On Deck
These
novels are completed and just now being marketed.
Interested parties will be referred to my agent. CE
North
from Pyongyang is set in 1956 Washington,
Japan, and North Korea. It is the tale of two strong
women—Ginny Stoops, a missionary's daughter acquired by the
new CIA for her language skills, and Naomi Kang, a
childhood friend who has returned to her homeland in a
tragically ironic attempt to reunite her family. Naomi
formerly did quick-study portraits of customers in her
father’s Tokyo restaurant, and now she decorates her shabby
room in a North Korean mental hospital with sketches from
her mind’s eye.
A foolish alcoholic prank by a junior CIA officer thrusts
Ginny and Naomi into the center of a diplomatically
embarrassing and potentially catastrophic confrontation
between the United States and People’s Democratic Republic
of Korea.
Original Oriental sketches from Naomi’s memory are
integrated throughout the novel. (Artwork provided by the
author’s Far East-born daughter, Gretchen Cocuzza)
Black
Easter Lily, Don’t Leave Me Down
Here
A spoiled, conceited Eastern doctor is convicted of
defrauding the government and serves his probation in the
physician-starved Appalachian coal fields. His office is in
Aunt Vinegar’s dilapidated motel, shared by the barber/fire
chief, a cotton-haired African-American, a suspicious and
cantankerous ex-coal miner, and the doctor’s heavy but
socially popular receptionist.
Fires with puzzling characteristics are destroying
structures—people are dying and disappearing. And something
chilling is going on deep in an abandoned mine atop Shucker
Mountain.
Aunt Vinegar’s athletic, deputy sheriff daughter and the
doctor must wrestle with the ethics of divulging long-held
secrets as they unravel the strange motivation behind local
homicides.
Sad
Mother Mountain (Sequel to Riding a Blue
Horse)
Molly
Bragg is a “retired” child prostitute whose violent rescue
from her keepers has rendered her paraplegic. Now sixteen,
Molly has been adopted by a State Trooper. She attends a
private school which has been only moderately successful in
sanitizing her language and correcting her disregard for
authority. She spends most of each week in therapeutic
rehabilitation administered by a WWII war bride, Grandma
Peanut—herself a prostitute in post war Japan, and with her
boyfriend, Stupe, a “slow” and happily naive mechanic who
is totally devoted to her.
Only one of Molly’s former “vendors” is alive. Nikki Sato
is a Japanese American transvestite whose escape from
prison is arranged by Zenith, a murderous religious cult in
Japan. Zenith’s funding has been threatened by arrest of
their spiritual leader, but they plan to regain muscle
through franchising their discovery, Glorychlor—an
instantly addictive drug which enhances all senses while
creating an orgasmic sensation in the user.
Fugitive Nikki, Glorychlor’s
distributor in
America, and is obsessed with killing Molly, the person
responsible for the death of his lover. Nikki is himself
a Glorychlor
addict and his
homicidal quest is accompanied by the potent drug’s
insidious and unsuspected side effects.
Once again, Molly is faced with defending herself and her
friends from psychopathic killers—this time from a
wheelchair.
Railroad
Town
The Zinger sisters have sold their bar and moved to the
Cool Embers Retirement Community. Their sleepy West
Virginia town is shaken by the finding of a bisected corpse
on the railroad tracks and the subsequent discovery of a
freight car—long abandoned in a deep ravine—containing a
secret that would shake the town. They team with a retired
Railroad Detective to sort out the mystery.