“Tell me again why we have to kill this guy and take his island,” said T.J., looking across the saltwater to a flat island a little over a hundred yards long and less than a hundred wide. Bushes and a few palms sheltered a small cabin and pier from the wind in all directions, except on the north side, where the shore was barren sand.
T.J. licked his lips and tasted the salt from the spray the small powerboat had kicked up on its trip down the Laguna Madre. He wanted to head back to Corpus Christi soon. He liked the taste of the salt, because it reminded him of the taste of a margarita, but that was all he liked about this day. He had no love for the Texas heat or for the oppressive humidity or for the roll of the boat in the slight chop or for the bright sunlight filtering through the haze. He hated these more than he hated killing, but he did what he had to to make a living.
So begins my novelette Click, the story of Frank Martinez and the two drugrunners that want the island where he is staying.
Frank Martinez, a policeman with the Corpus Christi Police Department, has unintentionally shot and killed an unarmed man when called to intercede in a domestic violence case. To recover from the guilt while the incident is under investigation by the CCPD, Frank’s fiancée arranges for him to stay on a secluded island owned by her father’s former law partner. While dozing one night on a lounge chair in the yard, he awakes to find two hitmen slipping onto the island and breaking into the cabin. Are they after him? Are they after the cabin’s owner? Most importantly, how is he going to reach his pistol in his luggage in the bedroom?
My action-adventure/crime novelette, Click, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For either version and to read a sample, go to my Amazon author’s page: Amazon.com/author/philslattery.
Reader Charles Stacey gave “Click” five stars, calls it “A great suspenseful read and then a twist”, and comments: “Author has a wonderful ability to develop the characters using few words. Great foreshadowing to build suspense. And then a really outstanding twist at the end that left me smiling.”
An anonymous Amazon customer gave it five stars, called it “strong storytelling”, and commented, “This novelette is a quick and very entertaining read. It opened with a grabber (“Tell me again whey we have to kill this guy…”) and kept pulling me in from there. Frank Martinez is a cop trying to recover from a shooting incident in solitude on an island off the Texas gulf coast. T.J. and Benny are the bad guys. Their hunt and chase on the small island kept me in suspense. It ends with a surprise twist. Slattery proves here he is a good storyteller.”
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I am seeking people to review my works and who post their reviews to markets in the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. I offer my Kindle e-books for free periodically according to Amazon policy. You can find my works on my 
My e-book collection of horror shorts A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror” is available on Amazon Kindle. For your copy, go to 
Logan Rickover, owner of a hardware store in a small town in Kentucky, has lucid dreams of life as an astronaut that intrude upon his life at any moment. Which of his lives is real? The quiet paradise of Danville or the terrifying jungle world of Stheno D?
Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover is a collection of my poetry written from the mid-80’s to mid-90s, a turbulent, fluid time in my life in many ways, but especially romantically. I have taken many of the poems written during those years and compiled them into a dark narrative capturing the emotional turmoil of a narrator who descends from romantic love for a woman into a lonely world of alcohol and night clubs, where his only love is the night that envelopes him psychologically, emotionally, and physically. It is about 110 print pages in length and lavishly illustrated with photos I found in the public domain (no, those are not photos of me or of my former paramours).
In this collection of short stories, I explore the dark, sometimes violent, sometimes twisted, sometimes touching side of love, the side kept not only from public view, but sometimes from our mates. Set in the modern era, these stories range from regretting losing a lover to forbidden interracial love in the hills of 1970’s Kentucky to a mother’s deathbed confession in present-day New Mexico to debating pursuing a hateful man’s wife to the callous manipulation of a lover in Texas.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 