The Fort Christian Sagas
May 2021
Separated at birth, can the Malvado twins survive and thrive when one must overcome privilege and a guaranteed future and the other human trafficking and sexual slavery?
Regina and Mark Malvado know they have a bonus child when the New York hospital sonogram tells them it’s twins. But on the day they are born, one twin leaves her mother’s arms and disappears. Maybe this makes them over protective of young Lukas. Not a single day goes by they don’t look at every female child… hoping.
Meanwhile the child that would have been Lissa Malvado is known only as Mary Christine and raised on a remote ranch half the continent away. Over the ensuing years, the character of each is tested in extreme ways, particularly after Mary Christine is sold to a rancher and Lukas finds new ways to disappoint his parents. The forces propelling the twins on their separate journeys are deflected by choices each makes driving them further apart and yet bringing them towards common ground.
March 2020
It takes a village to raise a child, but can one person convince a city to take responsibility for its own safety and protect everyone equally?
After work, T.K. Jefferson mentors kids at the Fort Christian Boy’s Club who want to learn to play basketball. He seeks redemption for his own failure to win the college national championship years before. He mentors a young player, not unlike himself, Deshaun Bush, whose team has a real chance of going all the way.
However, T.K. sees that chance snuffed out in an officer involved shooting that takes Deshaun’s life. This incident sends T. K. on a journey to understand why Deshaun died, why his tale is sadly not unique, and finally on a mission to ensure it can never happen again in Fort Christian.
But as T.K. begins to look for alternatives to the status quo, he finds the thoughts of those who most directly feel the loss of Deshaun are not shared by those responsible for that loss.
As T.K. raises questions publicly, he finds that even those he thought to be his friends seek ways to undermine his efforts and put T.K. and his wife, Sina, in danger.
And through the intimidation, can T,K. convince a city that everyone must take responsibility for each other and heal the divisions that have existed for more than a century?
June 2015
How do you rise to overcome the past that haunts you?
Texas-based FBI Agent Jim Carr loses the love of his life in a drug bust he leads against the Zeta Cartel.
Jim becomes a loose cannon, disrupting drug flows and killing more than his share of cartel sicarios. He becomes indispensable, but also a problem for the Bureau.
Alene Oliviera remembers Jim saving her life in that same drug bust. When given responsibility by the President for a low-profile Department of Justice interagency task force to disrupt cartel movement into the US, she seeks him out.
Jim sets up operations for Alene, but the Zetas have other ideas and they target Jim directly. Jim must balance his personal rage with his professional duties and somehow figure out what to do with his growing affection for Alene.
Using cutting edge simulation technology, Jim and his partner, Willy Graves, a Fort Christian detective, accelerate their training with the US Army’s best to disrupt the Zetas on their home turf. Only for every punch by the Task Force, the Zetas counterpunch in escalating fashion.
Ultimately Jim is lured by the Zetas into setting the stage for an audacious plot to transform the very relations between Mexico and the US in such a manner as to make the Zetas almost unstoppable. Only Jim and Alene stand between the Zetas and success.
October 2022
When a Marine Corps. warrior becomes the Deputy Chief of Police in a Texas city, she must use the strengths she developed overcoming the horrors of her childhood, and subsequent combat experiences, to rally her officers around her unconventional approaches to keep the city safe and end her continuing nightmares.
Linda Soteria, trades in her Marine Corps. uniform for that of the Deputy Chief of Police for the City of Fort Christian, Texas. Only she refuses to leave her AR-15 rifle behind. Surviving a childhood school shooting has shaped who she became, but the memories haunt her dreams and days.
Her Marine Corps. experiences and relationships lead her to make decisions that officers under her command and city officials question. But the sum total of who she has become, drive her to extremes in trying to keep Fort Christian safe.
Those same experiences define her relationships and often inability to get deeper than surface level with those who reach out to her. Until events bring Linda to face what she has been preparing for nearly her whole life.
Will it bring the death she once escaped or salvation?
July 2020
When you live in a world apart what makes you happy may not be what makes others in that larger world out there happy, or does it?
Jasmin Braveheart contemplates leaving for college just before being abducted from her cocooned Fort Christian home. When she awakens, it is into the rest of the world… the one where people wear masks to protect themselves from unseen disease and pollution. Where every day is a struggle to exist. The world that isn’t mediated for her and presented on vast wall screens, sanitized, perfect in representation but missing so many aspects.
