Mary Deal

Mary Deal is an Amazon best-selling and award-winning author of suspense/thrillers, romance, a short story collection, writing reference, and self-help. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first feature screenplay, Sea Storm, was a Semi-Finalist in a Moondance International Film Festival competition. She is former newspaper columnist and magazine editor.

She has traveled a great deal and has a lifetime of diverse experiences, all of which remain as fodder for her fiction. A native of California’s Sacramento River Delta, where some of her stories are set, she has also lived in England, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and now resides in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is also an oil painter and photographer. Her art is used to create gorgeous personal and household products from her online galleries.​

Grief is Love - A Memoir of Surviving Bereavement

Memoir

After losing her long-term partner, through poetry and essay, the author shares the turmoil and often-times bewildering depths of her grief.

This memoir exposes the spectrum of emotions with which those suffering loss will become familiar or already experience. The author holds back nothing of her odyssey of despair. Her experiences and much she has learned to help herself provides other survivors a chance to see that they are not alone. Though everyone’s grief is different, still all grief is surprisingly similar in its basis. Hope is found in familiarity with another’s grief and no one should endure the bereavement process alone.

Following the author’s progression through relentless sorrow and finally redemption lets others know there is validation for their emotional suffering. An easing of the pain occurs as the memory of loss takes its place among all other memories of the life shared with departed loved ones. This memoir offers helpful advice for survivors who endure their grief till the puzzle of life meshes back together again in a new pattern.

River Bones - Sara Mason Mysteries, Book One

Mystery/Thriller

Sara Mason returns to live in her hometown area despite torturous memories of the drowning deaths of her alcoholic parents and younger sister. She purchases a verifiably haunted ramshackle Victorian, intends to make peace with her past, and then learns the elusive psychopath is stalking her. Skeletal remains are found near her property, and later, on the property. Sara’s dreams of rebuilding her life are hindered. More remains are found and she is ordered to live elsewhere during the investigations.

Suspects include Crazy Ike who digs in graveyards; a vagrant caught wringing a cat’s neck, a window peeper, and numerous others connected to the twenty-eight known dead. The psychopath strangles his victims and snaps the hyoid bones in their throats, then buries each body with a small animal.

After escaping several attempts on her life, Sara discovers clues from previous victim burials and is the only person who can identify the perpetrator. She volunteers as a decoy for the Sheriff’s Department, and ends up with the maniac’s powerful hands wrapped around her throat.

The Howling Cliffs - Sara Mason Mysteries, Book Two

Mystery/Thriller

Sara Mason’s dedication to solving missing person cold cases with love interest, Huxley Keane, includes accompanying him into the Vietnam jungle searching for his MIA brother’s remains. The search yields heartbreaking yet questionable fragments that await identification.

Sara has purchased a home on the island of Kauai for use as an R&R stopover by veterans who make frequent trips between the U.S. Mainland and Vietnam. She learns that a little girl went missing ten years earlier on Kauai. Strangely, dogs perform a death wail when taken high on the cliffs. Accompanied by a neighbor’s retired forensic dog, Sara wants to learn why they howl mournfully in the forest.

Someone wants the missing child cold case to stay cold. Attempts are made on Sara’s life and continue as she investigates the girl’s disappearance. Sara is near death after her car is forced to roll off the road. Later, she is pushed over a rocky cliff. Dazed and alone at night on a narrow ledge, she discovers a frightful scene. Then the forensic dog leads Sara and the police to a second disgusting site that explodes the case wide open and exposes an elusive murderer’s motives, revenge and victims.

Dead To Life - Sara Mason Mysteries, Book Three

Mystery/Thriller

A desperate search to match a bullet-scarred key found in the Vietnam jungle that could identify an MIA.

Sara Mason and love interest, Huxley Keane, follow a trail of clues in an attempt to match a bullet-scarred key found in the Vietnam jungle. An apartment key was given to Rocky, Huxley’s brother, by his fiancée. If sweet Emma Ellis kept a matching key all these years, it would prove Rocky is not an MIA but deceased.

Tracing Emma proves to be a perilous escapade. She doesn’t wish to be found. Emma’s corrupt history is revealed. She’s now streetwise, involved in drugs and human trafficking. She attempts to stop Sara and Huxley whose very lives are threatened. In separate incidences, both Sara and Huxley are left to die of their wounds. But Sara and Huxley are resilient and save themselves. When Emma is caught, horrifying truths about the woman send their sensibilities reeling.

Down to the Needle

Thriller

From the day her five-year-old was abducted, Abigail Fisher vowed never to stop looking until her daughter is safely returned. Despite multiple searches, twenty-three years have passed without a trace of Becky Ann. So when Abigail learns that death row inmate Megan Winnaker is the same age as her daughter, she wonders if the kidnapper—her ex-husband—had Becky’s Ann’s face surgically altered to prevent identification.

Megan Winnaker maintains her innocence, but she will be put to death immediately if she loses her final appeal. As Abigail launches her own investigation to determine if Megan is truly her daughter, someone wants nothing more than to stop her in her tracks. Suddenly, the house of the witness who landed Megan on death row is burned to the ground. Then Abigail’s home explodes in flame leaving her fighting for her life. An alcoholic witness skips town and another is found dead from a drug overdose. To add to her plight, Abi could lose the love of her life when his former love distracts him.

