Paradox Books

An Amazon Bestseller and Top New Release! (November 2023) Pete Bedauern began his life as a latchkey kid in a run-down trailer park with a single mom, living on stale hot dog buns and bleak prospects. Those were the cards Fate had dealt him, and Pete was on a life path that would lead to a meaningless existence full of failure and despair. Then Pete's estranged uncle burst on the scene and punched Fate in the mouth. Uncle Si is scarred inside and out; he's a hard drinker; painfully blunt; a little mysterious and maybe even scary, but takes an interest in his nephew that Pete's father never took. Most of Uncle Si's life is a secret, but through the part of it he shares, Pete undergoes a master course on life, love, and full-contact sports. Pete will also learn more about history than he ever imagined because, as it turns out, Uncle Si has a time machine. Paradox is one good-hearted-but-alienated boy's journey into manhood, and Escaping Fate is the opening leg of that trip. Before it's complete, Pete will learn the guarded secrets of history, take on a pan-continuum conspiracy, crack the code for success with women...and maybe even save the world. Well, one world, maybe...

An Amazon Bestseller and Top New Release! (December 2023) Pete was rescued from the dimension-hopping death squad that "erased" his biological family. Now he's in a makeshift cross-continuum witness protection program. Uncle Si gives him a new home in a peaceful neighborhood, a new life in the blissful postwar era, a new, affluent family that cares about him, and a new identity: Ike Jaeger, on an alternate path to a future that was impossible from Pete Bedauern's native time period and circumstances. But even at these idyllic time-space coordinates, there are challenges. Acquiring a girlfriend is a lot easier than keeping a girlfriend, for instance. A strong arm for throwing footballs is not as important as the leadership required to be a great quarterback. No matter how pleasant the environment, there will always be bullies. You have to lose some fights while learning to be a winner. And one little coding error in a warp interface's software can transport you to a future even worse than the leftist hellhole you escaped from. Paradox is much more than a time-traveling rags-to-riches adventure--it's an odyssey into manhood for a hard-luck boy who is reborn with the chance to re-write his own destiny. In Rebooting Fate , that boy becomes a young man blazing a trail toward ambitions he never dared entertain before.

An Amazon Bestseller! (February 2024) Ike Jaeger is off to college, earning a degree he may put to use colonizing Planet Valhalla, or designing a warp generator that will revolutionize time-space jumps. But he's not going to let classes, studying, or homework distract him from what's most important: football, hot rods, and girls. Handpicked by Coach Stauchel, Ike steps into the limelight as the starting quarterback for the Yosemite Pumas. With the weight of the team's aspirations on his shoulders, leading them to victory outweighs maintaining a low profile. Scholarly pursuits may fail to interfere with gridiron glory, but unforeseen misadventures just might: a wrong turn into a postapocalyptic future, an ill-fated obsession with fighting in World War Two, and encounters with an array of vivacious vixens. Will the clairvoyant African prophetess in 1960 Sierra Leone capture his heart? What about the glamorous Hollywood hopeful in 1942, or the vampish proto-woke professor teaching his political science class at Yosemite Polytechnic? Ike escaped his own dystopian destiny, but Fate is a vindictive mistress, hell-bent on dragging him back into her cruel clutches. Will she gain revenge with a blind-side cheap shot by a hulking defensive lineman, by using communist occupational forces to blow his antique fighter plane out of the sky, or by exposing Ike as a time-traveling fugitive from an alternate reality to cross-continuum assassins? Paradox is much more than a time-traveling rags-to-riches adventure. It's the epic adventure of a boy who perhaps was never supposed to be presented a chance to strive for greatness...but was anyway. In Defying Fate , that boy is now an adult--but the journey to manhood is far from over.

An Amazon Bestseller! (June 2024) Ike Jaeger blazes through his senior year surrounded with opportunities. With two Bowl championships under his belt, he's earned the interest of a professional football team. The US involvement in Vietnam is escalating, opening up commissions and even fighter pilot slots. His talent for engineering is earning him respect among the scientists on Planet Valhalla and elsewhere. There's no shortage of beautiful wife material, either. He can't quite get over the JFK assassination, though. The official narrative is ludicrous, and he won't accept it. Finding the truth behind the murder draws him down a rabbit hole that leads him through a whirlwind tour of history that exposes the assassination plot as just one part of an international conspiracy that might prove timeless. In Provoking Fate , the Paradox series becomes a roller coaster ride fraught with epiphany, danger, and personal tragedy, flinging Ike toward a secret war that transcends multiple realities and the dimensions in between.

An Amazon Bestseller! (June 2024) Ike Jaeger has finally arrived. After a coaching shakeup, he emerges atop the new player roster to see if he has what it takes to make his mark in professional football. It's going to take more than a strong arm and a keen mind to quarterback a penalty-plagued expansion team into the elite of the league--especially with all the detours from that unlikely ascension. Navigating the psychedelic Summer of Love is just one of the challenges he must face. Ex-girlfriends catch up to him in the strangest places, suspicious that he's not just moving through time in a linear fashion like everyone else. He undertakes a foolhardy attempt to single-handedly rescue best buddy Brock "Bull" Dozier from the Vietcong, as well as a skip-tracing mission into a parallel timestream to locate a high-value intelligence asset. All this while romancing Vivian, the mysterious and beautiful temporal spy who has been shadowing him ever since the JFK assassination. Oh yeah--let's not forget the no-holds-barred street brawl with a time traveling death squad in 1914 Sarajevo. While Ike is cracking the code to football greatness, he discovers an internecine cold war between pan-continuum international conspiracies that will determine whether mankind can ever be free, or forever ruled by an ancient bloodthirsty cabal. And he wants to be right on the front lines when that cold war flares hot.