Scar the Sky

The next book...

Here’s the cover for the new book!

And here’s the Amazon blurb—

Lightning never strikes twice —until it does.

A killer is hunting down survivors of lightning strikes in this dark and twisting thriller perfect for fans of J. H. Markert and Richard Chizmar.

Everything changed for Andi Ellis when she was struck by lightning and her heart stopped. Andi was resuscitated, but she was never the same—electronics strangely malfunction in her presence: clocks can’t keep time; batteries swiftly die. And while many lightning strike victims are left with temporary "lightning tree" markings, on her they are permanent scars.

Years later Andi, her eight-year-old daughter, and a fellow lightning strike survivor have fled Texas and Andi’s dangerous ex to go off the grid in a strange and secluded desert community.

Meanwhile, two private investigators pursue a US senator's missing daughter who they find too late. When searching for information on the strange lightning scars on the girl's body, they find themselves pulled into an FBI investigation—people who have been struck by lightning are being murdered.

As the death toll mounts, the task force traces the killer further west—closer and closer to Andi Ellis and her daughter, and the haven she's carefully created.

Thriller and horror readers will be enthralled by the dark turns in Scar the Sky.

I generally don’t hawk my own wares here too much, but if you’re interested in pre-ordering (and pre-orders always help), here’s a link—

Scar the Sky

The root ideas for my books all come from different places, and Scar is no exception. It all started with an article I clipped and saved, “Allergic to Life: the Arizona residents sensitive to the whole world,” by Mae Ryan, from The Guardian. I first touched on the concept of electrosensitivity (electromagnet hypersensitivity) in my novel Call the Dark but knew I wanted to explore it further in what became New Cornelia, the fictionalized take on Snowflake, Arizona I created for Scar. The second article was “Inside the hidden society of lightning strike survivors,” by James Walker, also in The Guardian.

So, two articles five years apart led me to my own story about a mysterious lightning strike survivor and the scars—both physical and emotional—that still mark her. I started writing an early version of Scar in April 2023, as a book I then called The Black Light Club, but didn’t really hit my stride with the manuscript until summer, and got a first draft done later that year. I tinkered and revised in the early part of 2024 right up until I retired from DEA, then took in my agent’s notes, and had a submission version ready to go right around ThrillerFest. And while I’ve often talked about the dividing line that splits my novels (pre and post The Flock), this new book felt wildly different yet again; a top heavy procedural that introduced possible leads (Wren & Rio) for an ongoing series reminiscent of The X-Files, in hopefully all the best ways. Fortunately, Crooked Lane saw that vision, albeit with a roadmap for more revisions than any previous book of mine. What started as a sprawling, 100k+ word tome (effectively almost two books in one) was dramatically cut and reordered into the slimmer, tighter book that is now Scar the Sky. Is it better than The Black Light Club, as I originally envisioned? Yes. But I wouldn’t have gotten to Scar without BLC. I had to tell the story my way, first, to get to the version you’ll see on store shelves September 9.

And here’s the heart of it—while I consider myself a novelist first, I don’t pretend to have any keen insight into how the publishing world works anymore than I do the TV/film industry. I’m no more strategic with my books, no more adroit at trying to chase trends or lists or accolades. I simply write the stories I enjoy, find someone who enjoys them (and wants to publish them), and then hope enough readers enjoy them too, that I get the opportunity to do it all over again.

As I said at the top, I don’t often hawk my own wares, but I am proud of Scar.

And as a treat, here’s the opening—

There isn’t a cloud in the sky when Andi Ellis is struck and killed by lightning.

Ten miles away, over in Barrenton, light rain falls beneath a leaden ceiling of westward drifting nimbostratus, amorphous gray sheets barely glowing from within. But in Dupont, out by the soccer fields where Andi stands, the heavens are clear, the late summer sun high and hot and so bright you gotta wear shades.

Andi’s blue eyes are hidden behind a fancy new pair of tortoiseshell glasses with bottle green lenses, and she’s smiling, laughing, still more than a little hungover from an impromptu birthday bar crawl the night before. She’s just turned twenty-six.

She’s making jokes, and not kindly ones, with best friend and fellow teacher Joyce Madras about another teacher, that weird new substitute hire Max Conroy, when the one-inch-wide bolt, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, superheated more than 55,000 degrees—hotter than the sun itself overhead—pierces her heart.

Joyce will say later that for a few moments, surely no more than two or three heartbeats, Audrey Ann Ellis seemed to almost shine inside out with a horrible, black light.

She burned…

As always, feel free to—