The Settling

＂A seemingly random leaf, floating on a quiet pond, Charlie Campbell is a bookkeeper of little account whose life is ordinary to the point of invisibility, but upon his death unlocks a truth that challenges reality. A once-wunderkind, Professor Tom Campbell has procrastinated too long and is now stranded in a small backwater college and deeply resenting it. Elly Asher is a rescuer, be it injured animals or broken people, but she cannot help herself. Now she hides from her past, tucked away in a small Texas town, afraid but ever hopeful. Warrant Officer Bob Vardis is jaded at the end of a long career at the Pentagon as the Sherlockian devil’s advocate. Rigid and doctrinaire, his life is ordered, methodical and loveless... and he is exhausted by it. Whether the old man’s life was real or imagined, his death is the catalyst that changes everything as lives of settling come to a final settlement＂--

I had hoped to be a writer after graduating from St. Edwards University in Austin, but family imperatives and minimum nutritional requirements argued for pragmatism, and that rode me through a series of enterprises, elected and appointed public service, a graduate degree from Harvard, higher education administration and professorship, and finally to consulting for businesses, government and non-profits. Along the way, I forgot where I started. I like to think it was a long, circuitous postponement, and it turns out it was a useful practical research that informed and inspired my first novel, Laguna, which won an IPPY Gold Medal in 2007. In 2016 I began writing full time. I guess you could say that at last I have come to the beginning.