My fourth novel is officially released, and it feels good to return to the high sci-fi mystery territory I first explored with On the Loop. If you enjoyed that novel’s twists and turns, I’m sure Broken Helix will be right up your alley.

This time around (ha) I’m exploring a central mystery from three very different perspectives. The story for Stasia, Zara, and Ellie begins in the same place, but after they each endure an unexplained event, their lives take wildly different courses. For our heroines, nothing is quite the same in the days and weeks that follow. As they struggle to come to terms with what happened to them, they’ll face external tests—from authorities and their loved ones both—as well as internal, existential challenges.

But what is a “broken helix”? The title refers to the circuitous path humanity has mapped through a series of wormholes—only these interstellar doorways harbor a secret that will change how we think about space travel. I don’t want to give anything away, but the whole idea began with a phrase whose origin I’ve been unable to track down. The gist of it was this: a different person emerges from each doorway we pass through. Apply that thinking to wormholes, and that gives you something like this:

That’s not a spoiler, is it? I hope not, but I wanted to share the kind of thinking that went into this story. I definitely wanted to avoid getting caught up in hard sci-fi, but on the other hand I needed to make sure that the humanist storyline could hang on plausible underlying logic. Hopefully that will come through.

Anyway, check it out for yourself on Amazon right now!

So what’s next? You’re never satisfied, are you? Well I’m going to cap off 2020 with the release of my fifth novel, Songs From the Void, in December. This one is a small town mystery with fantasy elements—new territory for me, but not without those twists I like to explore. I love how the story came out, and hope you will too. Stay tuned for more info, including the cover.