Awards, Press & Interests

Life, Interrupted

It was not easy being the fourth of thirteen kids. Fourth. The oldest girl. With three older brothers. Trust me, it’s not an enviable position. Our family was not like other families we knew. The number alone was enough to make us stand out. We looked different, too. Mom was from the Philippines, Dad from the coal mines of West Virginia. They met when he was stationed outside Manila at the end of World War Two. They had the first of us soon after they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. When there were ten of us kids—there should have been eleven but our baby sister Teresa had died in a terrible way—my father and brothers converted an old school bus into our home. Amid the chaos of the early seventies—think anti-war protests, drugs, rock n’ roll--we traveled across the country. That may sound like a hippie trip, but it was nothing like that. The bus was painted in two conservative shades of brown and living in it didn’t mean the home rules changed. We were looking for the right place to settle. At least, I thought that was what was going on. Our parents didn’t keep us informed, but we older kids could tell that things were not going according to anyone’s plan. The bus broke down in South Carolina. After a year there, and another in North Carolina, we moved back to California. Fourteen of us lived in a in a single-wide trailer. I ran away when I was fifteen. I didn’t see my family again until my father’s funeral five years later. He died saving my sisters. I thought that someday we would reconcile, but the river swept away that hope as well. Life, Interrupted is the story of what happened next.

Parallel Lies

Dallas television news director Vicky Robeson is celebrating her success in her new job with a trip to California. She’s not there to relax or enjoy her surroundings. She’s on a mission. Lake Isabella, CA is where she, as a child, lost her family. Driven by guilt and health concerns, she’s determined to find out what happened to her baby sister, lost during the wildfire that killed their parents. Meanwhile, nearby, Clara Upton is pursued by dogs and searchers as she flees The Hollow, the only home she’s ever known. She begs The Creator to help her escape from Richard King, who heads the remote colony founded as a utopian commune in the 1970s. The community has become something much darker than its idealistic founders envisioned. Vicky meets with Susan Winslow, a retired TV news producer who inherited the Isabella Inquirer, the small local newspaper. Susan has the private journals of her former college roommate, who left her the business. Vicky hopes the journals hold clues that did not show up in public records, all of which she had already scoured as she searched for her sister over the years. As Vicky and Susan talk, Susan’s niece Chrissy bursts in to announce that a bloody body was found near her high school. Chrissy, a feisty teen with the instincts of a hardcore reporter, later finds odd carvings on trees near the scene. A drawing of the same symbol turns up in the journals. Vicky discovers the link between the fire that destroyed her family, the symbols, and the isolated colony. Could her baby sister have been taken by one of its members? She is joined by Pete Harris, her one-time—and perhaps soon again—lover. They take his RV to The Hollow, deep in the mountainous forest. They are greeted with deep hostility and suspicion as Vicky carefully tries to determine which—if any—of several women members might be her missing sister. Vicky discovers that women are being forced to have babies, which are sold to unscrupulous dealers. Vicky and Pete survive attempts on their lives as they probe and ultimately reveal and end the shadowy activities of the colony leaders, one of whom Vicky believes is her sister—and the most dangerous of them all.