NOVELS

Since the third grade, when I wrote an eighty-page fantasy book that was a little too similar to "The Lord of the Rings," and later in high school, I wrote two novellas.

 

But it wasn't until college, when I studied with award-winning author Mary Morris, that I fell in love with writing. There, I began work on my first full-fledged novel, The Weight of Ivory. Set in a fictionalized modern-day Ghana, The Weight of Ivory unfolds amid the escalating violence of the illegal ivory trade, where wildlife trafficking, militant groups, and political corruption are tightly entwined. As global demand for ivory surges, a single national park becomes the fault line in a much larger power struggle – one stretching from remote savannahs to government offices and foreign markets.

 

At the novel’s center is Mosi, a charismatic but deeply burdened ranger leading an understaffed team tasked with protecting Kimun National Park at any cost. As poaching operations grow militarized and alliances between traffickers and politicians surface, Mosi is forced to navigate not only armed threats in the field but the moral cost of survival in a compromised system. Running parallel is Amal, a teenage boy coming of age within this collapsing ecosystem, whose proximity to violence forces him to decide what responsibility means when innocence is no longer an option. 

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What begins as an effort to protect elephants becomes a high-stakes fight over truth, accountability, and who gets erased when power goes unchecked. Told in short, character-driven chapters reminiscent of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, The Weight of Ivory combines the moral urgency and political intrigue of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener with the polyphonic scope of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings.

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In my second novel, Without Promise, a literary thriller set in upstate New York, a man escapes prison and returns to the town where the woman he loves is raising their daughter with the cop who arrested him. As a statewide manhunt closes in, Ethan Cooper is forced to confront the broken father who raised him, the friendship that shaped him, and the love story that ultimately destroyed him.  

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Ten years earlier, Ethan is twelve when his mother leaves before dawn. What remains is his father Beck, and a roadside diner. Beck is withdrawn, quietly broken, and constitutionally unable to say what he means, yet he becomes the defining force in Ethan’s life: teaching him to cook, fish, survive, and, in his own damaged way, love. As Ethan drifts through suspensions, violence, humiliation, and an increasingly close friendship with Todd — the town’s golden boy — he also meets Jenny, whose warmth and belief in him offer the first real vision of another life. 

Told across dual timelines moving steadily towards collision, Without Promise is a novel about fathers and sons, masculinity, class, and the destructive and redemptive power of love. Sitting at the intersection of Mystic River and Demon Copperhead, this is a literary suspense novel with serious emotional ambition.

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I've also begun work on a literary thriller set against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution. The lives of a brother and sister working as M-26-7 agents in Santiago, a conflicted police officer enforcing Batista's brutal rule in Havana, and a young woman in Castro's group of rebels in the Sierra Maestra mountains collide in this tale of nationalism, love, loss, and hope. 

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Below are samples from The Weight of Ivory and Without Promise. I'm in the process of finding the right publishing company for both, and the full manuscripts are available upon request.