Books
The Spiral watches—choose, and pay
Hazard Pay
Book 1
Node Black Series
Space-horror with tactical grit: a salvage crew, a stubborn ship, and the kind of choices that come with teeth.
Dead ships. Bad corridors. Crew that won’t quit.
The Farside Runner takes jobs that smart people refuse: derelicts with cold air and warm lies, stations that stopped answering, and code that doesn’t stay polite when you talk back. The pay is good because the odds aren’t.
On a routine salvage, the Runner’s crew finds a ship that looks empty and acts wrong—doors that “remember” being closed, cameras that breathe between frames, and a signal that keeps asking for a name. The job should be simple: tag the cargo, tow the hull, get paid. Instead, every corridor trades time for distance, the AI won’t admit what it learned, and the crew’s best tools start charging interest.
Fieldcraft beats speeches out here. You check seals. You count seconds. You keep the person next to you alive. But every choice has teeth, and every fix moves the cost somewhere. When the Runner’s options narrow to two doors—burn the find or bring it home—the crew has to decide what kind of story they want to be in… and how much of themselves they’re willing to spend to get out.
Tense, tactile SF-horror with found-family under pressure, puzzle-fair mysteries, and receipts that land on-page. If you like derelict hunts, stubborn ships, and technology with a mean streak, climb aboard.
Start the Node Black series with Hazard Pay.
- Readers who want derelicts, signals with teeth, and claustrophobic corridors
- Found-family that fights smart, not loud
- Puzzle-fair dread: clues you can track, payoffs you can feel
Rooms
A Caldera Bay Files Novel
Volume 1
Coastal noir where rules bite back. The cases are personal, the town keeps score, and the bill always comes due.
Small-town noir with supernatural edges.
Caldera Bay smiles for the tourists and keeps a ledger for everyone else. The rules are old, the favors are counted, and some doors remember who pushed them.
When a simple missing-person case tugs a loose thread, it drags Kolbe into a town economy that runs on names, debts, and the kind of help you pay for twice. The leads aren’t clean—cash that smells wrong, a youth center with too many closed rooms, a market that opens only after dark—and every step forward trades time, trust, or blood. Kearney works the paper. Mara brings the law that fits in one sentence. Bruiser, the dog, sits the jamb and tells the truth you can’t argue with.
Kolbe’s job is fieldcraft, not speeches: check the angles, make the call, pay the cost where it lands. But Caldera has its own enforcement mechanism, and the longer he chases one missing kid, the more the town insists on balancing other accounts. Choices get narrow. Doors line up. Someone always wants a receipt.
ROOMS launches the Caldera Bay Files with modern noir pace, puzzle-fair clues, found-family under pressure, and a slow, eerie undertow. If you like cases that bite back, towns that act alive, and wins that cost something you can feel, start here.
Start Caldera Bay with Rooms. The bill arrives on page one.
- Readers who want noir with a quiet supernatural edge
- Found-family dynamics and procedural clarity
- Visible costs: every choice leaves a mark
Two Doors
A Caldera Bay Files Novel
Volume 2
Coastal noir where rules bite back. The cases are personal, the town keeps score, and the bill always comes due.
Small-town noir with supernatural edges.
Caldera Bay doesn’t forgive, it audits.
When a church pew gives up a velvet jaw and a receipt signed by a dead man, Kolbe finds himself working chain and memory for Mara instead of chasing clients. The case should have ended with a warrant, but the city keeps sending invoices: masks, sermons wired for sound, and a man who collects debts in faces instead of cash.
Bruiser smells ghosts where there shouldn’t be any. Emily counts the bodies that still breathe. Every name comes with a price, and every door opens to a room that wants something back.
Kolbe’s job is to keep the paperwork clean while the city decides what he’s worth. But Caldera’s balance sheet never closes—it just starts a new column under You.
Two Doors dives deeper into the Caldera Bay Files with modern noir pace, puzzle-fair clues, found-family under pressure, and a slow, eerie undertow. If you like cases that bite back, towns that act alive, and wins that cost something you can feel, try this one.
