What would you risk to achieve your dream? Would you risk your career? Your life? Your child's life? While researching Alzheimer's disease, Los Angeles neurosurgeon Julie Stein discovers the key to her long-frustrated dream of becoming a novelist: a combination of drugs that allows her to write as well as Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the drugs' side effects may kill her. The high school football team is about to cut Julie's son, Pete, who dreams of playing linebacker in the NFL. Knowing the costs, he secretly starts taking anabolic steroids. Julie soon faces an awful choice: abandon her dream...

Anthony "Mouse" Maas is caught in the Baby Boomer Crunch with three free-spending daughters and financially strapped parents. A hard-working commodity broker in Los Angeles, Mouse is in a slump and his firm, for which he has made so much money, is about to fire him. Then his mother dies. At her funeral he meets his high school sweetheart, Sharon Calloway. She reawakens in him an old dream to become an artist. Desperate for money to pay off his debts, support his family, and have a chance to pursue his dream and, maybe, run away with Sharon, Mouse devises a scheme to bilk his ungrateful bosses...

Surprise, suspense and entertaining plot twists are crucial to all fiction, and behind all three is the art and science of deception. Where's a law abiding, morally upstanding writer to turn for lessons on the principles of deception, the fine art of misdirection, and the ins and outs of obfuscation? Drawing lessons from more than 200 novels, plays and films, as well as from conmen, magicians, spies and generals, Fictional Deceptions shows you how to use the 7 principles and 10 techniques of deception to baffle, mislead and surprise your audience, which will most certainly entertain them.