THE CANTERBURY TALES IN NEVERLAND makes a post-apocalyptic detective thriller resonate with literary history and ask what it means to be well-read . . .and to get the joke. This is a post-apocalyptic mystery wherein the detective's need for hard facts clashes with a culture's need to reinvent itself on the ever shifting sands of story telling. There are two main stories. In one, Jackson Thomas, a former mayor of a small town known as The Ville, is trying to avoid being stoned to death on false charges of conspiracy to incite riot and murder. He is hampered by being under arrest and dependent...

Bicentennial Day for America is going to be a long one for LarryTreegarden. There's a fifth of Southern Comfort to kill before noon. There's all the memory other people won't let the fifth kill off. The woman who's divorced him three times wants to talk. His older son wants to publish Granddad's Civil War Journal. Everyone wants to talk war history with a World War II vet. The mayor wants Larry's crane to lift the statue of a fictional hero into place in time for the fireworks. The only person not bothering him is his younger son shipped home from Viet Nam and resting for five years under a...

He looks like a young adult, claims to be born in the 19th century and laments that the other wizards call him Merlin Sherlock as a taunt. Thaddeus Barlow has wanted to be a detective from when he read newly published stories of Edgar Allan Poe before disappearing into a kindergarten for wizards. Now, after 169 years of learning the basics of wizardry and reading detective stories on the side, he has graduated into the world with the hopes of fulfilling that youthful fancy. He would do so gladly if it were not for the mockery of his fellow wizards who do not consider snooping a respectable...