Title: Island Buffs
Author: Alan A. Winter
Publisher: KBPublishing
Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Format: Kindle/Paperback
Island Bluffs is a
story of love, forgiveness, and understanding the dark side of the human
spirit. It explores the age-old question: are children accountable for the sins
of their parents and grandparents? Carly Mason is a successful New York City
forensic dentist. She and her widower husband, Gabe Berk, are trying to start a
family. Thinking they had exhausted the options by consulting with all of
Manhattan’s fertility experts, Carly and Gabe learn of an eccentric scientist
who runs an exclusive clinic. The doctor commits to helping the couple conceive
the baby they so desperately want, but only if they agree to what seems like an
outrageous stipulation; Carly must carry twins, one biological and one that she
is a surrogate for. Once the twins are born Carly has to surrender the
non-biological twin to the doctor at birth, no questions asked. Further, should
the old doctor die before Carly gives birth, she has to agree to give the baby
the name chosen by the doctor. As required for treatment, Carly and Gabe move
into a new house, which is within thirty minutes of the clinic. They soon
discover that their new home and town, Island Bluffs, are far from ordinary.
Carly and Gabe feel eyes spying on them at every turn. Gabe’s father, Yehuda,
hears strange noises that only he can hear. Megan, Gabe’s rebellious
sixteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, is attracted to the son of
a Neo-Nazi. The mysteries continue to deepen as a scavenger ship appears on
nearby waters searching for sunken treasure along with glimpses of a lone
swimmer lumbering through the waves of Barnegat Bay. Island Bluffs is a
present-day town bound to the past by horrible secrets and pacts made long ago.
Keeping secrets buried as some had hoped was no longer an option for the Berks.
Their new and some thought long-forgotten home made that impossible by putting
them squarely in the middle of it all. When the truths are revealed, the
shocking twists and turns will challenge the very notions of what is right and
wrong.
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At first blush, Alan
is quick to say that he never intended to be a writer. But when he thinks about
it, he’s been writing in one form or another, for his entire adult life. In
college, he wrote paper after paper for his history and literature courses.
Professionally, he edited a dental journal and wrote more than twenty
scientific papers. That still doesn’t explain how a dentist came to write
fiction!
It started in 1982
when Alan made small talk with a patient about a sci-fi idea he had. She
thought the idea was so terrific, she urged him to write a movie treatment
about it. Alan dismissed her offhand. What did he know about writing movies?
The patient persisted.
Each time she would visit his office, she would demand to see the finished
movie treatment. Seeing she was serious and relentless, Alan agreed to hand her
a treatment. But how? He had no clue where to start. Asking other patients for
guidance, Alan was introduced to a young screenwriter who agreed – for a fee –
to write the treatment. They worked together, produced a treatment, and shopped
it around to a number of studios. One studio took the idea (without permission
or payment) and turned Alan’s treatment into a movie.
Alan experienced two
revelations at the time:
1. Rather than waste energy being litigious, be
flattered that a studio felt Alan’s idea was worthy of turning it into a movie.
Knowing a stranger valued his creativity supported all of his future projects.
2.
Collaborating with the screenwriter gave Alan the validation he needed that
if and when he chose to write a book, it wouldn’t be foolhardy…not that it
really mattered what others thought!
3. Still, Alan had no
desire to write fiction. That changed in 1985. That was the year that Alan
began writing his first novel, “Someone Else’s Son,” which was eventually
published by MasterMedia, Ltd.
What prompted Alan to
write “Someone Else’s Son” is a story in itself. When Alan completed his
periodontal training at Columbia, he joined a prestigious Fifth Avenue
periodontal practice. Day after day, the well-to-do, prominent patients asked
Alan if he was old enough to be a dentist. (He looked that much younger than
the two senior partners). Trying to convince the patients that he was old
enough to be a dentist and, therefore, experienced enough to treat them, Alan
put his two sons’ pictures on the treatment room wall. When his third son was
born, he added that one, too. Every few months, he updated the photos.
But a curious thing
happened on a daily basis. The patients kept asking why Alan had pictures of
children on the wall. When he replied, “They’re not just any children; those
are my sons,” no one believed him. They claimed the boys looked too dissimilar
to be brothers. They joked that he must have taken the wrong one home from the
hospital. Though this was not the case (at least he didn’t think so), Alan
wondered what he would’ve done had he discovered, years later, that he and his
wife had brought the wrong child home from the
hospital. The result was “Someone Else’s Son.”
While maintaining his
periodontal practice, Alan has continued to write since he first took up pen to
paper, although now he is very appreciative that his mother forced him to take
typing in summer school after his sophomore year of high school. Boys just
didn’t do that back in the ’60s, but it has been an invaluable skill over the
years.
In 1999, “Snowflakes
in the Sahara” was published by iUniverse. “Savior’s Day,” also published by
iUniverse, was published in 2013 to critical acclaim. It was selected by Kirkus
Reviews as a Best Book of 2013.
“Island Bluffs,”
Alan’s newest novel, is published by KB Publishing to excellent reviews. He is
at work on his next novel, “The Legacy of Izaak Wolf,” about an adolescent with
Asperger’s Syndrome achieves the near impossible to save his family from a
surefire calamity.
Alan and Lori live in
his native New Jersey. They have five children and five grandchildren.
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Excerpt
His eyebrows shot up in surprise and then his eyes pierced mine. Then, unexpectedly, he cocked his head to the side and studied me for a moment before the one side of his mouth tilted upward in a half smirk. 
Regan discovered the joy of writing at the tender age of twelve. Her first two novels were teen fiction romance. She then got sidetracked into the world of computer programming and travelled extensively visiting twenty-seven countries.
