The Transfer

Memoir — on submission

A woman who spent her career at the NSA learning to recognize deception in other people's communications is methodically defrauded by a romance scammer — and then by a second scammer she hires to recover the first loss. She wires her life savings across an ocean, sells her house fully furnished, and flies to Kyiv with her Vizsla to meet a man who was never there.

The Transfer is the story of what happens after. Of a Kyiv hotel room with a green bathtub and a cracked ceiling. Of two Ukrainian women who stop to pet her dog and refuse to look away. Of bankruptcy court in Grand Junction in January. Of what it means to have spent a career studying exactly this kind of manipulation — and to have walked directly into it anyway.

It is a book about deception. And about the specific, clarifying form of humiliation that follows knowing exactly how something works and choosing, each time, to override what you know.

Jones Hole: On Rivers, Reverence, and the Harm in Loving Things

Memoir — on submission

The river says the same thing every morning at the ramp, before the clients arrive:

Trust me. Everything and everywhere is as it should be. Just let things unfold.

Jones Hole follows Kit Calder from her first float trip on the Green River in her early thirties — when she quit her job at Apple, went back, and learned to row a dory on a baloney boat — through her years as the first female guide on the river, through the building and losing of a dream house on a mountainside above Flaming Gorge Reservoir, to the afternoon she stood in Jones Hole Creek and released her father's ashes into the water he had loved his entire life.

Along the way: a former baseball pitcher who proposed marriage on three-punch lined paper in gorgeous cursive and sent a Polaroid of his Converse shoes. A stroke victim who referred to his guide as he all the way to the takeout while she rowed as hard as her shoulders could take. A best friend who raced sixteen-foot wooden longboard skis down mountains and is now losing her voice to Parkinson's. A swallow that weighed nothing in the palm of a hand. Blood on the snow. A grizzly outside a tent on an Alaskan sandbar. And a river that never lied — even when everything else did.

This is not a fishing book.

It is a book about what the river actually is — beautiful and brutal and entirely without moral — and what it costs to love something that clearly.