"Safe" Is Now Available!

 "Safe" Is Now Available!

My third novel, SAFE, is now available on Amazon and wherever awesome books are sold.

After the back-to-back writing, editing, and publishing of the first two novels in the Wicker Anthology—Wicker Hill and The Morgue—SAFE arrived differently. It wasn’t a story I’d been carrying for years, or something built on a decade of notes and revisions. It came on a whim, sudden and insistent, without the long shadow of history that follows Wicker Hill.

Where Wicker Hill was an eleven-year labor of love, slowly shaped by time and experience, SAFE was the voice in the back of my mind saying:

“You need to write me. Now. No questions. No hesitation.”

And so I did. And it was right.

SAFE has left an indelible mark on me as a writer.

I was immediately attached to Andrew, Wrenley, and their strange, fragile world—and as I followed them, I realized I was growing too. Writing SAFE showed me just how much I’d changed since the first time I sat down to write Wicker Hill. It stretched me in ways I didn’t expect.

The result is a story that’s heartfelt, wholesome, funny, cute, terrifying, and engaging in all the right ways. And I’m genuinely proud of what it became.

But, what is SAFE?

SAFE is a story about the one place you’d do anything to protect—and what happens when the world outside begins to fold in on it.

On the surface, it’s simple: a father and his ten-year-old daughter living alone in a luxury penthouse sixty stories above a dead city.

Their days are made of pancakes and cartoons, rooftop gardens and a turquoise pool that still catches the morning light. Below them, the streets are overgrown and silent; whatever ended the world has already had its say.

Up here, everything works. The lights never flicker. The air never chills. The walls never creak. It is, by every measure that matters to a child, perfect. Safe.

But SAFE isn’t really about the end of the world. It’s about what a parent will sacrifice to keep one small piece of it untouched. It’s about the lies we tell to protect the people we love—and the monsters that grow in the spaces where the truth should be. There’s a locked door in the penthouse that hums like a sleeping animal, a city that may not be as empty as it looks, and a daughter who’s starting to notice the cracks in her father’s stories.

As Wrenley grows more curious and Andrew grows more desperate to keep their fragile peace intact, the question at the heart of the book becomes painfully simple: is it better to live in a beautiful lie, or face the kind of truth that might destroy you?

SAFE blends intimate family drama with slow-burn horror, claustrophobic tension, and the quiet dread of realizing the person who keeps you alive might also be the one keeping you in. 

If you’ve ever loved a good apocalypse story—but cared more about the people in the one apartment than the chaos on the news—this one’s for you.

But why?

Because, more than anything, SAFE is driven by the people trapped inside it.

Andrew isn’t a classic action hero; he’s a man held together by coffee, fear, and a promise he made to a little girl when the world fell apart.

His love for Wrenley is fierce, but it’s worn at the edges—shot through with exhaustion, guilt, and the kind of tired determination that keeps you standing long after your body wants to fold. He’s constantly calculating, constantly bracing, doing quiet, terrible math in his head about what it takes to keep her safe one more day.

Wrenley, on the other hand, is pure velocity—ten years old, restless and bright, still able to find magic in rooftop gardens and old cartoons, still asking all the wrong (or right) questions. Her chapters are full of wonder and mischief and the stubborn curiosity that comes from growing up in a world built on half-answers.

At least one reader has said that Wrenley is the most accurately written child character they’ve ever read, and her voice is the heartbeat of the book.

The story moves in a kind of tense orbit around them, bouncing between Andrew’s and Wrenley’s perspectives in the present and slipping back into the past to show exactly what each of them endured to end up in that glittering cage in the sky.

We see Andrew before the fall, the choices he made when everything went wrong; we see Wrenley slowly realizing that her childhood has been carefully edited.

That shifting lens—father, daughter, then the ghosts of who they used to be—is what gives SAFE its spine: not just what happened to the world, but what it cost these two people to survive it together.

You can get it on Amazon right now!

And I really hope you do.

When I finished SAFE and held that first copy in my hands, I felt a kind of pride I hadn’t felt with any of my previous books—and for a while, I couldn’t figure out why.

Wicker Hill is, in a lot of ways, not just my first novel, but potentially my magnum opus. I loved it so much that I dove straight into its sequel, The Morgue, as soon as it was published. Of course I’m proud of those books.

But SAFE carries a different weight.

Talking it through with my wife, I finally realized why:

Wicker Hill is only the first part of a much larger story—a story that won’t be fully told until the next two books in the series exist. As much as I love Wicker Hill (and I truly, deeply do), Abigail and Asher’s journeys aren’t finished yet. Their story is still unfolding.

Andrew and Wrenley’s, though?

SAFE is complete. Their arc, their trauma, their love, their terrible choices—it’s all there, beginning to end. SAFE is my first fully contained narrative, carried all the way through to its conclusion. There’s something incredibly special about that.

SAFE is special to me, and I hope that it—along with Andrew, Wrenley, and the story they hold between them—resonates with you even a fraction as much as it does with me.

You can get SAFE right HERE today. Pick up a copy for your favorite reader for Christmas, or grab one for yourself. Step into that penthouse high above a dead city, live alongside Andrew and Wrenley for a little while, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll walk away with a new understanding of what love and safety really are.