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The Cross Quarter Mysteries
Louis Flint Ceci
“An ambitious and deeply felt novel about community, memory, and the forces that shape our lives, set against the haunting beauty of California’s central coast.”
– Bill Konigsberg, award-winning author of The Porcupine of Truth and The Music of What Happens
$19.95
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Description
Secrets simmer in a small town, longing stirs beneath the surface, and something wild waits to break through.
Bradley Holt’s life is coming apart. His husband is gone, his Silicon Valley job is slipping, and the future he counted on no longer feels secure. Then, at Beltane, an ancient spring festival marking one of the cross-quarter days between seasons, he meets Daniel, a warm, enigmatic presence from a seaside monastery in San Lucca, Bradley’s old hometown.
Going back means facing everything he left behind: a homophobic brother, a sister in crisis, an old crush with secrets of his own, and a town where long-held grudges hide behind polite smiles. As the cross-quarter days approach, San Lucca grows stranger, as if some buried truth is pressing toward the surface. A meteor blazes overhead. Wildfires rage. A body washes ashore. Another person vanishes.
When the cross-quarter days arrive, everything tilts. Disasters stack up—an earthquake, a meteor blazing overhead, wildfires, a body washed ashore, and another person missing. Each feels aimed at Bradley’s heart, but is the driving force malevolent or mere chance?
Drawn to Daniel and back into the life he thought he had escaped, Bradley must confront the past and the forces gathering around him.
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About the Author
Louis Flint Ceci has been a high school English teacher, a college professor of journalism and mass communications, a commercial actor, and a freelance science journalist. He was a software engineer before retiring in 2015.
His poetry appears in The Colorado-North Review and Impossible Archetype. He won the Gold Medal in the Poetic Justice Poetry Slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney, Australia.
His short stories have appeared in Diseased Pariah News, Jonathan, and Trikone Magazine, and in the anthologies Queer and Catholic, Gay City Volume 4: At Second Glance, and Best Gay Erotica of the Year, #3. He has twice been a finalist in the Saints+Sinners short fiction contest. His four-novel series, The Croy Cycle, wrapped up with Leave Me Not Alone in 2022.
Ceci has published several scholarly articles on linguistics and poetics, and one on artificial intelligence, “Efficient Distribution of Back-Propagation Models on Parallel Architectures,” which he co-authored with Patrick Lynn and Phillip E. Gardner. It has not, to date, made its authors billionaires.
Ceci is an avid U.S. Masters swimmer, and he has competed in the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics World Championships in 2020 and 2024, and in the 2026 Gay Games in Valencia, Spain.
He lives in Nevada City, California.
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Praise
“An ambitious and deeply felt novel about community, memory, and the forces that shape our lives, set against the haunting beauty of California’s central coast. Louis Flint Ceci creates a vivid setting and a wide cast of characters that bring this world to life, inviting readers into a place that feels both timeless and immediate.”
“Between San Francisco’s Painted Ladies and the freeways of the Southland, there is Los Padres, thousands of square miles, but, according to one of the characters in this novel, “a village.” This is definitely California, with its earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, floods and mudslides; plus a monastery, a commune, and a store named Authentic Earth. The Pacific Coast Highway snakes through the landscape and the lives of the Holt family, their in-laws and neighbors, friendly or otherwise. When one of the Holt siblings says, “What goes so wrong that you can’t see a future without pain?” the reader is primed for infidelities, disappearances, puzzling pills, murders and a host of secrets, and Lou Ceci’s The Cross Quarter Mysteries delivers them. Even if, as the family’s gay son Brad says, “Some mysteries stay mysteries.”
“Louis Flint Ceci is your witty guide to the quirky denizens and ancient lore of the central California coast. Over those misty cliffs unfurls an epic tale of murder, played out by fascinating characters, each of whom could have a very good reason (or two) for killing one (or two) of the others. Great, creepy, cozy fun with a stunning backdrop. Now, let the shocks and surprises begin!