Authorpreneur Dashboard – Michael Hogan
Dog Hills
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
In a small town, everything is personal. Bollo had been a star, a football hero where that meant everything. But sometimes heroes peak too soon. Sometimes the downside is a rough ride. Now, up against a rust-belt crime boss, Bollo looks to a local detective to stay alive, solve a crime and win back his wife.
Book Bubbles from Dog Hills
Dark and Rainy Night of the Soul
I wrote this at a time when I had lost my driving wheel as a result of a series of bad decisions, ill-informed choices, chance and happenstance, and the utter betrayal by certain persons I’d once trusted, cared for and loved. It was the dark and rainy night of the soul. I had left my hometown at 18 and had returned only for funerals and a few holidays that were as unhappy as the funerals. My memories of that town are colored by memories of my family and the town suffers by association. Nonetheless I grew up in Dog Hills where everything is personal, where fights go straight to the bone, blades to the jugular, and the physical consequences are easily endured compared to the damage done to the heart and soul by the hatred evident in too many hometown faces.
Sistine
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
The Boston Jesuits kick an idealistic young man to the curb. Official Reason: He drinks too much. Real Reason: Troubles with authority and the Jesuits’ Velvet Mafia. Homeless, he joins AA and nabs a job tutoring a wealthy Boston Lawyer’s daughter at the family compound on Cape Ann. He gets a bird’s eye view of a crazy family, decaying from within, and harboring a terrible secret about the death of a young boy--a secret that will eventually be their downfall.
Book Bubbles from Sistine
The "Art" of the Novel
The story’s told in the third person from Dennis Wertz’s POV. He watches, interacts with and traces the rise and fall of Ned Garrity and his law firm, as well as a Cardinal’s precipitous fall from grace for having authorized the movement and transfer of pedophile priests from parish to parish. The “art” of this novel is in the book’s form, its structure. Sistine is faithful to the ceiling in that each chapter or episode corresponds by imagery, language, theme, symbol, with one of the several panels, medallions, lunettes, that move from the prophet, Jonah, through the Creation, the Temptation, Fall and Expulsion to the Flood and The Last Judgment. As the ceiling’s frescoes tell the story of life, anybody’s life, Sistine allows for characters who are fully human, mixed bags, whose goodness is as evident as their defects, crimes, wrongs and sins. In the end – a last judgment of sorts – the sins we commit lie less in what we do than in the lies we tell ourselves to enable us to do what we do.
