“The road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began….
Until it joins some larger way….
And whither then, I cannot say.
”
Banner: Justine Chan, US Park Service
Not All Dead Together
A Novel in Stories
Coming from Chin Music Press, April 2025
Not All Dead Together traces the intertwined lives and friendship of two families, one Guatemalan and one American, across 60 years of war and betrayal, in particular, that of the two daughters, one with a family so safe and a country so dangerous, the other with a country so safe—for a middle-class white girl anyway—and a family so dangerous.
Crossing the Divide
In Ronald Reagan’s Colorado, the wilderness is for sale. When Forest Ranger Will Britt falls to a mysterious death patrolling a local Wilderness Area threatened by mining interests, his young wife Noni is left with their new baby to defend their ranch from a predatory US Senator looking for access through their land for coal development. And the Senator’s local agent turns out to be a neighbor, Petersen Tolstad, part cowboy geek, part Nam-vet poet, who might have been a friend and now may be an enemy. In the modern literary western tradition of Normal MacLean, Thomas McGuane, and Louise Erdrich, Crossing the Divide asks: who owns the West? And who owns love?
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The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
The skin evil wears may be different in different cultures, but the heart beats just the same.
In-yong Han—Solo to his friends—is a Korean-American cop detailed from San Francisco to American Samoa to advance his career, bring modern forensic methods to this remote South Pacific Territory, and keep peace between the Korean commercial fishermen and the Samoans. And he’s failing spectacularly. His wife has left him, a white American doctor has just been murdered, and Han gets caught in a riot between the tuna boat Koreans and a Samoan mob. Picking up the pieces, he acquires an odd group of helpers: a demonic Samoan surgeon, an American woman expert on leprosy and avoiding emotional entanglements, and a Samoan aristocrat who may be a saint or a murderer.
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A Bird in the Hand
The body of a young woman is found in a dump in American Samoa. Then the prime suspect in her death is found half-eaten by sharks. Natural justice? Native justice? Or something else entirely?
Lieutenant Han, a Korean-American homicide detective on loan to this remote South Pacific island nation, is also its only trained investigator. Born in one culture, raised in another, married into a third and now working in a fourth, Han takes nothing for granted about why people kill each other. Even so, these two deaths make no sense. Meanwhile, Han's estranged Japanese wife is back in Samoa, apparently more interested in an American ecologist than her husband, and the woman doctor Han fell for in his wife’s absence seems to be falling for the hospital's new pathologist, a long-distance ocean sailor from South Africa with some unique experience in third-world killing fields.
As the answers to Han’s questions emerge from the cultural chaos like the ghosts that haunt Samoan forests, he discovers that the last blind spot is his own. And it may kill him.
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Loose Cannon
Paz Hernandez, beautiful, passionate, a physician's assistant and leader in the Latino community of southeastern Colorado, wants to know why two of her doctor friends from her missionary days in Central America were killed and why a third is now fleeing his country and begging her for help. But she never gets to ask him. Even as she prepares to hide him at her isolated canyon-country ranch, they are both gunned down in the ranch yard by an unknown assailant. The obvious suspect is Paz’s husband, Matt Ewan, a local Anglo known for his drinking and violent, secretive past. But Ewan has the perfect alibi: he claims he was changing a flat tire for the daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in the region, a federal judge whose younger brother is very obviously running for president of the United States. So who is this Dr. Jillian Cannon who Ewan says can vouch for him, and why hasn’t she turned up? What does she have to hide—or to hide from? In the end, everyone swept into the maelstrom of Paz Hernandez’s passion for justice must decide where their loyalties lie and whether the soul of a man running for president is worth more or less than the life of an ordinary man.
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