About Jeff
Jeff quit a perfectly good job at the age of 47 to return to college for his MFA. His first novel, Other People’s Children (Simon and Schuster, 2021), emerged from that silly decision. His second novel, Like It Never Happened, was released by Crooked Lane Books in 2024.
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Jeff’s writing has also been published in The Sun, Booth, Harpur Palate, and Publishers Weekly. He was the winner of the Madison Review’s Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize.
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He is a passionate proponent of the Oxford comma, a mediocre men’s league hockey player, and a fair-weather fan of the Chicago Blackhawks. He was born and raised in St. Louis and now lives in Elmhurst, Illinois, with his wife and two children.
About The Novels
As soon as Gail and John Durbin bring home their adopted baby Maya, she becomes the glue that mends their fractured marriage.
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But the Durbin’s social worker, Paige, can’t find the teenage birth mother to sign the consent forms. By law, Carli has seventy-two hours to change her mind. Without her signature, the adoption will unravel.
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Carli is desperate to pursue her dreams, so giving her baby a life with the Durbins’ seems like the right choice—until her own mother throws down an ultimatum. Soon Carli realizes how few choices she has.
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As the hours tick by, Paige knows that the Durbins’ marriage won’t survive the loss of Maya, but everyone’s life is shattered when they—and baby Maya—disappear without a trace.
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Filled with heartrending turns, Other People’s Children is a “heartbreakingly dark, suspenseful exploration of the boundaries two women push to have a child” (Cara Wall, bestselling author of The Dearly Beloved) that you’ll find impossible to put down.
Thirty years ago, Tommy, Malcolm, Henry, and Kevin were best friends graduating high school, brothers almost, until the night they did something terrible. The decision to keep hidden what they did in that parking lot shattered their friendship and warped their lives. But when Kevin, struggling with a heroin addiction, drives his motorcycle into the side of a truck, the other three find themselves together again—at Kevin’s funeral.
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When they meet Kevin’s wife Naomi at the wake, they can tell that she knows everything, and when they learn that she’s a reporter, they’re terrified. When she sends them to visit one of their victims from that night—at the nursing home where he’s been suffering for decades—they do as they’re told, even though they know it won’t stop there.
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After watching her husband pay a steep price for keeping the friends’ secret, Naomi has crafted a plan to make Tommy, Malcolm, and Henry pay their fair share. When the three men begin to fight back, they’re forced to decide just how far they’ll go this time.