In the tradition of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, The Dying of Mortimer Post is a first-person narrative chronicling the life of a young protagonist through the turbulence of a changing world after he undergoes a life-shattering event.

Mortimer Post is the quintessential product of late-'60's middle America. He is a college-bound physics major from a good family, engaged to his high-school sweetheart, and is at the forefront of his version of the American dream. Then, in twelve short minutes, he faces a loss so devastating it marks the end of his living and the beginning of his dying. But as the opening sentence suggests, some deaths are slower than others. Mortimer's takes a lifetime to complete; a lifetime best described not as a series of unfortunate events, but a series of unbearable tragedies.

Spanning four of America's most significant decades, The Dying of Mortimer Post takes the reader from the protagonist's coming of age in the Pocono Mountains to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. After the searing end of his military career, the reader accompanies Mortimer on a nationwide quest for understanding and healing. On this journey of discovery, he finds both happiness and sorrow in the backwoods of rural Mississippi, then a much darker side of himself on the unforgiving streets of south central Los Angeles. Only when he has lost everything and is finally ready for the release of death, does Mortimer discover that he already has the one thing he's spent a lifetime seeking, and with it, the chance to finally live again.

At once exciting, poignant, and disturbing, The Dying of Mortimer Post reveals the innermost of this almost Gump-like character as he struggles to make sense of a senseless world. A true epic, it is part love story, part war chronicle, part police saga, and all tragedy, but more than anything, is a tale of redemption in a world where the very concept has ceased to exist.

The Dying of Mortimer Post

SWAT sniper Ben Geller and his family have a lot on their plate. Their debts far outweigh their earnings. They're trying to adopt a young African-American boy whose father was killed during a SWAT callout. Plus, they're being stalked by a madman who has a grudge, a creative imagination, and fifteen million dollars.

Ben's family situation isn't much better. Of the three ladies in his life, the only faithful one is his eight-year-old daughter. The other two-the wife he thought he knew, and the badge-and gun-toting girlfriend who is maybe just a little too possessive-are both full of surprises. When Ben gets suspended for using excessive force during an arrest and finds himself in danger of losing his job, he realizes he's lost all control of his life.

Then things begin to change for the better. In a very short time, the stalker, the brutality case, the girlfriend; even his debts, drop away, leaving Ben back in control.

But is he really? When bodies start piling up, the Gellers realize things aren't as they appear; that "better" isn't necessarily everything it's cracked up to be. And worse, control isn't just something Ben's lost; it's something he never had.

SNIPER SHOT is the story of Ben Geller, a sniper on the Stratton, Oregon Special Emergency Response Team (SERT, which is synonymous with SWAT). Struggling to maintain his composure after taking a shot during a particularly intensive hostage siege, Geller discovers that not all of his enemies exist on the opposite side of the thin blue line.

While trying to juggle his failing marriage and a burgeoning affair with fellow officer Andrea Fellotino, Geller must also deal with the increasing enmity of his nemesis within the police department, Officer Bob Slater, who also happens to be his sniper partner on SERT.

Everything pivots around a staggering revelation during a second hostage crisis, in which a fifteen million dollar ransom and numerous lives are at stake. After a hostage is killed and the suspect inexplicably disappears with the ransom from SERT ’s impenetrable perimeter, Geller makes a discovery that rocks his department, and his team, to its very core. Only then does his hardest job begin – that of proving what he knows, while trying to keep his family, and himself, alive.

Sniper Shot