from Amazon.com, from B&N, in print from Amazon's Create Space
, and in other formats from Smashwords.| I've been fortunate to publish in multiple genres. To learn more about a book, click the link. | |||
| Mystery | Romance | Fiction | Anthology |
| Mahu | Gay Life.com | Invasion of the Blatnicks | Paws and Reflect |
| Mahu Surfer | Three Wrong Turns in the Desert | At The Diner | Hard Hats |
| Mahu Fire | Dancing with the Tide | The Outhouse Gang | Surfer Boys |
| Mahu Vice | Teach Me Tonight | Rhiannon | Skater Boys |
| Mahu Men: Mysterious and Erotic Stories | The Guardian Angel of South Beach | Tough Guy Erotica | |
| Mahu Blood | Soul Kiss | Mr. Surfer and Other Gay Erotica | |
| In Dog We Trust | Mi Amor | Pledge Class & Other College Boy Erotica | |
| The Kingdom of Dog | The Russian Boy | Three Lambs: Erotic Tales of a Gay Frat | |
| The Handsome Prince | |||
| Model Men | |||
| In Dog We Trust | |
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After a bad divorce and a brief prison term for computer hacking, 42-year-old Steve Levitan has returned to his home town of Stewart’s Crossing and taken a part-time job as an adjunct professor of English at his alma mater, Eastern College. While walking around his gated community, he becomes friendly with his next-door neighbor, Caroline Kelly, and her golden retriever, Rochester. |
| When Caroline is shot and killed while walking Rochester, Steve becomes the dog’s temporary guardian. Together, these two unlikely sleuths work to uncover the mystery behind Caroline’s death. This book is available in Kindle edition
from Amazon.com, from B&N, in print from Amazon's Create Space, and in other formats from Smashwords. |
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| The Kingdom of Dog | ||
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The Kingdom of Dog picks up a few months after the end of In Dog We Trust. Eastern College is about to launch a $500 million fund-raising campaign, and Steve has been hired to handle the campaign's public relations. It's a full-time job, though only for a short term. He gets permission from his new boss to bring Rochester to work every day. | |
There's a murder during the launch party for the campaign,
and quickly Rochester is nose to the ground in search of clues. I'm still playing with
character names (thing of songs when you see Jose Canusi and Juan Tanamera) and I'm still
having fun writing about a smart but wild golden retriever. Order it in Kindle version
here, or from B&N or Smashwords. Paperback edition coming soon! |
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| Mahu Blood | ||
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Mahu Blood begins on Hawai’i Statehood Day in August, about ten months after the action of Mahu Vice. Statehood is a controversial issue in Hawai’i, because many native Hawaiians perceive the United States as an occupying force that overthrew a sovereign monarchy in 1892. Kimo and his partner, Ray Donne, are on duty at a rally in downtown Honolulu organized by Kingdom of Hawai’i, one of many competing groups which seek reparations from the US for the loss of land and independence. An elderly woman is shot dead there, only a few feet from where Kimo’s mother and nephews are taking part in the demonstration, and Kimo and Ray take the case. |
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| At the same time, Kimo’s dealing with domestic difficulties, having just moved in with Mike Riccardi. Since both are alpha males, the transition to shared living space isn’t easy, especially because Mike’s parents live next door. As Kimo and Mike struggle to adapt to living together, they begin to forge their own ohana—a Hawaiian term which means family, as well as community. The theme of ohana resonates through both Kimo’s personal life and his investigation of the murder as Kimo and Ray follow clues through a labyrinth of competing groups, uncovering a trail of gambling, money laundering, and mental illness. The title refers both to the blood spilled in three murders, as well as the blood ties that link native Hawaiians to each other. People come together in many ways here—through native heritage and family ties as well as love and fellowship. Click here to order the e-book from MLR. |
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| Mahu Men | ||
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Mixing mystery and erotica, the stories in Mahu Men take readers into the world of openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka. Moving from pickups to murders, Kimo surfs the waves of his professional and personal lives in a sexy, sensual tropical paradise, where danger and desire lurk behind every palm tree. The stories fill the gaps between the Mahu novels, showing Kimo dating as well as solving cases and establishing a relationship with his new detective partner. Mixing the sensuality of erotica with the sharp-edged attitude of mysteries, Mahu Men is a chance for new readers to meet Kimo, and for fans to delve more deeply into his world. |
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| Click here to buy the paperback or here to buy the e-book. | ||
| Mahu Vice | ||
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About a year and a half has passed since the flames engulfed Waahila Ridge
State Park at the end of Mahu Fire. During that time, Kimo and Mike dated for about six months,
but the pressures on them increased to the point where their relationship ended. But when a fire
breaks out at a shopping center Kimo's father used to own, and a young boy is killed, they are
forced to work together-- and to acknowledge that the embers of their relationship are still hot. But a lot stands in the way of their getting together once more, including a mysterious man who knows how to exploit Kimo's sexual fantasies, Mike's identity issues, and a deadly little thing called murder. | |
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Click here to buy Mahu Vice at Amazon.com. Click here to read an excerpt from Mahu Vice. |
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| Mahu Fire | ||
| Winner of the Hawaii Five-O award for
best police procedural mystery A finalist for the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery |
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Six months have passed since Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapaka'a's return to Honolulu from his undercover
assignment on the North Shore. He's becoming more comfortable with his visibility as Honolulu's
only openly gay homicide detective, including mentoring a group of gay teens.
