It’s 1985, and Jack Trexlor is fresh out of the Arizona state mental hospital. He’d like to simply tend bar, paint pictures, and lay low for a while, but his old friend Macy Barnes turns up, and things quickly spiral out of control. Macy introduces him to an enigmatic Navajo man named John Lupo and the high-adrenaline world of the desert. Thrilled by adventure, Jack accepts their invitation to a weekend fishing trip. By the cool water of the Verde River, deep in the heart of the desert, he thinks he just may find something he’s been missing. What he finds instead is trouble. The group grows to include John’s girlfriend and Macy’s wife, and snakes, scorpions, and the ghosts of Jack’s own past keep everybody on their toes. And when some poachers slink out of the sagebrush, things go from bad to worse. As their quiet fishing trip decays into a desperate ordeal of survival, Jack slowly comes to realize that, even if John Lupo can lead them out of the desert, nothing will ever be the same.

In many ways, Victor Storm is an average retiree. He lives a simple life, supported only on his pension, and he attends a class at the local community college. In other ways, Victor Storm is anything but average. He’s a former Special Forces soldier, already retired at the age of 41. He doesn’t own a car. He’s haunted by his past, and he’s taking a philosophy class to try to figure out the big truths. When his quiet retirement is shattered by a random act of extreme violence, however, Victor is torn from the textbook and put on the front line of philosophy. An inept bureaucracy drops the ball, and it’s up to him to set things right. Unfortunately for the perpetrator, Victor Storm is more than up to the task. This first book in the Crusader series shows how Victor Storm found a new life, by losing it all, in the mean days of winter.

In the beginning, as in many beginnings, there were deals with the Devil, attacks by unlikely demons, ghost dogs, strange things in a cemetery, long walks home, true love and true hate and true ambivalence. Hack Hammond fought Indestructum for his girlfriend and the world. Denis Grey took A Walk Down Main Street sometime after Clinton Irving vowed there would be No More Lonely Knights. Angela found quite a reason to Make It Big. Caspar Thomas should have thought things through before Four Hours, and Conrad Warner should have seen it coming in Dog Days. And everyone just stared at The Monument. In the beginning, there were First Lies: early short stories by T.F. Torrey. Some of these stories have appeared in minor publications both on- and off-line. Though early work and rough, many of the tales here are genuinely good. Others are decent, but several are truly drivel. Read at your own caution.