Like petits fours at a party, these seven short pieces of fiction aim to satisfy the reader’s taste for something small and tasty. In Bithersby’s Bored Birthday, an enterprising private detective encounters something most unusual–and she’s all in black. Piotr’s Great Find discovers mysteries of the universe in the kitchen sink, and in The Strawberry People of Miracle City strangers come from nowhere to bring prosperity to a tiny farming town. Stalked is a creepy murder mystery in which the newspaper-reporter narrator becomes an unwilling character (hint: the butler didn’t do it). Sort out At Play, and you’ll find a veritable layer cake of interacting characters. The Piano Box lets you put a piano in a garage if you want, and then there’s Conspirators. They’re more than willing to help their fellow high-rise tenants.

A Reader's Buffet is being published in paper and electronic formats. The ISBN for paper is 978-1-879211-05-6. It will be available on Amazon quite soon, and in Kindle and other e-pub formats at Amazon and other online outlets shortly thereafter.

The piano plays torch songs, and the fluffy house cat has mischievous habits that transcend even the paranormal. And then there's that little wet dog... Atlanta gay couple Whit and Casey find the country home they dream of, but find out it's haunted. After a spat and some scary adventures they buy the place anyway, but can't decide whether to move in. The sexy ghosts turn out to be pre-incarnations of themselves, and a good time is had by all. But what of the mysterious psychic, the flirtatious waitress, the burly gas station owner and the motocycle-riding vamp?

Author Jay Gross started writing this novel in 1982 on an actual typewriter, finishing it a year or two later. It sat a while, underwent revisions, converted to word processing formats and moved from computer to newer computer. Now after 29 years it's in print and the author's thinking sequel. The Naked Ghost is available in trade paper, Kindle, and e-book. The ISBN for the paper edition is 978-1-879211-01-8, available from Amazon.com. The Kindle version, also available from Amazon, is ASIN: B00522VEME, and the e-pub edition is ISBN 978-1-879211-02-5, available at www.BN.com and other retailers. Retailer and library copies are available from www.CreateSpace.com.

In Company Time v1.0, a geeky novel if there ever was one, expert computer programmer John Farmer brings his pet project to work in order to show it off to Ozzy G. Osgood, his boss and - despite company policy – close personal friend. Predictive Analysis forecasts what people will type: commands, memos, email. Set loose on company systems, the program poses ever greater dangers, getting them both in hot water over real and imagined security breaches. John and Osgood find themselves slinking around the offices in the wee hours, dodging security guards and running the program for good or ill, trying to outwit the artificial intelligence. The powerful program keeps setting off their superiors' suspicions when they mysteriously know the content of memos before they're written. All of this, the program precisely predicts and worst-case-scenario-izes for them. Floundering in future-shocking troubles, they devise a desperate plan. Ah, but there are no secrets from Predictive Analysis.

The book is available now in paper or electronic formats.

Author Jay Gross started writing The Naked Ghost in 1982 on an actual typewriter, finishing it a year or two later. It sat a while, underwent revisions, converted to word processing formats and moved from computer to newer computer. Now after 29 years it's in print and the author's thinking sequel. The Naked Ghost is available in trade paper, Kindle, and e-book. The ISBN for the paper edition is 978-1-879211-01-8, available from Amazon.com. The Kindle version, also available from Amazon, is ASIN: B00522VEME, and the e-pub edition is ISBN 978-1-879211-02-5, available at www.BN.com and other retailers. Retailer and library paper copies are available from www.CreateSpace.com, and other electronic versions and markets are served through smashwords.com.

Company Time v1.0 is a more recent work, a few years in the writing, not all of it devoted to the novel. With IBM ranting about neural-model supercomputers and testing prototypes of a computer architecture that takes artificial intelligence to its umpteenth level, the time for Predictive Analysis is now. The book is fiction, and the beginnings of it hit the wordprocessor long before IBMers played Pong on their new brainiac. If you think about it, however, maybe dream a little, in the none-too-distant future it could indeed come to pass.