Welcome
Thank you for visiting. The third book of my 1920's trilogy, "The Big Town," will be released mid-March and available at all major bookstores.
I think writing literary fiction is not a market driven exercise. To find a voice to write, a story to relate, a language to tell it in, and a desk to work at, is what writing is about. I sit down at my desk, day after day, head focused on my work, and move the narrative forward.
I gave a decade of my life to these books, and now I give them to you. I hope you enjoy them.
What's New?
March 2012. "The Big Town" is a novel of the Jazz Age in the summer before the stock market crash of 1929. It's the story of a failed businessman whose dreams of prosperity hinge on the secret proposition of a millionaire industrialist and a dangerous relationship he finds with a poor orphan girl chasing love in the great American metropolis.
The Books
THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER
With the Great Depression looming and about to define America's next decade, three strong-minded women related by marriage form an uneasy household in the summer of 1929. Forced by her husband Harry to uproot their two small children from Illinois and take up residence in East Texas, Marie Hennessey struggles to find a place not only within her mother-in-law's home but in a Southern town whose troubling unfamiliarities compound her marital woes and homesickness. [Read More]
THIS SIDE OF JORDAN
Monte Schulz's prose novel opens in the spring of 1929, as the 19-year-old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast attends an ill-fated dance marathon he's too sickly to participate in. After a year of his life has been stolen by a sanitarium, Alvin knows he's relapsing, and dreads not only the drudgery of his family's homestead, but a return to the hospital. In this state of mind, an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, Alvin crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist named Chester Burke. [Read More]