eva Melendez, seven-year old community icon who has just died of cancer. A touching solution to poverty and grief, especially since Murphy comes from a long line of respectable funeral directors. Murphy knows mourning and Murphy certainly knows how to dig herself a grave.

So, make that Murphy has a major problem.

But Murphy isn’t the only one with problems. Her best friend, Erica ‘Bings’ Binger has lost her job, Bings’ beloved grandmother has just been diagnosed with cancer and Murphy’s parents, Ken and Barbie, are struggling financially with the McConigle Mortuary. And one way or another, all these problems are stacking up on Murphy’s shoulders.

Really, all she wanted to do was pay back the class money she lost gambling, not cause a national dialogue on how we mourn. From borrowing that first twenty dollar bill to blackmailing Riley Cobean, her father’s shifty new funeral director--it’s an all-or-nothing gamble to save the family business. Murphy takes a fast track, self-taught course of Business Models 101 and learns that in life, as in business, there can be profit in loss and and loss in profit.

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LIBERTY JUSTICE JONES

A girl in search of an education, a draft horse in search of one last chance, a derelict tractor in search of a missing gear, and a young man in
search of a home. These unlikely compatriots join forces and
risk everything for a small bit of something during a
time when nothing was king -
The Depression.

Last name, first and middle:	Jones (comma) Liberty Justice
Age:	17, more or less
Describe yourself in one sentence:	Steal-trap mind with a spring-loaded mouth
List Three Goals:	Get off this farm. Get into college. Work on people’s heads and I don’t mean curling hair.
List Financial Assets:	$1.73, not counting the money my brat brother owes me. That would make it two bucks even.

Yeah, yeah, things are tough all over. It’s 1936, what do you expect? Don’t you know we’re in the middle of a Depression? How’s about a buck for every time I’ve heard that one? And what is more depressing than to be stuck here, smack dab in the middle of my mother’s Christmas tree farm, pruning her precious little trees of joy? Being poor as Job’s turkey is pretty darn depressing. My red frizzed hair is pretty depressing, but one depression at a time here.

I think getting kicked out of school was a blessing. I’ve been bored stiff anyway since the 7th grade. I’m too smart for my own good, so they say. They tell me to learn to type or teach or become charming to lure some nice young man willing to overlook my IQ. Best forget all my silly dreams of science and math and medicine. So much for Liberty and Justice. Best stick with the common attributes of Jones. Be thou common and spare thyself.

Maybe I’m not as smart as I think. How come I can’t figure out a way to get my mom out of debt and off this wreck of a farm? Grandy’s no help, that’s for sure. I love her, but she’s nutty as a walnut grove and talks to her stupid old tractor, Stella. And my brother Jefferson is a liability, not an asset. Now, good ol’ Charlie McGregor is a good man and would do Mom a lot of good, if she’d get over this ‘no handouts’ kick of hers.

Sure, I can run away. Hop a train and be where - halfway to Yale or Harvard or Oxford? Ha ha ha. Maybe as a filing clerk. Say by some miracle I do get into college. Then what? Blame myself for the rest of my life that I walked out on my family, causing Mom to lose her own dream - this newfangled idea of growing plantation Christmas trees? Here! On the Oregon Coast Range, for cryin’ out loud, where any fool can walk into the forest and into a tree, and cut it down for free? Logic has nothing to do with dreams.

Now there is one small glimmer of hope on the horizon. There’s this contest for the most beautiful Christmas tree delivered to the state capitol. And the prize for perfection of color and symmetry and size? Five hundred dollars!

I have the plan, I have the tree and I have a coconspirator - Rudy Somebody, a drifter fresh off the rails. And there’s Stella, our Frankensteined tractor and of course Quiller, my old best friend, my American Shire draft horse. Simple. All I have to do is move this 25 foot Christmas tree from here to Salem. In the snow, without getting caught. I can do it all with physics and okay, maybe some luck.

Look, I’m not stupid. Hard times do hard things to anyone’s dreams - Mom’s, Grandy’s, mysterious drifter’s, mine... even those who seem to have all they could ever want. I reckon there comes a time to put aside one’s own dreams for someone else’s.

And a time not to.

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THAT HELLIE GIRL!

So just who is THAT HELLIE GIRL? a tough street Arab, a seasoned pickpocket and a small girl in big trouble. There’s a time to cut and run and there’s a time to stay and fight - knowing which takes savvy and guts. It also takes heart - all found deep down inside THAT HELLIE GIRL!

It's 1918 - a world war of nations is ending and a global war of epidemic is beginning - but to Hellie Jondoe the war of survival on the streets of the Bowery is just heating up.

Orphaned at 4, a street Arab by 9, and by 13, ‘the best damn cannon of moveable property between Satan’s Circus and Hell’s Kitchen!’ Hellie is as tough as she is resourceful... on her own turf.

But after a gang shootout, Hellie is coerced by her brother to go west on an orphan train, thinking it’s a safe, free ticket out of town. Instead, she lands as far off her own turf as she can get, the middle of nowhere - the Hidden Hills, a ranch outside Pendleton, Oregon. Here she is expected to work for three years as indentured ranch help and it is here she meets her match in the form of the elderly, but domineering ranch owner, Mrs. Scholastica Gorence. Sharing the same fate is Lizzie, a half-blind girl whose mother has abandoned her - who, like Hellie, has much to learn, but who also has much to teach.

As the grip of the Spanish influenza reaches the Hidden Hills, where life and death are assigned by the whim of fate, the women all learn lessons of loyalty, honesty, and truly come to understand what a ‘family’ really is.

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AND LOOKS WHAT’S ON THE BACK BURNER!

CALM CHOWDER

Oregon Coast, World War Two

Two teen girls, one paranoid, panicked tourist town, the FBI, the police, the Junior Commandos, the relocation authorities, and Tommy K, the kind old gentleman who has the recipe for the town’s mystical calm chowder. K stands for Kasamoto and the girls will see to it he is one Japanese-American who will not be interned.

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THE ARAB OF WARSAW

A troubled teen learns to forgive himself as he befriends a mysterious, elderly man who has saved more lives than he will ever know. Will he learn to forgive himself for the one life he couldn’t save? From the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto to the halls of a retirement home in Oregon, two stories intertwine, two very different lives are changed forever.