About

Here I am in Bratislava, Slovakia, musing with Napoleon about one of the mysteries of life. This occurred during a fantastic vacation I took with my wife in October 2014. (It was a package trip by Viking River Cruises. I’ll give them very high marks for the trip and would recommend them highly for everything except the nonstop mail marketing campaign that still persists to this day — we get a minimum of one mailing a week and sometimes as many as four or five in a week.) This was something like the tenth day of the trip, and spousie was absolutely sick and tired of hearing me blather on — “I wonder why this …, I wonder why that … , I wonder why the other thing …” So, I was compelled to sit down with the iconic statue in the town square and ask, “Your excellency, I wonder how you were able to convince so many that you were a man of the people, even as you continued your unrelenting quest for world domination. What is it about human nature that makes us so desperate to follow a perceived hero?” Our discussion was quite interesting. Maybe I’ll write a post about it someday.

The point I’m getting at here is not that I am mentally unbalanced, but that I am fascinated by the mysterious behavior of people. Maybe that’s why I so enjoy reading mystery books. Maybe that’s why I’ve had a longtime dream of writing mystery books. I made an initial foray into that field during a sabbatical from my day job back in 2006 and 2007, but various events led me back into the workplace and I set aside the writing for several years. But now, after a 40-year career as an Aerospace Engineer, I’ve actually and truly retired. (Here I am waving goodbye from the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th hole of The Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland. To clarify, I haven’t retired from GOLF, as the photo might imply — this is just a metaphor for retiring from my “real” career.) Spousie and I have now moved to our former vacation home on Lake Superior, near Grand Marais, MN (voted the “Coolest Small Town in America” in 2015 and pictured on the Home page), and I am once again taking a shot at this mystery writing thing. The results to date are listed on the Books page and in the posts on this site.

I hope you find the site interesting, and I also hope you buy a book or two. But if not, that’s all right. In fact, I wonder why anyone would actually find the site interesting, or buy a book or two …