Judith. Beneath a painting’s layers of soot and varnish, a young widow stands in the light of dawn, a sword in her hand, waiting three hundred and fifty years for someone to ask where she came from.
When conservator Lila Yonoktova cleans an old panel of Judith and Holofernes, she finds it unfinished, unsigned, and hidden under varnish meant to make it look worthless. Its owner, J. Dinman, a wry, slightly depressed fifty-five-year-old corporate executive, has walked past it for twenty years. Now he wants to know who painted it, and why so many risked so much to keep it. The trail leads from 17th century Delft, where the unbearable Johann Van Kleek falls for a goldsmith's young wife and begs to paint her as a biblical heroine, to Vienna, where a bisexual gallery owner sees his dead mother's face in the canvas, to 1936 Berlin, where a rogue art dealer hides masterpieces beneath ugly overpaint so fleeing Jews can smuggle them past the Nazis.
Guiding Dinman is Max Edwards, an eighty-five-year-old Los Angeles art dealer who ships strangers expensive wine and believes life is too short for anything less than a wonderful mystery.
Comic, tender, and devastating, Judith is about what we inherit, what we hide, and what remains when the lies are cleaned away.
Read the first three chapters
Now available in Kindle and Paperback
When conservator Lila Yonoktova cleans an old panel of Judith and Holofernes, she finds it unfinished, unsigned, and hidden under varnish meant to make it look worthless. Its owner, J. Dinman, a wry, slightly depressed fifty-five-year-old corporate executive, has walked past it for twenty years. Now he wants to know who painted it, and why so many risked so much to keep it. The trail leads from 17th century Delft, where the unbearable Johann Van Kleek falls for a goldsmith's young wife and begs to paint her as a biblical heroine, to Vienna, where a bisexual gallery owner sees his dead mother's face in the canvas, to 1936 Berlin, where a rogue art dealer hides masterpieces beneath ugly overpaint so fleeing Jews can smuggle them past the Nazis.
Guiding Dinman is Max Edwards, an eighty-five-year-old Los Angeles art dealer who ships strangers expensive wine and believes life is too short for anything less than a wonderful mystery.
Comic, tender, and devastating, Judith is about what we inherit, what we hide, and what remains when the lies are cleaned away.
Read the first three chapters
Now available in Kindle and Paperback
The Ad Game. In advertising they say sex sells. But when Max Kahn takes a job at a Pittsburgh ad agency, he learns that sex kills too.
The agency's executives are the last of the Mad Men, who believe humiliation, booze, sex, and drugs are all part of the job description. Keeping clients happy comes first, whatever the moral cost. When the account executive for Muffler King quits in spectacular fashion, trashing his office and scrawling accusations on the walls, Max, the new guy, is pulled onto the account. Muffler King’s owner, Big Jim King, is a narcissistic, bullying predator. Kitty Palmer, his marketing director and mistress, survives by being the most dangerous person in the room. Together they drag the agency's impressionable young intern, Petey, into the city's underground sex clubs, where the rules are whatever Big Jim says they are. The agency's solution is to smile, pour another drink, and look the other way. Max and his girlfriend Sienna, who is also the chairman's secretary, try to protect Petey, but they can only watch as events take a deadly turn.
Profane, funny, and unsparing, The Ad Game is a satire about an industry that sells everything, including its own people.
Read the first chapter
Now available in Kindle and Paperback
The agency's executives are the last of the Mad Men, who believe humiliation, booze, sex, and drugs are all part of the job description. Keeping clients happy comes first, whatever the moral cost. When the account executive for Muffler King quits in spectacular fashion, trashing his office and scrawling accusations on the walls, Max, the new guy, is pulled onto the account. Muffler King’s owner, Big Jim King, is a narcissistic, bullying predator. Kitty Palmer, his marketing director and mistress, survives by being the most dangerous person in the room. Together they drag the agency's impressionable young intern, Petey, into the city's underground sex clubs, where the rules are whatever Big Jim says they are. The agency's solution is to smile, pour another drink, and look the other way. Max and his girlfriend Sienna, who is also the chairman's secretary, try to protect Petey, but they can only watch as events take a deadly turn.
Profane, funny, and unsparing, The Ad Game is a satire about an industry that sells everything, including its own people.
Read the first chapter
Now available in Kindle and Paperback
The Fashions of the Times. Jake Gold’s grandfather gave him exactly one piece of advice: never lift a man so high that he can piss in your face. Jake, a shy and conflict-averse mid-level functionary in Pittsburgh's city hall, doesn't expect to need it.
Then one of the city's oldest law firms comes calling. Never mind that he isn't a lawyer. The firm is reeling from the fall of Pittsburgh-Gorman, a proud steel company devoured by a British corporate raider and a defense built on poison pills and wishful thinking. Edward Blanton, a brilliant, reckless partner, took the blame. His mentor, Daniel Harrington, who designed the strategy, walked away with barely a scratch. Jake spends his days in a windowless office on the forty-seventh floor, trying to figure out who did what to whom.
When the raider turns up dead in his bathtub, the vultures start circling, and Jake finds himself with a front-row seat to a high-stakes scheme and an uncomfortable question about whom to trust.
Wry, sharp-elbowed, and unexpectedly moving, The Fashions of the Times is about ambition, loyalty, greed, and what's left of a city when the money moves on.
Read the first chapter
Then one of the city's oldest law firms comes calling. Never mind that he isn't a lawyer. The firm is reeling from the fall of Pittsburgh-Gorman, a proud steel company devoured by a British corporate raider and a defense built on poison pills and wishful thinking. Edward Blanton, a brilliant, reckless partner, took the blame. His mentor, Daniel Harrington, who designed the strategy, walked away with barely a scratch. Jake spends his days in a windowless office on the forty-seventh floor, trying to figure out who did what to whom.
When the raider turns up dead in his bathtub, the vultures start circling, and Jake finds himself with a front-row seat to a high-stakes scheme and an uncomfortable question about whom to trust.
Wry, sharp-elbowed, and unexpectedly moving, The Fashions of the Times is about ambition, loyalty, greed, and what's left of a city when the money moves on.
Read the first chapter
The Sunday Brunch. Amy has left Pittsburgh for a sweltering Washington summer, with a broken air conditioner, a pile of unpacked boxes, a bottle of gin, and Nathan's copy of The Sound and the Fury. She's trying to forget the man who left her, the friend she slept with afterward, and the girl she used to be.
In Pittsburgh, her old college crowd still gathers for lazy Sunday brunches. Nathan, the brooding ex. Jenny, who has slept with half the group and apologizes to none of them. Tracy and Tim who drink like they have something to prove. David and Suze, whose money smooths over everything but the truth. They have the same jokes and the same grudges, and assume nothing will ever change.
When a death brings them back together, Amy has to face the people she left behind, and the one she never stopped loving.
Wry, frank, and quietly moving, The Sunday Brunch is about love, loss, and the friends who know you too well to let you hide.
Read the first chapter
In Pittsburgh, her old college crowd still gathers for lazy Sunday brunches. Nathan, the brooding ex. Jenny, who has slept with half the group and apologizes to none of them. Tracy and Tim who drink like they have something to prove. David and Suze, whose money smooths over everything but the truth. They have the same jokes and the same grudges, and assume nothing will ever change.
When a death brings them back together, Amy has to face the people she left behind, and the one she never stopped loving.
Wry, frank, and quietly moving, The Sunday Brunch is about love, loss, and the friends who know you too well to let you hide.
Read the first chapter
copyright 2026