Books published by Black Opal Books

Rory is excited for summer vacation. After a stressful school year dealing with her dreams and solving mysteries, she can't wait to dream about her dates with Bryce and fun with friends. But her dreams confuse her when she dreams of being with the wrong Wyatt brother, fighting with friends, being dizzy and disoriented, and passing out on a cold tile floor.Her life is turned upside down this summer. Bryce isn't there to help her solve the mystery and talk through her dreams, and she doesn't have his drawings to help either.She gets scared when she dreams about a breaking news story. Three are dead. Is this what her dreams have been predicting? Who in her life is in danger? Can she prevent the death of three people? Or is she one of the three who will die?

Mothering her brothers wasn't enough, Tookie wants a child of her own. After "auditioning" numerous men-one date at a time-all of them fail the test. Frantic, with her biological clock ticking down, she accepts a blind date with momma's-boy engineer, Ollie, who works with her secretary's husband. Ollie's old-country mother, Rose, yearns for grandchildren, but will she squash Tookie when her PI uncovers Tookie's past indiscretions?

Siblings Matthew and Elizabeth Janssen, nineteen and eighteen, live with their parents in Lilac Cottage in Cape Cod where they had been vacationing when they discovered a time-travel grandfather clock hidden in a secret room. When their parents bought the cottage and everything in it, including the clock, Matthew and Elizabeth are elated at still having access to the time travel device. Summer vacation is over, and the two teenagers now have to plan their adventures around school and family life, making it difficult to get back into the past to solve mysteries. And, boy, do they have mysteries to solve! Not only have a number of young girls been kidnapped and murdered between 1914 and 1927-crimes the siblings are sure were committed by the same man-but the jewels from a jewelry heist in 1900 are still missing. When the siblings find a riddle written by the man who allegedly masterminded the jewel heist, they are sure that if they can just figure out the clues, they can recover the missing treasure…that is, if they can survive their dealings with the murderer of the young girls.

It is 1993, the banking world is in turmoil, and in New Jersey, there is outright panic. The big New York banks and emerging regionals are gobbling up everything in the state. Every financial institution is now both predator and prey. The Fed has opened the floodgates, and traditional banking ethics are disappearing. At a used book sale, Jim Fairmont, a career banker having worked for First State Bank for more than twenty-five years, finds a blank, signed invoice belonging to an auto parts supplier. The document is contained in a box of books donated by Larry McBride, a new-breed, brash, thirty-three-year-old former New York banker. McBride had been hired by First State Bank to give it credibility in its defensive entry into international banking and who, like Jim, is an avid book collector. Alerted by McBride's strange behavior at the book sale as he searched for something, which Jim suspects was the invoice, Jim begins to investigate McBride's relationships with some of First State's customers. What he uncovers is much bigger than he ever imagined, involving clearly unethical conduct and questionable international asset movements. His discoveries put him in the sights of New Jersey's underworld who are determined to protect McBride and his clients, putting not only Jim's life in danger, but those of his close associates' as well.

Max Maxwell is working on a stalking case, involving the unhappily married lady he has been seeing, when he gets a call from an old army buddy, Bill Hart, who is now running an off-the-books intelligence operation in Washington, DC. Bill asks Max to help out with a situation involving another one of his associates. All Max has to do is pick up a sailboat and get it back across the Puget Sound to Seattle. He wasn't told that Bill's associate was working undercover and had been murdered on the boat or that the Canadian Intelligence Service, a Korean smuggling ring with a deadly mission, and a double agent might also be involved. This will turn out be a sentimental journey Max will never forget-if he even survives.

A plant exists that could change mankind's evolution, and the key to it resides with an exotic woman in Laos…When Spencer and Candice Harrington, two research doctors, travel to Laos on a sabbatical, they meet a beautiful and exotic young woman, whom they nickname Faint Chance. They hire her to be their guide while in Laos and offer to sponsor her to come to America. Touched by their kindness and generosity, Faint Chance shares with them a secret-she has the leaves of a special flower that grows only on a cliff near her village in the northern mountains. She tells Spencer and Candice that, if they eat some of this plant before sex, they will create a very special baby. They take her pronouncement with a grain of salt, but they also take the plant and eat it, not wanting to hurt her feelings. Back home in America, Candice gives birth to Devan, who is born with extraordinary gifts. Now firm believers, Spencer and Candice send Spencer's brother, Cameron, to Laos to meet up with Faint Chance and get more of the plant so they research its properties and reproduce it in the lab.Cameron, a confirmed bachelor, is soon traipsing through the mountain jungles of Laos with the beautiful Faint Chance, thinking his main concern will be not to fall head over heels in love with her while he's there. Little does he know that word of his mission has reached the powerful Japanese Mafia, who see the plant as a way to become immensely wealthy. After all, who wouldn't pay a fortune to guarantee having a gifted child? Soon, Cameron and Faint Chance find themselves embroiled in a life-and-death struggle that will take all of their wit and cunning-and maybe even a little help from the spirits-if they are to have any chance of surviving.

Scientists have incomprehensible theories about parallel universes, ripples in time, relativity, and probability. Ordinary people think, while any of those theories is possible, strange events are just our own imagination messing with our heads, a reaction to drugs-legal or illegal-fate, or merely coincidence. Of Unknown Origin is a collection of stories based on actual incidents which defy explanation or, at the very least, logical explanations. They could be examples of any one of the above theories. Call them mysterious or a brush with the supernatural or just plain coincidence, these stories will give the reader something to think about or, at least, to be aware to of the next time they encounter something of unknown origin.