In her journey through what for her is a shadow world, but is where nearly everyone else lives, she must overcome fear of the unknown and draw upon unrecognized strengths as she comes to understand the reality and special nature of her cocooned existence. She must navigate both the opportunities before her and the limitations of her own frames of reference.
But then she is driven to what could be deadly extreme actions resulting in the terror of being pursued by desperate violent unseen forces that deliver her to certain death in a California wildfire.
October 2021
When your whole life has been surviving one catastrophe after another you may find overcoming yourself is the biggest challenge, if your luck changes.
Lucca Smith left the only woman he ever loved upon graduation, running from continuing crisis and an incident that could have sent him to prison. Instead, he was allowed to join the Marines and fight in faraway wars.
Still in boot camp, he learns she has married his best friend. What’s a guy like him, the forgotten outsider, to think?
Although vowing to never return, ten years later he does, for his high school reunion. He is transformed as a now former Marine, but also the sole winner of a billion-dollar lottery, although his name was never in the media.
With the class valedictorian in tow, but still very much the outsider, he comes home to face who he was and what his classmates have done with their lives in hopes of deciding who he could become.
May 2017
Finding your future within.
When Shauna loses her first job, she learns she has joined half of the people who used to have work and those who are looking for their first job.
While she is thwarted at every turn by her former employer, she finally decides to reach deep inside to start her own company with the goal of not only creating a job for herself, but for as many others as possible.
All the while those who are losing hope riot in the streets demanding jobs, dignity and hope for themselves and their families.
Will Shauna and her boyfriend Nic, plug into the new economy, or be left behind while shadowy forces seem intent on bringing the government to its knees?
January 2021
Four mysteries, four impossible quests undertaken by four very different people at different stages of their lives. Can they find what they are looking for and find themselves in time?
Keisha’s grandmother mysteriously dies in the ER where Keisha works as a nurse
Daniel’s parents and sister disappeared twenty years ago and his grandfather tells him to leave it alone
Jock’s five-year-old granddaughter has a convulsion when her arguing parents come to pick her up from his house
Amytis’ brilliant grandson vanishes on his way to work.
Each sets off on a quest to solve the mystery, not realizing they alone cannot put their lives back together.
However, in their attempts to learn the truth, they find their worlds are not as they seem.
The forces conspiring to change their reality intersect in unforeseen ways, making it only possible to solve their mysteries by helping the others to solve theirs.
In the process, they find themselves, and that time is not necessarily their friend.
January 2017
There are two kinds of dreams: those you let hold you back and those that enable your future.
Mr. Greene has dreams. Different dreams. Dreams of being a tadpole and learning life’s lessons in the school of soon to be frogs.
He has other dreams. Dreams of being taken from his mother, never to see her again.
Dreams of beatings by ‘the man.’
So, Mr. Greene doesn’t talk. He avoids people. He only works at night, cleaning a building in a set routine anyone, even he could do.
Until one day he is asked to do more. Now, Mr. Greene must find ways to be more than he ever thought he could be.
June 2016
Do you ever really know the person you have loved more than life itself?
Dana Thompson is very successful selling weapon systems to governments in the hot spots of the world. His wife Katie is a well-respected international field producer for one of the major network evening news organizations.
They live in the center of the vortex of world events until Katie receives an unexpected diagnosis. This leaves Dana and their college-aged son, Brandon, to adjust to life without her.
But soon after her passing, an Italian friend of Katie’s approaches Dana to carry on the clandestine work he says Katie was doing for him.
As Dana struggles to learn the truth about Katie and to re-establish his relationship with his son, a startling revelation changes them forever.
January 2022
Running away from an unhappy childhood, finding the love of your life, and then losing him almost immediately, can make one driven, but cause you to become unhappily successful, until you discover who you were meant to be all along.
Annalise Evans grows up feeling like the third wheel on her parent’s perfect bicycle, never wanted and driving them apart.
When she finally escapes to college and meets Mr. Gorgeous, the love of her life, only to lose him to a rival, she embarks on a quest to become a successful woman in a dying industry.
Given a chance, she exceeds even her expectations. Then one of her earliest childhood friends comes to work with her; and another, a member of the family of the woman who stole her happiness.
Together they try to keep balanced, helping each other through a maze of challenges only to learn two dark secrets that have shaped who they have become. One poses an existential danger and the other an opportunity that could serve as a springboard to be who they were meant to be all along.