Kimo, his family and friends are attending a local charity event in support of gay marriage when a bomb disrupts the gala. Kimo is determined to find out who feels strongly enough against the issue to kill-- but it's possible that his high profile will stand in his way. | |
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Click here to buy Mahu Fire at Amazon.com. Click here to read an excerpt from Mahu Fire. |
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| Mahu Surfer | ||
| A finalist for the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery | ||
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Mahu Surfer, Neil Plakcy's second mystery novel, sends openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa'aka back to his surfing past. Rather than announce Kimo's public return to the HPD after the events of Mahu, his new boss asks the former competitive surfer to go undercover on Oahu's North Shore to find the killer of three young surfers. In his return to the North Shore, Kimo discovers trouble in paradise, from an epidemic rise in the use of crystal meth to increasing pressure on real estate prices. As well, he rekindles an uneasy friendship with an old friend whose sexual assault drove Kimo into the police academy, and further into the closet, six years earlier. |
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| Mahu Surfer showcases a handsome, sexy hero who struggles to overcome personal troubles and makes private sacrifices for the public good. Throw in an exotic tropical locale, plenty of aloha spirit and a dash of surf culture, as well as a slam-bang ending that puts Kimo and the people he cares about in danger, and you've got the makings of a page-turning mystery.
Click here to buy Mahu Surfer at Amazon.com. |
| Mahu | ||
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| Mahu has had a great life, beginning with a Haworth Press edition in 2005, an Alyson edition in 2009, and the newest edition, from MLR Books, out in 2011. | ||
| Kimo Kanapa'aka's world turns upside down in Mahu. At 32, the hero of
Māhū has reached the pinnacle of his profession, detective
on the Honolulu Police Department's homicide squad, based at the
Waikīkī station. But a difficult murder case, as well as
turmoil in his personal life, is about to threaten everything he
has worked for. A life-threatening drug bust in chapter 1 makes Kimo realize that it's time to stop lying to himself. He's drawn to the Rod and Reel Club, a gay bar in Waikīkī, where he has a couple of beers and begins the long process of accepting his attraction to other men. Leaving the club, though, he stumbles onto two men dropping a dead body in an alley, and he launches himself into a nightmare where his private life becomes public news. |
| Kimo's pursuit of this case takes him from the seamy underside of Chinatown to the elegance of million-dollar homes in Maunalani Heights, from gay bars where young men stride naked down runways to bloody crime scenes. | ||
| The Russian Boy | ||
| There are three Russian boys at the center of this book. Alexei Dubernin, the teenaged son of a Russian count,
longs to paint like his Impressionist idols. This desire brings him in contact with the Russian maestro Fyodor Luschenko in Nice, France,
in 1912, as the Russian aristocracy celebrates its last few years of prosperity on the Riviera. Luschenko paints an erotic portrait of Alexei, called Le Jeune Homme Russe, or The Russian Boy, which is received with scandal, then acclaim. Then, in the present day, the painting is stolen while being restored-- by another Russian boy, an art student in Paris named Dmitri Baranov. Dmitri's desperation to remain in Paris after his fellowship ends leads him into unsavory company, bringing him, and the painting, back to the Cote d'Azur, where someone is willing to stop at nothing-- including murder-- to possess this magnificent work of art. |
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| Hard on Dmitri's trail, and that of the
painting, is his boyfriend, American art student Taylor Griffin, and Rowan
McNair, a disgraced former professor of art history turned art detective.
