Vernon Fix Book 1: The Michael Butler Saga

Michael Butler's father was falsely accused of harness horse race fixing and it destroyed his career. When Michael Butler arrived in Vernon, New York two days after graduating from high school to begin his career in harness horse racing he was immediately ensnared in an unforeseen series of events that unwittingly drew him into a web of illicitness and innocence lost. He was seduced by an older women, discovered a race fixing scheme, fell under the spell of a crooked gambler, and agreed to risk his life as part of an undercover operation to rid harness racing of a sport-destroying race fixing operation.
The man guilty of destroying Butler's father's career mysteriously appears at the very race track where Michael Butler has taken a job as a groom, bringing with him the same race fixing scheme that ruined his father. This time the fixer is backed by a notorious mob. Michael risks his life to expose the operation and help save the integrity of the sport. Driven by the desire to avenge his father, Butler must confront the dangers and price of "doing the right thing" at the expense of those he cares about.
Vernon Fix is Book one of a four book quartet. Vernon Fix's shocking ending will haunt Michael Butler for the rest of his career.

Auteur

PETER P. SELLERS

Brevity here is key. But, brevity is often a subjective thing.

I want my biography to read like I was telling a story to a stranger on a long train ride. To begin such a self-serving exercise there has to have been a reason why my listener showed an interest in such an aggrandizing exercise. In my fantasy about the character motivations and biographical references I might mention to my stranger-on-the-train, the listener has read one of my books and enjoyed it; and he, or she, wants to know a little more about the characters, the why, the how, and, some stuff about me. That's exactly what I'd want to know if I ever got the chance to share an overnight commuter with Walter Farley, Len Deighton, Phillip Kerr, Ian Rankin, Raymond Chandler, or John D. MacDonald...you get my point.

Any author's bio ought to enlighten a reader to his or her family life, schooling, living environment, education, relationships, and how they affected the choice of genres, settings, characters, themes, and point of view in their writing. Every author who endures includes or alludes to some of their roots in every story they tell. If you came from poverty, were born to wealth, had teachers for parents, or was a working member of a police department, those impressions and memories can't help but surface. That's the case with me. Why hide it? Embrace it. It's all about moving a reader with your own "bio" and your own characters.

I had four siblings. We grew up in rural Western New York. We rode a school bus to a central school. I was unruly and disruptive, regularly punished for being overzealous. I was routinely disciplined with "detention" in the school library. The librarian was an elderly lady (probably early forty's) who was put in charge of our small group of repeat misfits. As we would gather to serve our "sentences" she would point to stacks of un-filed books and with a slight wave gesture start the process of us returning books to the shelves in compliance with the Dewey Decimal System. I liked holding hardback books.

Mrs. Cummings liked me. She made me an offer one day during my freshman year of high school: "start reading books while your here, write me book reports, and I'll let you out early." I vividly remember the first book she suggested...Walter Farley's Black Stallion. Nothing before or after (except girls) had the effect on me that that book did. I became obsessed with the dreamy perception of horses...