A FALSE DAWN

(synopsis)

Sean O’Brien couldn’t remember the last time he made a promise and then broke it.  Many years ago his grandfather had taught him a “man’s word is his bond.”

It’s a personal code—a way O’Brien conducts his life.  He has every intention of keeping the promise he makes to wife, Sherri, right before her death.

After Sherri dies, O’Brien leaves his career as a homicide investigator with the Miami PD and relocates to a remote section of Florida wilderness on the banks of the St. Johns River.

He’s restoring an old home and trying to rebuild his life when he discovers a young woman badly beaten and left for dead near the alligator-infested river.  She whispers a cryptic message in O’Brien’s ear, and he makes a promise to her.

It’s an accord O’Brien believes the local police will fulfill.  But when authorities drag their feet on the investigation, O’Brien finds the promise he made to his dead wife is about to conflict with the promise he made to the woman who was savagely attacked.

Soon O’Brien is plunging deep into the dark world of human trafficking and sexual slavery.  O’Brien finds that an old case he never solved in Miami resurrects it’s head on the banks of an ancient river and tracks him.

O’Brien is tossed into a deadly cat-and-mouse game where the only vow he can make is to stop an evil antagonist with a twisted, Godlike complex that’s hellbent on sacrificing O’Brien to a greater cause

THE 24TH LETTER

(synopsis)

It happens to every homicide investigator.  Even the best of the best.  Sean O’Brien never thought it would happen to him.  But there was something about the look in the accused man’s face that O’Brien could never quite forget.  It was  a look that haunted him in the dark hours somewhere between sleep and consciousness.  Even a decade later he remembered the  man’s face when the jury delivered the guilty verdict.

Although the evidence was overwhelming, something in O’Brien’s gut told him there was more to the story than surfaced in court, more than what was found at the murder scene.  But caseloads mount and time has a way of blurring the lines of desperation in a man’s face until something surfaces.  For O’Brien, it happens when he receives a call from Father Callahan.

The priest  hears the confession of a frightened prison inmate, and he learns that a man facing lethal injection in 84 hours is innocent.  The lead investigator on the high-profile case was his old his friend Sean O’Brien.  And now O'Brien has a chance to right a horrible wrong.  But he has less than 84 hours to uncover clues to a crime that sent an innocent man to death row.

Appeals have expired and the man will be executed in 84 hours unless O’Brien can find evidence that points to the real killer.  The 24th letter in the Greek alphabet—Omega—may provide the key to uncovering the killer’s identity.

Evidence may not lie, but evil does, and when the original killer comes out of his lair, O'Brien is in a race to save two lives - the man on death row and his own.

THE BUTTERFLY FOREST

(synopsis)

It’s the subtle signs that Sean O’Brien notices first.  The lingering glances that linger a moment too long.  Glances that become stares.  Stares that are quickly averted when the perpetrator knows he’s been spotted.  O’Brien is minding his own business in a Walmart when he sees a predator stalking two women through the store.  O’Brien has no idea that this morning in a Walmart will connect to a tragic morning seven decades earlier.

On a cool January morning in 1935, FBI agents surround a home secluded near the Ocala National Forest.  By the end of the day, four thousand bullets rip through the house.  The onslaught killed Ma Barker and one of her gangster sons.  It is the most volatile and infamous shootout in the history of the FBI.

Seventy years later, two college students enter the forest to release the rare and endangered atala butterflies.  The atala can only live in areas where the scarce coontie plants are found.  They are found in the forest.  Something else is hidden there – something that dates back to the deaths of Barker Gang members.

Sean O’Brien is led into this world from a Walmart parking lot where he follows a predator who is stalking two women.  O’Brien prevents the abduction, and he opens the door to a new relationship.  Also, he opens a dark door to an horror that lies secluded inside one of America's largest national forests.  Three bodies are discovered, and police think an old man, a former San Quentin inmate, is responsible.  O’Brien believes it’s something else, something hidden deep in the forest.   To prove it, he’s forced to find it.   He follows veiled tracks as they lead him farther into the woods where a horror, something more vicious than anything the Barker Gang ever did, awaits him.