Partners change, affairs are begun and ended, and dead bodies appear with
a disturbing regularity. In alternating narrations, Alexei, Dmitri, Taylor
and Rowan tell the story of the painting, its theft, and a series of love
affairs between older men and their younger protégés. By turns sexy, dangerous
and romantic, The Russian Boy is a story of love and art that spans
the ages. Buy The Russian Boy 
at Amazon.com. |
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| GayLife.com | ||
| Ah, romance! I love it and I hope you do, too. GayLife.com is my first venture into the
world of M/M romance. Learn more about the book at the GayLife.com page here on my website.
Click here to buy GayLife.com at Amazon.com. Also available in e-book from AllRomance E-books. |
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| Mi Amor | ||
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Miami Beach party planner Adam Beller is in the middle of an emergency situation when he runs into contractor Javier Marisco at the Publix on South Beach. There’s an electricity between them that only grows when Javier shows up, wearing an Armani tuxedo, at the party later that night. Can their love survive business complications, a surprise outing, a dead body and an FBI investigation? The answer is a story that could only take place on South Beach. |
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| Click here to order Mi Amor from Loose Id. | ||
| Three Wrong Turns in the Desert | ||
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If you like Kimo and Mike, you'll love Aidan and Liam. After his partner of ten years kicks him out, Aidan Greene flees Philadelphia for a job teaching English as a Second Language in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. He notices bodyguard Liam McCullough showering naked behind a bar and falls immediately in lust. (That's Liam on the cover. If you don't think he's sexy...) Aidan agrees to help Liam make a delivery, and that's where the fun starts. This is a fast, sexy adventure that I hope fans of the Mahu series will really enjoy. It came out from Loose Id in e-book format in late September 2009. |
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| Click here to order Three Wrong Turns in the Desert from Loose Id. Click here to read reviews. |
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| Dancing with the Tide | ||
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Aidan and Liam return in their second sexy, romantic adventure! With a handsome, horny client, a mysterious visitor, and deadly threats, Aidan and Liam will have their hands full. |
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| Teach Me Tonight | ||
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Aidan and Liam have been hired to protect a spoiled teenager attending an English-language institute on Tunisia's north coast. Liam worries that Aidan loves teaching too much to commit to their bodyguard business-- but when things go wrong and Liam’s sexy SEAL buddy Joey shows up to help out, career options become the least of their problems. |
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| The Guardian Angel of South Beach | |
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Despite regular work-outs, out-of-shape computer geek Leo can’t build the body he dreams of. Then he meets a strange old man who mixes up some magic pills, and Leo’s body blossoms. But even though he’s developing a killer body and having lots of great sex, he’s not happy, until he begins to change his personality, too. Can becoming The Guardian Angel of South Beach, protecting the weak, weird, and drunk from predators, make Leo happy and help him hook up with Dan, the man of his dreams?
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| Invasion of the Blatnicks | |
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Steve Berman loses his job just before a visit to his parents in Florida. En route, though, he’s offered a new one, with a developer building a shopping center at the edge of the Everglades. Comic complications ensue with the craziness of his cousins, the Blatnicks, and the equally zany construction crew. |
| The Outhouse Gang | |
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After my father passed away, I began thinking about what his life must have been like during the years when I was a kid, in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the 1960s and 1970s. He was an older dad, 38 when I was born, and he worked long hours as an aeronautical engineer, with a commute that took him away from home before I woke up and brought him back, tired, at dinner time. On the weekends, my mother ran errands and my father worked around the house or in his wood and metal shop in the basement. |
| On rare occasions during the summer he’d get out to the lake in the back yard to fish. He was active in our neighborhood association and always willing to help out a friend or neighbor. He wasn’t the kind of dad to go out and play with a kid in the back yard, and he had a temper-- but he was also my role model for how to grow up.
