S. Chris Shirley
High-stakes fiction with emotional depth
From a preacher’s son torn between faith and desire to a pharmaceutical CEO racing to save his wife from a fatal virus.
Playing by the Book
Playing by the Book is an IPPY Award-winning novel about the joy and heartbreak of discovering one’s own truth.
When seventeen-year-old high school newspaper editor Jake Powell leaves his small Alabama town for Columbia University’s summer journalism program, it feels like a dream come true. But his father, a fundamentalist Christian preacher, senses trouble—and he’s rarely wrong.
Up North, Jake must navigate unfamiliar freedoms and uncomfortable truths, starting with his growing feelings for a handsome Jewish classmate named Sam. What he could keep hidden back home now rises to the surface in the Big Apple.
Standing by his side are a sharp-tongued classmate with a Park Avenue attitude and the designer bags to match, a loyal friend from back home who isn’t sure she’s ready to let Jake go, and an outrageously flamboyant aunt determined to help him embrace love—and avoid the heartbreak she knows all too well.
Bloody Hell
Bloody Hell is a morally charged upmarket thriller about power, control, and the lengths we’ll go to save the ones we love. I am currently seeking representation.
Skyler Longview, CEO of Blackwell Pharmaceuticals, has built his life on mastering outcomes. So when his wife, Mimi, is infected with a rare, deadly virus, he races to find the cure—exactly what the man who orchestrated her infection intended.
The search draws him into a tightening web of hidden agendas, political pressure, and moral compromise—while Mimi’s body becomes the proving ground for a treatment that may come too late.
The story is told through the dry, incisive voice of Skyler’s corporate bodyguard, Derek Davenport—an observer trained to protect power, not question it. As the moral cost of Skyler’s decisions mounts, Derek is pulled from the perimeter into the fallout.
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