My New Novel TEXT MESSAGE

Today marks the day when my second published novel, TEXT MESSAGE, becomes available for purchase. As you can probably guess, text messaging plays a part in this horrific tale, though not in a ‘you just received a text so now your phone is going to somehow kill you in seven days’ type of way, but in a ‘a kidnapper is using your sister’s phone to send you text message instructions on how to win her back’ way. It all takes place in a Chicago area mall. Christmas is drawing near and a young college girl named Mallory wants to mark the future celebration with her boyfriend by buying a sexy piece of lingerie that he can ‘unwrap’. Naturally Mallory is forced to take her little sister Jenna to the mall -- anyone who has a little brother or sister will understand how parents often encourage (force) such things. Not wanting Jenna to see what she is buying Mallory let’s her shop by herself and soon learns via a text message from her sister’s phone that Jenna has been abducted. No ransom is asked for. Instead the kidnapper wants to play a game, one that involves Mallory going through several humiliating and somewhat dangerous experiences in order to keep her sister from being brutalized. The first of these experiences involves her walking around the lingerie store in one of the garments for all to see. Other more extreme instructions follow, all of them taking place in the crowded mall. What the kidnapper doesn’t realize, however, is that Mallory isn’t like most of the girls he has played with, and eventually is going to say ‘enough is enough’, even if it means her little sister is too suffer. Who will come out on top in this situation, the kidnapper who has been successfully playing games like this for years, one who seems to know all the ins and outs of the mall, or the young college girl who simply wanted to pick up a risky piece of lingerie?

As some of you may know this book was supposed to come out last month but was pushed back due to the book cover artist I had hired -- same one that worked on JIMMY -- never delivering the cover during the agreed upon time (this coming after it took me a month just to get through to him with emails asking if he wanted the project). Several weeks followed where I repeatedly asked him to contact me about the cover and whether or not I could expect to have is soon. No answer ever came so I eventually contacted an artist who runs a design company called Phobic Photo Creations and asked if he would be interested in working on a cover. He was and the result, which can be seen above, was amazing.