This photo is taken at The Country Bookseller in Wolfeboro, N.H. at a book signing of Cracks in the Wall.

As a change of pace, I thought I would let people know what I am working on, literarily speaking, as those who have read my books do ask me on occasion.

In addition to a number of short pieces of fiction and personal essays I have submitted to a number of different outlets and contests, I continue to work on a new novel, which at this point is slated to be the last of the Detective Parker Havenot series. This story begins five years after Cracks in the Wall ends, and will put the detective and his family in harm’s way from a prominent character in the previous book. I expect to finish the first draft of this book by late summer.

Also in the works is my memoir about growing up in a home headed by a “Greatest Generation” father in the post World War II economic explosion, a world of wildly enthusiastic optimism about the future. It was also a world of dramatic changes in family dynamics, many of those being not exactly positive.

Meanwhile, Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns sits on a shelf over my desk, awaiting the time when I can write the final chapters of arrest, trial, and conviction of the murderer of Stacey Burns. That book is probably two thirds to three quarters written but depending of how the next acts in the drama play out, some of it likely will require revisions. I wrote the first words of it almost seven years ago!.

Duke