Books
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my works
Available Books
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Earth and Stars
There is tremendous variety in form, theme, and tone in the poems in this volume. Many of the poems may strike the
reader as corroboration of Thoreau’s view of wildness and wilderness because Peake’s love of wild things forms his
poetic center, but this book also includes intense love poems as well as celebrations of birds and trees and lightning bugs. Though Peake celebrates nature, he does not view it with sentimentality. He faces without tears a world in which one creature preys upon another for survival, and he looks without fear to the “revelry of the grave” when his form becomes food for worms and feeds the laurel bushes growing over him.
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Rare Bird Alert
On a flight to a birding tour in Australia, Margaret Smith develops a friendship with Hammond (“Porky”) Frank. On the first part of the tour, they become close friends, although Margaret (“Maggie”) becomes suspicious of Porky. On the northern part of the trip, they are joined by a new assistant leader, Jameson Kanger, who begins a scheme with Porky. Left to herself, Maggie spends time with other tour members, especially Patricia Shaper, a young Olympic Women’s Trap Skeet champion. Kanger drugs Shaper and rapes her. Patsy confides in Maggie and they avoid Kanger and Porky the rest of the tour, although Porky renews his relationship with Maggie when she returns to Galveston, Texas.
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Birds and Other Beast
There is tremendous variety in form, theme, and tone in the poems in this volume. Many of the poems may strike the
reader as corroboration of Thoreau’s view of wildness and wilderness because Peake’s love of wild things forms his
poetic center, but this book also includes intense love poems as well as celebrations of birds and trees and lightning bugs. Though Peake celebrates nature, he does not view it with sentimentality. He faces without tears a world in which one creature preys upon another for survival, and he looks without fear to the “revelry of the grave” when his form becomes food for worms and feeds the laurel bushes growing over him.
Available Now
Love and Death on Safari
Jimmy Russo is a successful businessman and an obsessive lister of the world’s birds—until his murder while on a safari in Sierra Leone, Africa. Few of his fellow travelers mourn his death, as his constant negativity, foul mouth, and abuse of his wife, Jane, have long since alienated them.
One of them, Jackson Burnbridge, has known the couple since meeting them on a birding tour in Argentina while recovering from a rough divorce after twenty years of marriage. What’s more, he and Jane Russo have a past—an affair in Argentina that Jane wants to renew in Africa.
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Jakyll's Joust
John Jaykyll, professor at a small college in southern Appalachia, is having a mid-life crisis resulting from his conflict with the new college president, who hates his mountain origins, and dislikes Jaykyll because he is defending mountain literature and culture and the young professor in charge of this program who is accused by a crazy French professor of having an affair with his wife.
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Beauty's No Biscuit
A sequel to Moons Black Gold, this novel deals with the struggle of George Landsetter to keep his five hundred acres of woodland from Dave Blackmun, a lawless miner and criminal kingpin. Helped by Mike Barton and the FBI, George brings down Blackmun while trying to court Heidi Leaves, head of a nonprofit promoting better mining laws.
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Moon's Black Gold
Everett “Moon” Lunamin returns from battles in Vietnam determined to gain wealth and social status mining coal during the coal boom of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Moon struggles with his cousin George Landsetter, a reclamation officer, and surface mining competitors whose greed exceeds their ethics.