Zebratta

Book 1: "Taking Chances"  Colson Grey is a down-on-his-luck horse wrangler whose secret gay relationship with a real estate agent, Adam Baker, came to an abrupt end with Baker’s sudden, unexplained death.  Baker’s mother finds a journal in her son’s belongings, and sends Grey the journal, which starts him on an odyssey to understand  life in the ‘Queer World’ which he has always shunned and avoided.  

The story opens when Grey musters his courage after receiving the journal of his dead lover, to go to a discreetly advertised gay bar, the Red Stallion,  in the county seat of  Greenlea, Arizona, and finds himself immediately embroiled in the life of the men who share his secret.  He meets one of the bar’s young patrons, helping the youth to escape from an abusive lover, and meets the deputy sheriff of the town, Ellery Cantrell, who is called in to help deal with the violence at the bar.  Drafted into the investigation, Colson finds himself the object of Ellery’s attention and learns that Cantrell is the nominal owner of the Red Stallion men’s club, and is openly gay in a town which has made room for him due to his service to them, and the liberality of its leaders.  The story centers on the revelation of Colson’s lost lover, and the surprise discovery of a new relationship with the flamboyant Cantrell after the tragic loss of his lover, his most cherished and deeply-buried secret.

Part police procedural, part explicit erotic novel, ‘Taking Chances’ quickly establishes a large cast of characters that make up the core of both communities – law enforcement, and the Red Stallion - set in the American west during the first inklings of the rise of AIDS in the early 1980’s.  It is the first book in an epic-length series of novels collectively entitled ‘Tales of Greenlea County.’