WORKS IN PROGRESS
Mark’s creative fiction explores law enforcement procedure, institutional decision-making, and moral ambiguities that emerge when paths cross between ordinary citizens, criminal organizations, and law enforcement.
The multi-novel procedural series he is developing follows federal investigators as they intersect with civilian lives in extreme circumstances. Each novel in the series builds on the overall narrative arc of the story.
The SPARKLIGHTS Series
SPARKLIGHTS is a planned five-book thriller saga about young people forged by adversity—those who choose truth, courage, and moral clarity in a world designed to extinguish them.
The series takes its name from an ancient idea: that character is shaped through friction, and that light only matters when it pushes back against darkness. A Sparklight is someone who, in youth, learns to endure pressure without surrendering to corruption—bringing sparks of truth into systems built on secrecy, power, and control. Not all such lights survive. Some are snuffed out. Others endure long enough to change everything.
The story unfolds across generations, institutions, and even worlds, beginning as a grounded contemporary conspiracy and expanding into a sweeping reckoning with history, memory, and hidden systems of influence. While each book delivers its own narrative momentum, the series is designed as a single, interlocking arc in which characters and timelines converge toward an inevitable confrontation.
Book One – Kidnapped
Set in early summer 2025, Kidnapped introduces the Whynots, a group of teenagers who stumble into a violent conspiracy after rescuing a young girl from a remote Oregon campground. What begins as an act of courage quickly becomes a collision with federal power, staged evidence, and a justice system more interested in control than protection. Forced out of hiding, the teens must decide whether to disappear again—or stand and fight.
Book Two – Stritch Corner
Running parallel to the events of Kidnapped, Stritch Corner widens the lens on the conspiracy, following new characters whose choices reverberate through law enforcement, government, and the shadows between them. What appears at first to be a separate story gradually reveals itself as part of the same machinery, tightening the net around everyone involved.
Book Three – Zamora
Zamora returns to the aftermath of Kidnapped, following the consequences of survival. As Betty and Betsy are reunited with their grandparents—who have themselves gone into hiding—the threads from the first two books begin to merge. Past and present collide in a dramatic, unexpected climax that permanently reshapes the stakes of the series.
Book Four – [Title TBD]
Set primarily in the late summer of 1972, Book Four reaches back to expose the historical foundations of the conspiracy. Anchored to pivotal real-world moments—including an 1886 earthquake and the passage of Title IX—the story reveals how decisions made decades earlier quietly set the stage for the present, reframing everything the reader thought they understood.
Book Five – [Title TBD]
The final book opens in Danooae, a parallel world where characters from across the series converge to continue their pursuit of those orchestrating the conspiracy on Earth—known as Akkadia. What began as a contemporary thriller expands into a cross-world reckoning, without losing sight of the human cost that defined the first spark.
Together, the SPARKLIGHTS series explores how truth survives across generations, how easily light can be extinguished, and how the smallest sparks—once ignited—can illuminate even the darkest systems.