While Abi waits for DNA proof, she is desperate to free an innocent inmate who might just be the one who can fill her empty arms once again.

Off Center in the Attic

Fiction Short Story Anthology

Humor and nonsense, flights of fancy into other realms, fright, disgust and disappointment, silliness and wonderment, and the sadness of reality and heartache. It’s all here and more in stories that may leave you a little Off Center in the Attic, conjured through a mind that may be a little Off Center in the Attic.

Legacy of the Tropics

Fiction Adventure

A trilogy of stories that shatter the myths of stereotypical islands of paradise.

In Promises, during the late 1960s, the ketch, Mercy, sinks during a sea storm off Culebra near the Virgin Islands. Ciara Malloy assumes custody of her drowned fiancé’s son and learns a devastating secret about the boy that changes her life forever.

In Adrift, in the late 1990s, underwater photographer Lillian Avery gets caught in a rip current and swept out to sea off Kauai in Hawaii. In facing death, she finds a way to leave a message behind.

Years later, in Reunion, the two former neighbors from Puerto Rico reunite on Kauai. A hurricane wreaks island-wide havoc. Ciara is missing, presumed dead. Among the rubble, Lillian finds Ciara’s memoirs; a life history that threatens to expose tightly held secrets about the boy since the sinking of the Mercy.

Write It Right - Tips for Authors

Nonfiction - Writer's Reference

Learn how to polish your writing with a collection of extraordinary tips and numerous examples for making your prose leap off the page. Articles include information from preparing to write, the myriad details of how to write, edit and polish, all the way through to publishing and managing promotion and personal brand before and after the book is published. It’s incredible help for writers of both fiction and nonfiction.

While writing, you may have encountered myriad questions about imperfect areas that you stumble across in the composition. The thoroughly explained tips offered in Write it Right - Tips for Authors clarifies those worrisome issues instead of simply taking a chance they’ll be acceptable. This is a volume of writing aid that you will refer back to time and again.

Sea Cliff - A Love Story

Contemporary Romance

Rachael Connor is a young woman who has great looks, money, and a home of her own. She is reclusive, dealing with emotional scars of childhood abuse that left her fearful of men. Her father’s censorious teachings guided her into adulthood. It’s all she knows.

With a superior mind, having been through therapy, she counsels others to help them end their noxious situations. She creates perfect lives by writing novels. When she meets Matthew Knight, she is stumbling on how to better depict her story’s male character. She decides to pattern him with Matthew’s personality and mannerisms.

Matthew has other plans and knows what he wants. He pursues Rachael and falls in love. Rachael rebukes him, living by the rules established by her father that supposedly helps her maintain a respectable image. In understanding her misgivings of relationships by writing them as part of her book characters’ lives, she realizes she has loved Matthew all along, but has pushed him away. The realization causes Rachael to have a epiphany about how to overcome her father’s grip. The next time she falls in love, she will know how to deal with it. But will Matthew let her get away so easily?

Hypno-Scripts - Life-Changing Techniques Using Self-Hypnosis and Meditation

Nonfiction - Self-Help / Psychology

Do you wish you had the power to become all that you can be? Discover your potential through unleashing the power of your mind. All good intentioned programming works best when you reach a deeper state of mind. The secret is in accessing those states through easy life-changing techniques presented here, in thoroughly explained examples.

A thin window of consciousness differentiates two states of the mind – self-hypnosis and meditation – and this book will show their similarities, and define each condition and accessibility. If curious enough to at least peruse this book, then the ability to learn these techniques are already a part of your consciousness and soon to be recognized. Lucky you! Your subconscious is prompting you to investigate. It is saying that you are capable of deeper states of mind.

Many have tried to focus to learn either self-hypnosis or meditation and failed. Applied concentration and knowing what to expect once entranced may be what was missing. The instructions in this book are meant for those wishing to learn and use the techniques of self-hypnosis and/or meditation for self-improvement. Easy yet powerful scripts are provided to produce desired changes. You can change your life now!

The Ka

Paranormal Egyptian Suspense

Egyptian magic interpreted from hieroglyphs by an archaeological team activates ancient spells and rituals that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

California archaeology student Chione Ini-Herit has vivid dreams about the discovery of an opulent tomb. After learning that Chione’s dreams are playing out in Egypt, the founder of the California Institute of Archaeology accepts an offer to examine a mysterious site in Valley of the Queens. When they discover a tomb, the archaeologists’ lives are irrevocably changed in unthinkable ways.

Magical spells encoded into the hieroglyphs transport Chione and her former love interest—fellow archaeologist Aaron Ashby—back 3,500 years to ancient Egypt. Even stranger, Aaron and Chione begin to experience the lives of Tutankhamon and Tauret, a Priestess in Pharaoh’s Court. They learn that Tauret coded magical spells into the hieroglyphs to keep her and Pharaoh irrevocably joined in the afterlife.

When other team members speak the spells aloud, they, too, are affected in unfathomable ways by the Ka—the spirit of the entombed person. Chione and Aaron learn that Tauret has conjured powerful spells to provide Tutankhamon with a living heir, and Tauret has chosen them to complete her destiny.