Novels
Long-form fiction shaped by music, myth, history, and consequence.
Some stories are written to be read. Others are written to linger.
Melisma
Five centuries, five exiles, one wordless song — and not one of them knows they carry it.
Description
In the last days before the Sephardic expulsion of 1492, a boy hears his grandmother sing a wordless phrase over his mother’s body — a melody older than any language that could claim it. Over the next five centuries it surfaces again and again, always in a moment of exile: a Morisca woman deported from Granada, an Irish keener in the Famine, a Sicilian vintner bound for Ellis Island — each carrying it without knowing, each passing it to someone who will never recognize it. Framing them is Claire, a present-day woman whose ancestry test returns not a homeland but a scatter of strangers, and who weeps at a near-stranger’s funeral and cannot say why — reached, at last, by a melody that has outlived every language and homeland that ever gave it a name.
Completed • 93,000 words
Three Moons
A woman walks into winter to rescue her nephew, but winter has other plans.
Description
On the coldest night of the year, an elderly maple sugar farmer—the last holdout in a vanished New England community—walks into deep winter to find her nephew. She doesn’t find him. Instead, a whiskey jack named for the Cree trickster Wisakedjak follows from the first tree, the winter steers her toward a dead village, and her sister Angela appears unchanged by the years, leaving no footprints in the snow. Angela leads Colleen past a cemetery of familiar names and into the landscape of everything she has lost—toward a truth she has spent decades refusing to see.
Completed • 58,000 words
The Anatomy of Shadows
Paris, 1830. Poe. Berlioz. The year that made them.
Description
What if Edgar Allan Poe had made it to Paris? In 1830, a disgraced American student traveling under a false name takes rooms on the Rue Saint-Jacques with a renegade medical student named Hector Berlioz. Neither is anyone yet. Over one revolutionary year — the year of the Symphonie Fantastique — Paris gives Poe everything he will spend the rest of his life writing: the raven, the locked room, the Rue Morgue, and Lenore, here a woman physician named Eleanor Morel who keeps a private ledger of the city’s unexplained dead.
Edgar’s gift for reading death draws him into the city’s strangest cases and into Eleanor’s orbit. Fame costs him: the July Revolution burns his residency file out of the archives, a jealous officer and a vengeful minister turn his usefulness into danger, and when the impossible murders in the Rue Morgue hand him his greatest triumph, the truth cannot be printed — and the man who solved it is given twenty-three days to leave France. Hector’s year runs in counterpoint: a Prix de Rome won against a rigged jury, a symphony premiered in defiance of the Conservatoire, and an Irish actress named Henriette Smithson who promises to be in Paris when Rome lets him go.
For all its shadows, it is a warm book — a friendship, a great deal of laughter, and two love stories: one that ends in a marriage, and one that ends in a poem. A Historical Note closes the novel, because the truth is nearly as improbable as the fiction.
For readers of Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River and Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye.
Literary historical fiction · Complete at 105,000 words
The Cosmic Janitor Trilogy
An epic journey through Irish mythology, cosmic bureaucracy, and the redemptive power of music
Series Overview
When Seán O’Sullivan accidentally drops a reality-manipulating tool through dimensions and into the Big Bang, he’s recruited as a cosmic janitor—partnering with Niamh, a sentient nebula learning to be human. Together they face the Devil’s schemes, the Morrígan’s deadly tests, and the universe’s biggest existential crisis—all while proving that pub quizzes, strongly-worded letters, and stubborn Irish pragmatism might be exactly what the cosmos needs.
Book 1: An Apology to the Cosmos
WORD COUNT: 103,000 words
When Seán O’Sullivan accidentally drops a reality-manipulating tool through dimensions and into the Big Bang itself, he’s recruited by the CEO (Created Everything Originally) to repair the damage before his Devil boss can exploit the fractures to escape his earthly bounds. Partnering with Bubbles—a sentient nebula who takes human form as Niamh—Seán’s missions unfold across artistic history: preventing Leonardo da Vinci’s suicide, helping the deaf Beethoven connect with the music of the spheres, and watching helplessly as Robert Johnson trades his soul at the crossroads. As the Devil’s schemes converge on Seán’s family pub in Cork, he must learn that cosmic maintenance isn’t about preventing all suffering—it’s about conducting harmony from chaos.
Book 2: The Morrígan's Game
WORD COUNT: 87,000 words
When Seán O’Sullivan’s star-wife begins dissolving back into starlight, the Devil offers him a Faustian bargain. But descending through a hilariously modernized Hell—where influencers create content for zero followers and demons named Craig correct grammar for eternity—Seán discovers this was never the Devil’s game. The ancient Irish goddess Morrígan is teaching him the hardest lesson love knows: sometimes holding on tight means learning to let go.
Book 3: The Cosmos Answers
WORD COUNT: 93,000 words
The Devil escapes his imprisonment wielding a sentient Map his sister Serenity built before the War in Heaven, launching the final assault on reality by splintering Cork into seventeen-dimensional versions—Viking Cork, Butter Cork, Academic Cork, and more. He expects division to lead to destruction. He underestimates Cork’s stubborn refusal to unmake themselves during Wednesday quiz night. As the cosmos poses its ultimate question—whether harmony or entropy shapes existence—Seán must conduct the symphony of infinite Corks, knowing that the answer might mean sacrificing everything he’s spent three books learning to love.
Completed trilogy
