Posts on Criminal Justice and Prison Reform

It’s official: THE JACKLIGHTER: Murder, Betrayal, and Justice in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains launches October 27, 2026, the Tuesday before Halloween. Plus I have four bookstore signings and one library event on the calendar so far 🎃 I’ve known about the launch date for a while, but thought I would make a joint announcement of the pub ...

I already gushed about this in my last post, but I wanted to give Around Ambler its own proper spotlight, because a feature like this doesn’t come along every day 🎉 If you missed it: Around Ambler, my local news site covering Ambler, Blue Bell, Fort Washington, Maple Glen, and Lower Gwynedd, ran a feature on ...

Something Shifted This Week For years, I’ve been researching, reporting, and writing The Jacklighter, a narrative true crime book about the 1976 murder of Montrose attorney Martin Dillon and the decades-long quest for justice that followed. (Set for publication this fall.) For 30 years, I’ve kept boxes of newspaper clippings in my basement. Decades ago, I ...

🗣️ Listen to this short post and full excerpt, narrated by the author (23 min): New excerpts from THE JACKLIGHTER mark 50 years since a Pennsylvania attorney was murdered in the woods. In a perfect world, The Jacklighter would have been published on June 2, 2026, exactly 50 years to the day that Martin Dillon walked into ...

One of the highlights of this year’s Pennwriters Conference in Lancaster, PA, was recording a special podcast episode for the BookSpeak Network. I was thrilled to sit down with podcaster Tory Gates—author, broadcaster, and host of The Brown Posey Press Show—for an all-Pennwriters edition of the podcast. Tory is a veteran of nearly four decades ...

The 39th Annual Pennwriters Conference — Lancaster, PA | May 15–17, 2026 There’s something about a roomful of writers that recharges me every time. The 39th Annual Pennwriters Conference, themed The Writer’s Path, brought a swarm of authors, poets, and storytellers to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for three days of workshops, craft conversations, and a Lord of the ...

Some mysteries are buried deep, but they never truly disappear. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in the cold, hard details of a case that’s haunted me since I first started researching it three decades ago. Bringing The Jacklighter to life has been an exercise in reconstruction—sifting through old boxes of evidence, documents, and now ...

I’m still pinching myself. When I launched the Kickstarter campaign for The Jacklighter: Murder, Betrayal, and Justice in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, I hoped for the best and prepared for the worst. But my Backer Besties came through and fully funded (and then some!) my first Kickstarter campaign 😭😭😭 To every single backer who pledged, shared the campaign, ...