Shep Harrington is my main character. In his early thirties, Shep has seen a little of everything the world has to offer. He went to prison for something he didn't do. The prison stint cost him his marriage, his right to practice law, and his faith in the system. What it didn't take from him were his values and sense of fair play. In fact, these traits propel him into snooping and get him into trouble. Shep is likable, if a bit conflicted. He has a sense of humor, touched with cynicism, but isn't one to be crossed. He is gentle with animals, old people, and children. He has a visceral suspicion about people with power.

The setting for both SmallTown Mysteries is Lyle, Virginia. Like most small towns, the people of Lyle pretty much know what it going on with their neighbors, or at least think they do. But there are secrets and little intrigues that make Lyle both interesting and confounding.

Lonesome Song - A SmallTown® Mystery

Reilly Heartwood, a famous country singer, is dead. His sister doesn’t recognize the body. The local reverend has refused to bury him.

Reilly's death is ruled a suicide. And no one has bothered to investigate. What the hell is going on? That's what Shep, a 32-year-old divorced and disbarred lawyer, wants to know. The deeper he probes, the more he's drawn into reconstructing the final destructive minutes of Reilly's life, the more he's compelled to confront his own past, and to ultimately learn the startling truth about his mother, Reilly, and himself.

Chain Thinking - A SmallTown® Mystery

The uninvited visitor is Sydney Vail, a former soap opera star turned animal activist. With her is Kikora, a young chimpanzee. Sydney begs Shep to take care of Kikora, promising that he need does so only for a few days. What Sydney fails to mention is that Kikora was stolen from DMI , a biomedical test facility, where Dr. Celia Stone, its lead scientist, had recently been bludgeoned to death. Sydney doesn't return. Instead, she is arrested for Celia Stone's murder, and Kikora is sent back to DMI to be used as a test subject in trials of a new diet drug, a process that is likely to kill her.

Did Sydney really kill Stone? Should Kikora die so DMI can market a new diet drug? Shep's pursuit of the answers to these questions involves him a murder case that's more about power than justice - a pursuit that starkly reveals the plight of laboratory chimpanzees and other primates. Yet the book is neither preachy nor self-absorbed. The book's main character and its likeable narrator, Shep Harrington, deals with all the legal and moral issues with his own brand of questioning objectivity and wit. Readers are told a riveting murder-driven story, while left to decide for themselves how the legal and moral questions about the treatment of primates should be answered.