The Ditch Company

Hollis Pruett is ninety-one years old and nearing the end of his life. As memory pulls him back across the dry land he once surveyed and the community he spent decades trying to preserve, the boundaries between past and present begin to disappear.

A story about ambition, memory, grief, and the things we spend our lives trying to hold together.

The Novel

An upmarket speculative suspense novel about mortality, choice, and what happens when death begins obeying the fine print.

For nineteen years, Nora Voss has counted the dead for Ashgrove Mutual. Every year the company predicts how many of its customers will die, and every year the numbers come out almost exactly right.

Then Nora discovers they are too right.

A man drowns in a dry bedroom the same night a woman survives eleven minutes underwater. Policyholders stop following the pattern the moment their coverage ends. And when Nora looks back at the night her six year old daughter survived a drowning and her husband died hours later, she finds evidence that should not exist.

The deaths are not following probability. They are following the contracts.

When Nora discovers two children trapped in a policy group that still owes one death before the end of the year, she faces a choice no actuary should ever have to make.

If a death cannot be prevented, who gets to decide where it goes?

A Certain Number Will Die is a completed novel seeking literary representation.

The Novel

An upmarket literary novel about friendship, addiction, memory, and the things we carry with us long after childhood ends.

Denver, 1967. In the working-class neighborhood of Globeville, five boys spend the last days of summer doing what boys have always done—wandering alleys, hanging around garages, building models, and looking for something to do.

Then they discover something else.

What begins with model cement and gasoline becomes a private ritual, passed between them in garages and basements beneath the orange glow of the neighborhood smelters. At first, it is simply another way to kill an afternoon. A few strange minutes. A secret none of the adults know about.

But childhood ends. The boys grow up. And what they breathed in together doesn’t leave all of them behind.

Moving across decades, The Glue Boys follows five lives shaped by a friendship formed before any of them were old enough to understand what they were doing—or what it might eventually cost them.

At its center is a question that only becomes harder with time:

How long can one summer follow you?

The Glue Boys is a completed novel seeking literary representation.

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