January 2019
When two men enter your life, one opens up your senses and the other your mind, what do you do?
The tiny Fort Christian, Texas apartment of ‘J’, a well-regarded blogger, is invaded by celebrity Chef Xavier ‘X’ Francis, who opens her senses to the pleasures of food, wine and a night together. But then he is gone exploring unique foods and customs around the world, giving her fodder for fame from her blogs.
Soon after her night of bliss, the handsome and rich ‘Ace’ Acevedo, someone she scarcely knows, approaches her with a startling proposition.
J hopes for the return of Chef X, but he comes through Fort Christian to film an episode of his show and does not contact her.
Ace returns after a trip to reconnect with his roots, and offers J a getaway. She discovers ‘pure inspiration’ on this trip and a dark secret Ace protects.
Now she has to make a choice: to wait for Chef X, who opened up her senses or pursue the solitary Ace who challenges her sense of self and understanding of how art, food, family and friends all intertwine to raise her art.
May 2019
When you’re running from yourself, your choices change everything.
Like Ebenezer Scrooge, trial lawyer J’neWilcox encounters a ghost.
And subsequently she visits two futures that could result from the decisions she is making. She then visits the past, before she or even her parents were born to learn from her young grandparents how their choices determined her life’s trajectory.
She is accompanied on this journey by a young prodigy, who built the portal enabling their glimpses of what could be.
But in each instance except the last, the government is seeking custody of the prodigy to gain control of the pathways to alternative worlds.
Only J’necan help him find a place for him where he can be what he wants to be, and along the way finds that she is searching for the same thing.
October 2020
When your carefully constructed world begins to collapse in on you, sometimes you find your darkest secret is actually the key to the future you have unknowingly been building all along.
gBetoDoheneyBrown serves as the Attorney General of the State of Texas. She leads a life she could not conceive of as a dirt-poor Black girl who made a terrible choice that enabled her future.
But when a White police officer kills a former college football star pleading it was in the line of duty, that choice more than comes back to haunt her.
Pressed into prosecuting the officer, the brother of a former lover, in a betrayal, she finds herself possibly sending the officer to his death, or at least life in prison. And if she doesn’t, her own career is over.
Suddenly the life she has built seems to pause, awaiting a verdict that is as much about her as the officer.
gBetounexpectedly draws upon friendships, family and the deep resources of her own character to finally resolve the past and the relationships she thought she left behind.
March 2022
Would you give up your perfect life, your friends and your lover to take on an impossible challenge from which you will likely never return, just because you have this inexplicable need to do so?
Dr. Rose Ross is a successful Dallas clinical psychologist, helping clients grow beyond self-imposed limitations and working with the local police department profiling killers and delivering social histories for the court.
She has what friends describe as the perfect life and loving relationships.
However, Rose has made a commitment to leave this all behind, but not until next year.
She must manage expectations, feelings and unexpected events, which nearly take her life on more than one occasion.
Will she even survive until her departure date?
Can she leave those she loves, and who love her, behind for an unknown and unknowable new life? Can she leverage her perfection and force of will into a successful bold move for mankind’s very survival?
April 2024
No one is responsible, everyone is responsible, when the global financial system comes to a stop, four families must navigate the aftermath.
When the US Treasury fails to sell even one Treasury bill, President James MacArthur threatens to declare bankruptcy if the banks do not bid in an emergency auction the next day.
In Austin, Texas, State Senator George Abbott, who represents Fort Christian, is drawn into discussions about how to fund the state government, while his wife Rosalie, tries to understand how she is going to find the money to make payroll for their company.
In New Delhi, India, Sanjay Basu goes to work at the Mahindra car factory, where only one person seems at all concerned. Anita, his school teacher wife, listens to their son and daughter, who can only talk about their hopes of attending university in America.
Walter Brown goes to his job as a grill man for the downtown Sacramento, California, McDonalds, and Paloma, his wife, to her call center position. They are only concerned about him getting a job that will pay more so they might give their kids a better life.
At the same time, Alistair Blair, a London, UK, banker, realizes the world may have reached an inflection point… that the system will seize up and may never go back. Meanwhile, Miranda, his wife, is only concerned about the spring line of fashions for her clothing store near Buckingham Palace.
None can imagine how their lives are about to change forever except the leaders of four countrieswhose fingers are poised over a launch button.