What I'm Writing Next

A novel in development

She Would Be Next

A medical school removes a troubled physician from its residency program and quietly allows him to move on.

Then another institution does the same. And another.

Years later, when members of one of the committees responsible for his dismissal become targets, a female physician and professor who served on that committee begins looking back at decisions everyone believed were finished.

What she discovers forces her to confront an uncomfortable question:

When an institution protects itself by passing a problem along, who bears responsibility for what happens next?

A novel of psychological suspense about professional silence, institutional self-protection, and the danger of believing that removing a threat is the same thing as resolving it.

A novel in development

The Silence We Inherit

The Silence We Inherit is an upmarket book-club novel with a quiet thread of magical realism, set in a small Nebraska town where what people do not say can travel farther than what they leave behind.

At ninety-six, Sygne Thorson has spent a lifetime keeping other people’s confidences. Behind the bar, she heard about failing farms, affairs, family scandals, private guilt, and the compromises people made to survive. She became trusted because she never repeated what was entrusted to her. But in the final weeks of her life, morphine loosens the vault, and a story she tells her home-health nurse, Lisa, raises the possibility that Lisa and local auctioneer Charlie Chase may share the same father.

When Sygne dies and her husband Oliver follows five weeks later, their five adult children gather to settle nearly a century of belongings. Ordinary auction objects seem to carry an uncanny residue of courage, joy, and memory. But the most consequential inheritance cannot be sold: a boarding-school uniform, a family history interrupted by forced assimilation, and truths that were protected until no one remembered who had the right to know them.

As Charlie, Lisa, Elaine, and the Thorson family confront different versions of the past, The Silence We Inherit asks whether silence can be both kindness and harm—and what we owe one another once we finally know.

A public-domain edition

The Middle Five

Francis La Flesche · Foreword by Monica Messer

Originally published by Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five offers a rare and deeply personal account of Omaha boys navigating life at a nineteenth-century boarding school during a period of profound cultural change.

Monica discovered La Flesche's work while researching the Omaha Tribe for a novel and was moved by the wit, humanity, and historical value of his story. This edition is intended to help bring La Flesche's work to modern readers while honoring his voice and perspective.

As you read, begin with La Flesche's original preface. It is essential to understanding the spirit of the book and the world he was trying to preserve on the page.