The smell of oil is in the air, and so is murder, when eighteen-year-old Eddie Tipton arrives in a small Texas town with his widowed mother in 1950.  Eddie and his teacher mother take rooms in the home of Texas oil widow, Faye Ruth Collier.  Eddie spends time with handyman Ned Cotton and soon learns that Mrs. Collier's late husband was murdered a few years earlier.  Ned Cotton warns Eddie to stay away from Faye Ruth and to ignore the murder of Lawrence Collier.  Eddie, of course, cannot resist.

      Making his way in a new school, dodging the stigma of being the schoolteacher's son and succumbing to the lure of his middle-aged landlady, Eddie is embroiled in dangerous adventures on all fronts.  He is befriended by two classmates, Hillyer and Lon, and engages these two smart boys to help him unravel the mystery of Lawrence Collier's murder.  Also, Eddie falls in love with a bright young student named Reenie Fontenot.  And then, Eddie suffers a devastating loss, causing him to ratchet up his investigation and leading to a near fatal showdown.

(Available as a soft cover book at River Oaks Bookstore
on Westheimer in Houston.  For the eBook, Click Kindle.)

      A beautiful and unpredictable new play about a young art student, Danny Boudreaux, and his summer apprenticeship with renowned artist, Mina Davenport.   Danny's plan is to improve his technique through Mina’s tutelage and enter the league of fine artists.  But Mina has given up art and is living a Bohemian life in her cabin in the Connecticut woods with houseguests: Father Beau, a defrocked priest, and a runaway teen, Pim.   Danny is surprised at Mina’s lifestyle and by her thorny and uncooperative attitude.  They clash, and soon Danny sees that Mina’s methods of mentorship require him to uncover the secrets of his own life and to help her complete her next painting.

     The play is stylized and calls for an arrangement of scenic elements suggesting several locations:  New York City, Mina’s studio in Connecticut and other places, both today and yesterday.  Shifts in lighting move the story from place to place, time to time. 

     Four men, three women.  Two acts.

A Noir Comedy in Two Acts Click for the Kindle e-book.

     In this witty, provocative play about truth and illusion, unrelenting rain pours down outside the Connecticut home  of Dakin Abernathy.  Inside, Dakin and his neighbor, Ted Mueller, engage in a verbal joust where nothing is as it seems. Or is it?

      Dakin, a noted film noir director, accuses Ted of having killed his own wife.  In fact, Dakin, produces a severed woman’s thumb as evidence.  Ted protests, yet as morning spins into afternoon and a thunderous evening, he begins to believe that he might, indeed, be a murderer.  

     But something about Dakin’s manner suggests that he could just be riffing on one his film noir plots.  Dakin’s wife, Angela, complicates events with her flaky personality and suicidal tendencies.  Their daughter, Lana Veronica, comes home for the weekend saying she is in trouble with the law.  Then again, Lana Veronica likes to tell lies.  Dakin and Ted play cat and mouse over murder, breaking and entering and the very nature of fact and fiction.  Events escalate and secrets are revealed until the play itself suggests a film noir, complete with dark music, ominous lighting and swirling fog.

     Two men, two women.  Two acts.

(Available as a Kindle ebook.)