Stories of Disreputable People
in an Unforgiving World

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Ever since David Monk was six years old, he has possessed the unexplained ability to alleviate pain without touching. Strongly urged on by his parents, he uses his powers of healing to help his family and the members of his church. His best friend Walter Edelstein is gifted in his own way, a genius and talented musician pushed hard to excel by his suffocating and overbearing father. Both boys would love nothing more than to be allowed to grow up in the 1960s as ordinary kids.

Ten years later, in 1975, Walter has disappeared. David has settled into a bohemian life under an assumed name in a large Texas city. He falls deeply in love with Callie, a beautiful Navajo “hand-trembler” with mystical gifts of her own. A shocking revelation from his childhood upends his comfortable life, and David realizes it is imperative that he find his old friend.

The Unraveling of David Monk explores the power and burden of having extraordinary abilities, the bonds of childhood friendship, the influence of our past, and the importance of being true to who we really are.
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In the fall of 1972, J J Johns, a former ’60s pop star, arrives in the small West Texas city of Duro with his friend and producer, Harold, desperate to make a comeback record. They seek out a tiny music studio on the desert's edge run by an eccentric but legendary recording engineer, Allen Wallace, who is also eager to stay relevant in a changing music industry. With determination and gall, but very little budget, they cobble together a ragtag band of local musicians.

Meanwhile, Becky Paulson, a young filmmaker, is in town to make a documentary about the unsolved disappearance of a high school girl. Getting zero police cooperation and running out of time, she decides instead to make her film about the little studio and the struggling pop musician.

The projects soon descend into turmoil, beset by insanity, religious fanaticism, ancient supernatural forces, and untimely death. In the midst of this madness, all they can do is press “RECORD” and roll tape.

Salt of the King, the last story in the Duro series, is a tale that gives new meaning to the expression "location, location, location".
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The third novel in the Duro series visits the town in the summer of 1970. It is an unsettled place on the cusp of change, with an oddball assortment of kickers, freaks, artists, outlaws, classical musicians and an active community theater.

Andy, a musical prodigy, is assaulted and badly beaten in a city park, leaving him in a near-coma, his mind adrift in a strange world of vivid aural hallucinations. Andy's housemates Douglas and Reed, hapless would-be dope farmers, find themselves in over their heads in partnership with a local mobster as they struggle to grow a crop of Cambodian weed while battling the desert heat, the local authorities, ravenous deer, and their own ineptitude.

Meanwhile, a millionaire oilman arranges the kidnapping of his estranged grandson to "deprogram" him away from his hippy lifestyle, a plan that goes as badly as possible.

As Andy gradually recovers, he observes it all through his damaged but still brilliant mind.

Desert Discord is a story of greed, fear, murder, and a personal quest for peace in a hostile world.



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Damian is a rough-edged loner in 1987, who lives on the margins of West Texas society as a small-time drug dealer and smuggler. When events go horribly, murderously wrong, he flees into the remote wilderness—the only place he can feel at peace—to hide from the outside world and the people hunting him.

Connie, the wife of a Dallas millionaire, experiences horrible, vivid dreams about a dark force who threatens her and her only daughter. A controversial therapist steps in to help, using hypnotism to elicit hidden memories of satanic rites and ritual murder. An affable TV pastor and a hidden church basement may be at the center of it all.

A small plane disappears in the mountains. A chance encounter with a young girl in desperate trouble forces Damian into an impossible situation. With both a winter storm and a ruthless bounty hunter closing in, should he save his own life, or risk everything to salvage some vestige of his humanity?

Wait Till I Come Down, the second Duro novel, flies from the gleaming high rises of Dallas, to a corrupt and played-out West Texas boomtown, to the winter peaks of the New Mexico wilderness.

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Kerry is 18 in the winter of 1975, and all he wants from life is OUT—out of high school, away from the dusty West Texas town of Duro, and off this desolate high desert plateau called the Caprock. While some of his friends harbor dreams of breaking in to the local music scene, or finding a future with jobs and marriage, others dive into the blissful relief provided by drugs and needles.

Kerry just wants to vanish from this town in a cloud of dust . . . until a breathtakingly beautiful girl arrives from nowhere to knock the wind out of him and send his world tumbling out of control. Suddenly he finds himself in a no-man's land between a sadistic lawman and a brutal drug dealer, faced with nothing but bad choices.

Headfirst Off the Caprock, the first novel in the Duro series, is a story of corruption, betrayal, murder and, most terrifying of all, true love.

New edition with a new cover!