Dr. Anita Shining moves into a bucolic suburban neighborhood to make a new start and is quickly befriended by unsuspecting country club characters. Lauren, the chain-smoking freelance writer, forms an instant alliance with Anita, an alliance that inspires her to assume a leadership role in the conspiracy ahead. Bonnie has no purpose. She works out relentlessly and has a body that would make a younger woman jealous but it has no allure for her husband who is aroused primarily by Court TV and all things crime. Kate is in a bad marriage with a boring husband whom she refers to only as: Mister. She needs sex and she needs it now. Lust drives Kate to make poor decisions, decisions that affect not only her husband and family, but all the families who find themselves inexplicably connected to Anita. 

As head of renowned medical facility for people dying of terminal illnesses, Anita Shining is a much loved and revered leader in the field of thanatology – the study of death. Dr. Shining notes that her patients frequently express an impassioned lament: they will not have a chance to make their mark, to change the world before they die. Dr. Shining hears their plea and devises a brilliant - if sinister - plan. Scarred by the murder of her own daughter and frustrated with an ineffectual criminal justice system, she schemes to have some terminally ill patients murder the country’s most heinous criminals. The plot is complicated by an FBI agent torn between his own feelings of duty and the contempt he holds for the serial criminals he tracks; a group of strong woman friends who unwittingly select the targets for execution; and the narrator, a sensible, witty woman who discovers Dr. Shining’s macabre conspiracy to render justice. 

Nothing to Lose is suspenseful and fast-paced, a carefully plotted page-turner, with a shocking final twist that lingers long after the story ends. 

In a tiny village in the Adirondack Mountains, fifteen year-old Righteous Markland snaps. Driven by madness and rage, he slaughters his own parents and the three children next door. In a final gesture of twisted glee, Righteous Markland slits his own throat. The year is 1911.

Nearly a century later, Dean Brasil, a once promising psychologist, hosts evening hypnosis shows aboard the luxury cruise liner, The Spirit of the Sea. What begins as harmless amusement for the unsuspecting participants quickly proves to be anything but amusing when, under hypnosis, three complete strangers are accidentally regressed to a place of terror and fear.

Baffled by their common recollection, Dean Brasil searches for the universal thread that binds them to each other. What he finds, however, forces them all to confront a haunting possibility.

Righteous Markland lives.

Come aboard! Meet the colorful, soulful characters who explore impossible possibilities while learning what it means to celebrate and heal and remember. Cruise to Retribution is an entertaining adventure filled with humor and sex and challenge and danger: a novel that makes your heart swell and your mind surge.