Richard Stroud, my cover artist for 2014's 'The Purgatory Inn', has again impressed with his fine work for my newest release.  A brief synopsis for 2017's 'Sea of Bones': 

In the name of humanity, compassion and political pressure, the death penalty has been abolished and correctional institutes of the past are facing extinction. In lieu of execution, the vilest offenders—the majority convicted serial killers and mass-murderers from around the globe—are instead sentenced to permanent solitary confinement via the United Nations created UPIE (United Pacific Island Exile) program, wherein they are essentially drop-shipped onto a secluded beachhead of their very own, just one of a possible thousand such tiny, deserted isles located in the southern Philippines.

   For veteran man-and-wife Correctional Officers Zachary and Liza Gorman, their assignment to the penal colony Atlantis is in of itself  no more than a glorified babysitting gig. 

   Oppositely, roguish, hard-drinking fellow officer Dylan Barnes views the year-long assignment as his last best chance for advancement in a career so often hijacked by his own rakish behavior. 

   Daily duties are somewhat mundane and rarely stray from tedium, save the always eccentric, often times borderline psychotic personality’s they are tasked to serve via regular supply runs, that is until a series of gruesome inmate suicides rock the deep blue sea facility to its very sand and stone foundation. 

   With a possible facility shutdown looming and a potentially destructive tropical storm approaching, the Gorman’s and a somewhat skeptical Dylan Barnes team with the colony’s assigned psychiatrist and a commanding officer desperate for answers in unearthing clues to a murderous conspiracy that will ultimately reveal the responsible party as one of shocking familiarity.    

   When wading the most treacherous of waters, the lesser of two evils can oft times prove to be the deadliest.