Red Tide is Coming

For those of you who once read my blogs, and might read them again, I am back. It has been a year of silence, that happily is about to be broken. I was fighting many battles in my absence, in many ways and at many levels: for my life. I am back, at least for now, because I have won those battles at last, if not the war. As to that, one cannot truly control the outcome of one's life, much as we might wish otherwise. Still, we can try.

Imagine, if you will, having to pick up your life and move (we've all done that) but in the process, incurring a grievous injury requiring surgery. Then take it further: that you go to sleep in pain, and wake up a different person. Or two different persons: persons who do not relate to you, who are hostile to you and to each other. One is manic; the other profoundly depressed.

So then you reach out for help and are given medications, and the medications trigger a terrible reaction. So then you try, try again, and finally find balance.

Imagine, in trying to cope with these multiple conditions, that the only respite you can find is in your garden, if you are lucky enough to have a garden. Plants, as growing research (no pun intended) is finding, have deep intelligence. How else can you explain how a tomato plant, or a grape vine, can form a hand, reach out, and grasp another plant or a trellis, for support? And do so overnight? Mine did. Repeatedly. And they fast became my friends.

So now those seasons and more have passed, and I have recovered, and good fortune has found me in the form of a new publisher, Booktrope. So I am going to be back in print again, very soon, at long last.

My first offering will be an environmental mystery, titled Red Tide. Set in Florida like all but two of my prior mysteries, it deals with ocean dumping of toxic chemicals, and, of course, with murder, as all mysteries must. Red Tide will re-introduce my long dormant pot-smoking hipster P.I. Tony Lowell, and the original series will be re-published, in new editions, in rapid succession: probably one per month. Then there will be my investigative journalist series, The Jake Fleming Investigations, beginning with The Shakespeare Chronicles, which has been translated into seven languages to date, was a bestseller in Italy, but has never before been published in English. More on that later.

Meanwhile, my greetings to you all. I have missed you.