Hillsboro Publishing, LLC

Coming in Summer 2026

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Ripples in the Catfish Pond

 

Mitchell Lazarus keeps falling for the wrong women: One who lives too far away, one who's too married, and one with too many secrets. He records all of this in an unpublished memoir but then vanishes. Ten years later his daughter finds the manuscript and thinks it might hold a clue to what happened--if she can determine which parts are real and which parts her father fabricated to protect the one person who knows for sure. Teaming up with her favorite mystery writer Cooper Keye, Amy Lazarus begins a search for the man who followed his heart into a strange tale of catfishing, unbridled lust, and vigilante justice.

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This novel has more sex and murder than all the rest of my books combined, if you like that sort of thing.

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Bob Smith

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I wrote the first draft of this novel in two months in the summer of 1983. It was good but not great, so I rewrote it again and again over the next 40-some years but couldn't get it where I wanted it. The ending always felt too contrived. Finally I realized that the only way to make this novel work would be to throw out 75 percent of the original plot.

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So that's what I did. 

 

The title character is an unassuming young English major at a small college in the Midwest, and during class discussions he often finds himself daydreaming of mystery, adventure, and romance. When a mysterious girl named Mushroom invites him to the alternate world of Terrapocrypha, he cautiously accepts--and finds a place he never would have imagined in his daydreams. The greatest writers in the English language live forever in this world, but beyond that Bob can't decide which is more unbelievable: the talking raven named Arthur, the building described as almost infinitely high, or the fact that Herman Melville is obsessed with the music of the 1960s. Bob Smith is a freewheeling comic romp with fast-paced dialogue, unforgettable characters, and William Shakespeare in a lime green sport coat. Oh, and there are some bad guys.