A Potential Reader Asks: What Book Should I Start With?

One of the most common questions I get asked is this: what should I start with? The question usually comes on social media, from folks I really don't know well. I'm inclined to ask them what they like to read so I can fit my answer more directly to their tastes. 

Below, what I want to do is classify my best books and their genres, so I can point readers to this very blog to determine what they might want to read next of mine, or read for the very first time.

I'm including what I deem are my best books in each category. Click on the titles to go to their Amazon pages.

Here we go...

IF YOU LIKE A GOOD LOVE STORY

1. Blink. A semi-autobiographical love story set in the early '80s (the semi-autobiographical part) and present day, when the main character goes searching for that elusive "missed connection" from many, many years ago...and finds him.

2. Dinner at Home. My "romance with recipes" charts the course of love between a man who's seemingly lost everything and the homeless guy caring for his toddler niece as they embark on a course to build a home-chef business together. This is my most popular love story.

3. Blue Umbrella Sky. My Lambda Literary Award finalist that showcases the love between a man trying to get over the loss of his long-term spouse due to Alzheimers and a recovering alcoholic and singer who's much younger in a Palm Springs mobile home community.

4, Caregiver. Based on my own experiences as an AIDS buddy in Tampa, FL at a time when the virus was a death sentence, this book shows how love can arise out the ashes of tragedy.

5. Raining Men. One of the writing hat tricks I'm proudest to have achieved: taking a sex-addicted cad and redeeming him once he learns that loving himself is the most crucial love of all.

IF YOU WANT TO BE A LITTLE SCARED AND IN SUSPENSE

1. The Man from Milwaukee. Winner of the Rainbow Award for Best Thriller and Best Gay Novel Overall, my story of a closeted young man in Chicago discovering a strange affinity with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who's just been arrested for his shocking crimes, is my take on the unreliable narrator and a testament to self-acceptance. Disturbing, yet poignant, this is one of my best.

2. Toxic. My Seattle-set story of how an innocent man, recently dumped, goes looking for love online and finds poison instead. Inspired by a true crime.

3. Bashed. Part ghost story, part love story, this is where I show how love grows out of tragedy, in this case a horrific hate crime.

4. IM. My serial killer thriller, IM is about the dangers of online, anonymous hookups. It also showcases one of my most evil, devious, and yet oddly sympathetic killers.

5. Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe. My werewolf story with a twist: mine is a homophobe preying on Seattle's gay men. The horror story has a counterpoint, though--the love of a young man and a Sicilian chef. The latter has the habit of disappearing every time there's a full moon. Yet, everything is not as it seems...

Check out my Amazon Author Page for more titles. Most of my work falls into the two above categories.

Writing THE END to BLUE UMBRELLA SKY

Hooray! Yesterday, I wrote "The End" on my latest novel, BLUE UMBRELLA SKY. I will be doing a final polish and turning in to Dreamspinner Press early next week. Letting go is always bittersweet: 2 parts joy, 1 part despair. I was inspired by my new home and this book is about a man moving to Palm Springs to begin a new life after his husband passes from Alzheimer's. He not only finds abundant blue skies, but a neighbor called Billy Blue, who offers him a second chance at love, if only he'll take it. Here's the first page, as it now stands: 

Milt Grabaur stared out the window of his trailer, wondering how much worse it could get. The deluge poured down, gray, almost obscuring his neighbors' homes and the barren desert landscape beyond. The rain hammered on his metal roof, sounding like automatic gunfire. Milt shivered a little, thinking of that old song, "It Never Rains in California."

He leaned closer to the picture window, pressing his hand against the glass and whispering to himself, "but it pours."

That window had given him his daily view for the last six months, ever since he'd packed up a life's worth of belongings and made his way south and west to Palm Springs and the Summer Wind Mobile Home Community. This same picture window, almost every single day, had shown him only endless blue skies and sunshine.

Milt had begun to think the expanses of blue, lit up by golden illumination, would never cease.

Until today.

At about three o'clock, that blue sky, for the first time, was overcome with gray, a foreboding mass of bruised clouds. Milt wondered, because of his experience in the desert so far, if the clouds would be only that-foreboding. The magical gods of the Coachella Valley would, of course, sweep those frowning and depressing masses of imminent precipitation away with a wave of their enchanted hands.

Surely.

But the sky continued to darken, seemingly unaware of Milt's fanciful imagining and yearnings. At last, the once-blue dome above him became almost like night in mid-afternoon-and the first heavy drops-fat beads of water, began to fall, first a slow sprinkle, where Milt could count the seconds between drops, then faster and faster, until the raindrops combined into one single, and Milt had to admit, terrifying roar.