In case you missed the book launch for my novella, Send The Dead, the Kindle version is free for four days on Amazon, from Thursday, February 26th to Sunday, March 1st.

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The Acolyte: A Novel

It’s almost ready. Jacket art soon. My hero is an altar boy who must help a federal prosecutor and the FBI bust a Catholic priest's child exploitation ring.

The New York Times called my third novel, Brain Storm, a thinking man’s John Grisham thriller, an overused label to be sure. But I do think that if you liked Brain Storm, about a lawyer appointed to defend a brain-damaged white supremacist, The Acolyte will offer the same mix of law, satire, and a good story.

Kahtoola Exospikes

I do not aspire to being an influencer, but now and again I do have an impulse to recommend something besides books and movies.

For the last ten years I’ve been living in the mountains of Montana, which means I am usually walking either uphill or downhill. During the winter months, that often means walking up and down on solid ice. If you are anywhere close to my age (almost 72), one fall on ice can end your career as a hiker. Even back in the Nebraska flatlands, I wore Yaktrax or several other similar cleats when going for a walk or a run on snow or ice. Alas, these traction cleats all seemed to last a month or two before falling apart.

Enter Kahtoola. (These links don’t contain affiliate codes, I’m just sharing because I love the product.) In Montana, I soon learned about Kahtoola, a company that makes three different models of traction cleats for different kinds of walking, running, or hiking. These cleats are expensive, roughly $70 or more, but I’ve been wearing mine from November to April every day for ten years and they show no signs of wearing out.

• Kahtoola Exospikes - best all-around cleat for snow and ice. It is uncanny how I can walk down a steep grade on wet ice in these things and not slip, even a little. Super grippy and good in snow and mud too. Good for Montana.

• Kahtoola Nanospikes - the nomenclature is a little confusing, but this model has smaller cleats, made for running or walking on flatter surfaces. Good for Nebraska.

• Kahtoola Microspikes - You probably don’t need these unless you are traversing an ice sheet on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park. But if you are, this is what you need.

Here’s a video of how to put them on. It does require some hand strength because the rubber grips are thick and strong, part of why they last so long and work so well. Amazon sells them, as well.