Books published by Deux Voiliers Publishing

The Fencers is the third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical Cold War Escape stories. It is both an immigrant's narrative of seeking a better life and a brighter future and a sports memoir focusing on two Olympic fencers, one representing Canada, the other Romania. Most of all, it is the account of the author's friendship with Paul Szabó, a Romanian-Hungarian epée fencer, Szabó's love for a young woman he married and her tragic death. In Romania, the country Paul represented in the 1976 Olympics, Nicolae Ceaüescu was then President. Mismanagement, rampant corruption, mass surveillance, brutality and human rights abuses were rampant. Ceaüescu's Stalinist secret police, the Securitate, was particularly notorious for purges, oppression and restrictions of freedom of the almost two million Hungarians, like Szabó, who had lived in Romania for centuries. And it was in this context that Paul, only twenty-one at the time takes the difficult decision to stay in Canada, with the prospect of never seeing his parents and homeland again. He approaches his friend, Tatrallyay, who against all odds helps him defect to Canada and start a new life in his chosen country. The Fencers is an exciting true story of courage, friendship, love, happiness, success and tragedy.

Apollinaire, a doctor in his tropical African homeland, is working as a call centre agent in icy Toronto. Still seeing himself as a physician and hoping to obtain his licence to practise in Canada, he drives around at night in a borrowed taxicab, illegally treating the ill and injured, while leaving his loved ones behind. The people he visits include a violent countryman, an AIDS victim who uses a storm lantern for lighting, a former torturer who loves Scrabble, and a host of other characters striving to understand what life means in this new country which is now their own.

It is 1923. The location is Port-au-Prince, the scenic and sweltering capital of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Although the country won its independence more than a century earlier, for the last eight years it has languished under the yoke of the U.S. Occupation. Like most of his compatriots, Hellénus Cato is a staunch opponent of the American intervention. The foreign administrators are proving no better than the local opportunists, the Pretenders who say one thing and mean another. Cato is growing more miserable with each passing day, despite the company of his lovely young wife, Céphise. When a dashing Cuban arrives in town promising him fantastic riches, Cato’s destiny is about to change drastically—but not necessarily for the better. Is this the chance he has been waiting for, or is this foreigner yet another Pretender?

Dave, an undercover cop, is busted when his cloaking power fails in the middle of a biker gang meeting. Forced to hide out as the detachment commander in Kirk's Landing, a small Manitoba town, his only goal is to continue as a loner and lay low for a year. He learns it's hard to stay a loner in a small town, though, especially with everyone eager to meet him and enlist his help with their version of the local issues, including his new First Nations friends. Dave finds his detective instincts pulling him into an unsolved disappearance, corruption in the local high tech paper mill, and pollution of the local lakes and rivers. When Dave tries to use his invisibility to help him in his investigations he discovers there are darker forces at work-spirit forces that are now targeting him, changing him. It's now up to his friends to decide if he can be saved in time.