Continue your journey in Caldera Bay with Two Doors.
- Readers who want noir with a quiet supernatural edge
- Found-family dynamics and procedural clarity
- Visible costs: every choice leaves a mark
Doghouse Blues
A Caldera Bay File Novel
Volume 3
Coastal noir where rules bite back. The cases are personal, the town keeps score, and the bill always comes due.
Small-town noir with supernatural edges.
Caldera Bay doesn’t forgive, it audits.
When a church pew gives up a velvet jaw and a receipt signed by a dead man, Kolbe finds himself working chain and memory for Mara instead of chasing clients. The case should have ended with a warrant, but the city keeps sending invoices: masks, sermons wired for sound, and a man who collects debts in faces instead of cash.
Bruiser smells ghosts where there shouldn’t be any. Emily counts the bodies that still breathe. Every name comes with a price, and every door opens to a room that wants something back.
Kolbe’s job is to keep the paperwork clean while the city decides what he’s worth. But Caldera’s balance sheet never closes—it just starts a new column under You.
Doghouse Blues dives deeper into the Caldera Bay Files with modern noir pace, puzzle-fair clues, found-family under pressure, and a slow, eerie undertow. If you like cases that bite back, towns that act alive, and wins that cost something you can feel, try this one.
Continue your journey in Caldera Bay with Doghouse Blues.
- Readers who want noir with a quiet supernatural edge
- Found-family dynamics and procedural clarity
- Visible costs: every choice leaves a mark
Forgotten Doors
A Caldera Bay Files Novel
Volume 4
Coastal noir where rules bite back. The cases are personal, the town keeps score, and the bill always comes due.
Small-town noir with supernatural edges.
Some doors were never meant to open twice.
A municipal audit turns personal when a string of sealed properties start showing activity without tenants—voices on empty lines, bills paid by names that don’t exist, doors that answer even after their locks are pulled.
Kolbe Fletcher knows the rhythm: every open door costs someone a truth. Mara’s team works the city’s paper trail, but the receipts keep folding back—same ink, same hand, years apart. Somewhere in the system, a case they thought was buried is signing its own forms again.
Caldera Bay wants equilibrium. The rooms want witnesses.
And somewhere in between, the city itself is taking inventory.
Some debts remember who knocked.
Some doors never forget.
Continue your journey in Caldera Bay with Forgotten Doors.
- Readers who want noir with a quiet supernatural edge
- Found-family dynamics and procedural clarity
- Visible costs: every choice leaves a mark
Borrowed Faces Are Lies
A Caldera Bay Files Novel
Volume 5
Coastal noir where rules bite back. The cases are personal, the town keeps score, and the bill always comes due.
Small-town noir with supernatural edges.
Caldera keeps a ledger, and some debts wear faces.
When a series of counterfeit identities start turning up with their seams showing, P.I. Kolbe Fletcher finds himself chasing a runner network that treats memory and disguise like a business model. Their product isn’t murder, it’s substitution. Their ritual isn’t religion, it’s accounting.
Rhea Voss runs errands for the kind of people who pay in absolution. Hadrien Cross keeps the books. And the man behind both has learned to weaponize faith, ledger stamps, and borrowed skin.
From tidewater stakeouts to courthouse rigging rooms, Kolbe and Mara’s crew track the trade in faces through Caldera’s underbelly; where interest becomes blood and balance gets paid in breath.
Procedural grit meets quiet horror in a city that files everything, even its ghosts.
Room. Door. Hinge. Bell. Balance.
In Caldera Bay, truth keeps a receipt.
Continue your journey in Caldera Bay with Borrowed Faces Are Lies.
Coming Soon!
- Readers who want noir with a quiet supernatural edge
- Found-family dynamics and procedural clarity
- Visible costs: every choice leaves a mark
Halloween
Tales From Caldera Bay
Volume 1
Welcome to Caldera, where porch lights flick on and old debts wake up. These Halloween shorts deliver quick, creepy hits—markets after dark, doors that remember, favors that charge interest. Every tale sets a Rule and writes a LEDGER. Wins cost; some names don’t come back.
