About the Novels

Burmese Dominoes: Run

A plane crash in the jungle of eastern Myanmar unites a father who never knew he had a daughter, and a daughter who never knew who her father was.

After trekking the Tibetan border with Nepal, Reed Dempsey hops a plane bound for Delhi and a connecting flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Three lifelong girlfriends on college break fly from Goa to Delhi. Catching a connecting flight to Chiang Mai, they sit next to Reed in an exit row. Flying through monsoon conditions, the plane loses power and crashes in the northeastern mountains of the Golden Triangle. Only seven survive.

One of the college girls sustains serious internal bleeding. The survivors build a stretcher for the young woman and head down the mountain for help.

The local military is pillaging the countryside and executing villagers. Soldiers open fire on the plane survivors, killing all those heading down the mountain except for two of the girlfriends. Samantha videoed the murders and also finds a mass grave near a village. She and Rebecca run for their lives back up the mountain toward the crash site, where they meet Reed walking down. Knocked unconscious in the crash, he was buried under debris.

Can these three survive the jungle and find safety in far-off Thailand?

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Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders

coverCaleDixonThis Book is a 106,000 word complex multicultural international detective mystery dating back to the disappearance of the Huns.

The Hatfields and McCoys fight over the Blood Diamond in The Killing Fields in Burma.

George Orwell once wrote, “When I sit down to write a book, I don’t say to myself, ‘I’m going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

I just finished a one year suspension as a detective for what my superiors thought was a crazy theory about an international bank robber that had better connections than the airlines. It’s a long story. I’ve been working for the last year in the research department at the same precinct under the attractive gray blue eyes of Victoria Short, my boss and with any luck, soon to be my lover. She helped me get reinstated as a research detective. Since then I’ve gotten mixed up in a murder case that began at the Cho Estate Museum in San Francisco.

An Asian man was found inside the museum in the early hours of November 18th with a Un Jang do stuck in his back and through his heart; it’s a ceremonial knife predating the existing borders of Korea – before it was divided by the west. Since the Moguk case began, four people have died, three by the same weapon. I’ve been to Burma, Idaho, and Washington DC where I too was stabbed in the back. In Burma, now called Myanmar, there’s a region called Moguk. The Moguk region is home of one of the finest blood red rubies in the world. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the stones and what they do to people. I’ve had to vanish from the watchful eyes of the Tatmandaw, the military arm of the oppressive regime in control of the country. I’ve had an affair in Mandalay, drank rice whiskey with the Lisu and Palaung villagers and turned cartwheels through opium fields.

When I returned to the States, I realized I had stumbled into the crossfire between two families intricately bound by greed, deceit and revenge. It’s checkers verses chess with these two; one family striving to be crowned while the other family positions to take a queen. The Won family, from South Korea is a distant relative of the Cho dynasty nobility and the Stell family, two of whom were stationed near Seoul at the end of the Korean War. One of the Stell brothers deceitfully married into the Won family for secrets and keys to ancient Hun vaults. The next generation on both sides is now being bled to keep those secrets.

At present, I’m in a hospital bed with two knife wounds in my back and the nurse just injected me with morphine for the pain in my lung. I wonder if the morphine is from Burma. I’m staring into the phosphorescent blood luster of a Moguk Stone as my mind swaggers blindly into the dark. My name is Cale Dixon. Detective Cale Dixon.

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Cale Dixon and the Women of Cho Heart and Seoul

Dagley choAfter being stabbed, Cale finds himself in more trouble; and there are people out there that are depending on his every move to stay alive. Monica Stell is invited (coaxed) to South Korea to meet the other side of her family for the first time, the Won. The Won have an ancestral connection to the Cho Son dynasty and a vast treasure dating back to the disappearance of the Hun.

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White Bars

cover_WhiteBars_frontWhite Bars is a 27,500 word middle grade book; a comical account of two myna birds trapped in neighboring cages and their plot to escape a pet shop. It’s a story of their desire to fly, be free, and return to their tropical forests across the Pacific Ocean to the Malaysian peninsula and beyond.

Every evening, at six bells, after the pet shop closes, a small band of field mice scamper through a crack in the siding and turn the pet shop into a stock market where the animals in the cages trade what they have for what they want; seeds, sand, plants and bugs. The field mice receive a commission similar to that of brokers on the stock market floor. Chaos and mayhem are only disrupted by mishap.

Myna birds are in the Starling family; a large family of birds spread out over all inhabitable continents and islands except the poles. They live high up in temperate to tropical jungle canopies and seldom reach the ground, but when they do – they have a tendency to hop sideways. Myna birds have a unique ability to mimic sounds – all sounds – including human speech. This is one of the reasons they are taken from their jungle nests in Sri Lanka, Burma, Northern Thailand and Malaysia – among other areas.

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The Women of Cho: Heart and Seoul

Dagley Cover WebMonica Won Cho Stell has been invited by the Won family to South Korea to learn about her mother and her family’s history. Her mother committed suicide when Monica was young to protect her daughter.

Detective Cale Dixon is driven from the hospital by his research boss and lover, Victoria Short. Dixon was recently stabbed in the back and is now on the mend.

The Won family is preparing for Won Chanyu’s traditional Korean funeral, and Mother Won is working on Monica’s safe passage. Father Won prefers to use Monica as a pawn to find her father, who is believed to have killed Father Won’s brother in London for vault keys.

John Stell disappeared 20 years ago, leaving Monica to fend for herself through prepaid private school and university. Monica now works for a congressman and is on leave to discover what she can about her family.

Rayman Stell, a cousin who lost his mother and father to the Won, is suspected of killing Chanyu Won in San Francisco. Both families are on edge as Cale Dixon orchestrates a convergence in Seoul, South Korea.

This international thriller is the sequel to Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders.

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