CIVIL: TRue North
Near-future speculative fiction.
"...it's the depth and beauty of Barker's writing that makes Rachel's and Chet's storylines so compelling." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In a nation fractured by war, the hardest thing to face isn't the enemy—it's the person you've become.
In a near-future America torn apart by a second civil war, Rachel Waterman—known as the Raven—is being hunted for murder. She survived a military detainment facility called True North, and she got out the only way she could. Now she's found something she never expected: a community of survivors trying to build a life in a hidden, off-grid sanctuary.
U.S. Marine Captain Chet Miller doesn't see the Raven as a survivor. She’s the woman who killed the man he considered a brother.
Tracking her across the scarred wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, Chet expects an easy hunt. But as he closes in, the lines between enemy and survivor start to blur. The woman he came to confront carries a trauma that mirrors his own—and the man he believed he was may no longer exist.
For readers who want the emotional weight of The Women, the moral complexity of The Things They Carried, and a heart-pounding fight for something worth saving.
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Me and my emotional support plant.
In the works
CIVIL Book Two
CIVIL: Southern Comfort
Sometimes making peace is more dangerous than waging war.
Rachel Waterman is willing to stake everything on the hope that the right thing, done for the right reasons, might actually matter.
It's a beautiful idea — and in a better world, it might even be true. In this world, promises are broken and men betray their word. Rachel is about to pay the ultimate price for being wrong.
Chet Miller knows the math of survival — what you hold onto, what you let go, what you tell yourself at the end of the day. But watching an innocent person die because the people who gave their word couldn't be bothered to keep it — that's a different equation entirely.
Every choice you make has a price.
Southern Comfort — because in this world, peace was never going to be free.
DARK FANTASY
Daughter of Sand and Magic
The only thing more dangerous than having no power, is having too much.
Aramaath, a desert king's teenage daughter, was raised to be a bargaining chip — trained to be handed off to a stranger as a wife. But when a foreign woman brings a talisman that awakens a forbidden magic within her, she becomes something no one in her world is prepared for.
When her father's kingdom burns, Aramaath flees into a desert full of enemies. The refuge she finds is a trap. The holy city that takes her in is a prison. And the man who hunts her wants something far worse than her life.
Everyone wants to control her power. She's done letting them.