Caldera smiles for the tourists and keeps a ledger for everyone else. Volume 1 opens the gates: the Night Parade trades hunger for a weekly beat; the Bookmobile lends courage—due at dawn; a warehouse grows a market after dark; a lighthouse whispers forecasts you can’t unhear. Dolls ask for midnight. Mirrors ask for consent. Blackthorn sets dessert. Each tale stands alone with a sharp payoff: one Rule to keep (or break) and a LEDGER that records the price. Cozy-creepy to razor-edge, all anchored in noir bones.
First visit is free. The bill isn’t.
- Short, stand-alone hits — read in any order; one sitting per story.
- Rule + LEDGER in every tale — clear setup, clean payoff, visible cost.
- Cozy-creepy to razor-edge — small-town noir vibe, Halloween flavor without filler.
Halloween
Tales From Caldera Bay
Volume 2
Welcome to Caldera, where porch lights flick on and old debts wake up. These Halloween shorts deliver quick, creepy hits—markets after dark, doors that remember, favors that charge interest. Every tale sets a Rule and writes a LEDGER. Wins cost; some names don’t come back.
October tightens the screws. Volume 2 walks the Hayride Loop that never returns everyone it counts, sets a Mask Shop string to rasp when you lie, and stamps a rosette in Best in Show that won’t come off. A paper-yellow Candy Ledger chimes shut on sticky fingers, and the Whispering Lighthouse trades warnings for names. Short, stand-alone stories you can finish in one sitting—each with a rule that bites and a receipt you can feel. Noir warmth, small-town strange, visible costs.
Razor-short hook:
New rules, old debts, quick teeth.
- Short, stand-alone hits — read in any order; one sitting per story.
- Rule + LEDGER in every tale — clear setup, clean payoff, visible cost.
- Cozy-creepy to razor-edge — small-town noir vibe, Halloween flavor without filler.
Halloween
Tales From Caldera Bay
Volume 3
Welcome to Caldera, where porch lights flick on and old debts wake up. These Halloween shorts deliver quick, creepy hits—markets after dark, doors that remember, favors that charge interest. Every tale sets a Rule and writes a LEDGER. Wins cost; some names don’t come back.
The town’s smile gets thinner. Volume 3 maps the Corn Maze Shift where rows rearrange to keep what they like, unlocks a Doll Shop that sells midnight by the ounce, and finds a Foundry Market that only opens when the siren turns inland. A Mirror goes blank until you pay the right name; a Porch-light Circuit gathers kids and something that isn’t. Each story delivers a clean hit—rule stated, cost tallied, ending earned. Read in any order; the ledger remembers either way.
- Short, stand-alone hits — read in any order; one sitting per story.
- Rule + LEDGER in every tale — clear setup, clean payoff, visible cost.
- Cozy-creepy to razor-edge — small-town noir vibe, Halloween flavor without filler.
Halloween
Tales From Caldera Bay
Volume 4
Welcome to Caldera, where porch lights flick on and old debts wake up. These Halloween shorts deliver quick, creepy hits—markets after dark, doors that remember, favors that charge interest. Every tale sets a Rule and writes a LEDGER. Wins cost; some names don’t come back.
By Volume 4 the accounts are loud. The Night Market opens early and asks for something you meant to keep. A Paper Crown buys an hour you can’t afford. The Glass Forecast in the lighthouse tells the truth and charges interest. A Tin-Pan Favor hisses across a salt seam; the Exit Sign remembers who left first. Short, seasonal stories with Caldera’s noir engine: fieldcraft over speeches, found-family under pressure, and wins that cost on-page. Start here or loop back—the rules don’t mind.
- Short, stand-alone hits — read in any order; one sitting per story.
- Rule + LEDGER in every tale — clear setup, clean payoff, visible cost.
- Cozy-creepy to razor-edge — small-town noir vibe, Halloween flavor without filler.