At the time, I was reading Iron John by Robert Bly and other books about the men’s movement, and I was searching for my own understanding of what it meant to be a man. I was also reading How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto, and I liked the way she constructed interconnected stories-- like pieces of a patchwork quilt-- that added up to something larger. But I didn’t really understand the stories I wanted to tell until I read about an event in Hallandale, Florida, the town next door to where I lived. Every year at Halloween a group of local men, all anonymous, decorated an outhouse with political slogans and delivered it to City Hall. A festival had grown up around the event. I transported that event to a little town called Stewart’s Crossing, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It’s very much like Yardley, the town where I grew up. And the men in the story are a lot like the men I saw around me-- working guys with a commitment to family and community. I took the first story in the book, “Chuck - 1963,” to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where I got some great advice. One savvy author pointed me toward Freud’s connection between excrement and money, and that helped me crystallize what Chuck’s problems were, and why he was motivated to start the gang. Click here to order this book from Untreed Reads. |
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| "At The Diner" | |
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Here's what reviewer Kathy K. has to say about this short story, in her review for the E-Book Addict website: "At the Diner" is only 6 pages, but in those few pages Neil Plakcy shows us two men, father and son, estranged and, without saying anything, trying to find their way back to a relationship. Told from the son’s—Jerry—point of view I was immediately connected with what he was feeling. Not only had he lost his mother but his father as well… a father whom he felt he could never satisfy. |
| My heart went to him totally and I mourned even as he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. But as the story progresses we see that, by small degrees, Phil is trying to mend the rift between them. Even seeing through Jerry’s eyes I still got a real feel for his father but, not being invested emotionally the way that Jerry was, I could understand that in his own mostly non-verbal way Phil was trying. Now this is a story that, even as short as it is, holds a solid wallop that I felt for quite some time. In fact I’ve re-read Neil’s short At the Diner a few times in the time I’ve had it… and I believe that I will continue to do so. It’s about a journey that most of us have either undertaken or at least understand and tied to family it has the potential to really affect the reader. Beautifully done Mr. Plakcy; it’s no wonder you’re one of my favorite authors. Click here to order this story from Untreed Reads. |
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| "Rhiannon" | |
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After I finished my MFA thesis, Invasion of the Blatnicks, one character
stayed with me: Junior, the construction superintendent. I just couldn't stop thinking about
him and what happened to him after the book ended. I spent a lot of time on construction sites, and Junior is based on many of the men I worked with-- wild, crazy guys who knew their way around concrete and drywall. He's also based on a guy I never knew, a man who worked at South Street Seaport before I got there. He was, by all accounts, just as crazy as Junior. One of the marketing girls had a party at her apartment, and this guy did vertical pushups against her wall, leaving high smudges where his stockinged feet rubbed against the paint. |
| Then he died, of an apparent drug overdose, and every day that marketing girl saw those smudges on her wall, too high for her to clean. I loved that image, and tried to bring some of that guy's character to Junior. In this story, he meets a woman who's not all she appears to be. Is the one to tame him? Read "Rhiannon" to find out. | |
| Buy it from Untreed Reads. | |
| Paws and Reflect | ||
Now Available as an ebook:
Paws and Reflect: A Special Bond Between Man and Dog Click here to buy Paws and Reflect at Amazon.com. Sharon Sakson and I have collaborated on this collection of stories about gay men around the US and the close connections they have with their dogs. Contributors include Edward Albee, Charles Busch, Lev Raphael, Alistair McCartney and David Mizejewski, host of Animal Planet's Backyard Habitat. |
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| Soul Kiss | ||
My new young adult novel, written under the name Scarlett Jacobs. When seventeen-year-old Melissa Torani falls for cute but nerdy newcomer Daniel Florez, she has no idea that meeting him, and sharing a deep soul kiss, will change her life forever. No longer an ordinary girl, she’s plunged into a world of gang-bangers, Cuban exiles, and FBI agents. And what’s going on with her brain? How come she’s suddenly so much smarter than she used to be? |
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| Just one kiss from Daniel plunges Melissa into a science fiction world-- have Daniel’s brain cells been leaking into her? How can that be possible? And yet she’s reading faster than she ever has before, scoring higher on school tests, and even helping her parents understand what’s wrong with her brother, the Big Mistake. Melissa’s wry, funny take on adolescence, falling love and getting out from under her parents will draw you in. Fans of Richelle Mead and Stephenie Meyer will fall in love with Melissa and Daniel as they depend on their brains and their deep emotional connection to survive-- and maybe even graduate from high school along the way. Click here 
to buy Soul Kiss at Amazon.com. |
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