Works

T.C. Eckert

Nine-Mile Road

Nine-Mile Road is a character-driven, coming-of-age story of 92,000 words, mixing a large amount of humor with a touch of drama and suspense. The third of seven exceptionally unique siblings living with
their hippie parents in the wilds of Montana, sixteen-year-old Ranger Parkes deals with the hatred of an older brother, struggles with young love, comes to realize the potential of his canon-like arm on the
baseball diamond, and rides the familial rollercoaster of his father’s get-rich-quick schemes—each a more spectacular failure than the last. Then his father starts to hit it big with a promising enterprise raising and selling mink, until that too meets with disaster and the family faces losing everything. But Ranger’s parents won’t go down without a fight and hatch a risky and illegal plan to save their land; one Ranger unwittingly exposes, risking the lives of the entire family.

Praying to Fence Posts

Will Henry Firethorn has one goal in life: unify quantum mechanics and general relativity to explain the universe in a single set of equations. He has the genius to do it, but the fates keep throwing obstacles in his path, sending his life careening in strange directions. His mother runs off with an encyclopedia salesman. His father—presented with a fence post harboring the image of Jesus—starts a rural church that collapses under his father’s dalliances with the women’s auxiliary. The strange girl next door fakes confinement in a wheelchair for years but then rises up claiming Will Henry healed her, leaping in and out of his life from then on as both lover and villain. Another woman, rejected after a one-night stand, tries multiple times to kill him. To escape her, he joins the Army and volunteers for Vietnam, only to end up patrolling the jungle. His survival through all this, and more, depends on Max, a female, shape-shifting alien who wants only to keep Will Henry—the “smartest person on the planet”—safe from the enemy, safe from the woman who still wants to kill him, and safe from the hands of a competing race of aliens. At a length of 108,000 words, Praying to Fence Posts is a humorous, character-driven story, mixing the everyday with a touch of fantasy and fun.

Wiregrass

Vivid dreams plague Ben Hatcher as he recovers from his battle wounds in the military hospital in Vietnam. The intense images don’t match the memories he has of the day his baby sister was kidnapped—eleven-year-old Ben helpless to stop the two men who took her. Or was it a man and a woman? And how did they know that on Thursdays, two-year-old Brittany would be in her playpen in the back of her father’s store being watched alone by her older brother? And how could she have been clutching her favorite stuffed animal in one hand as she was being carried away, her small arms reaching out to Ben, when she lost the toy days earlier?
When the war is over for Ben, he returns to the Low Country of South Carolina to try and make sense of what the dreams are telling him in comparison to the memories he carries. What he uncovers raises more questions than answers. But Ben will put the pieces together, find that his sister is still alive, and then face a dilemma. Does he tell her the truth and possibly destroy the life she knew, revealing her parents as criminals? And how far will her father, a rich and powerful man, go to stop Ben from revealing the truth? Wiregrass, a novel of 90,000 words, is a fast-moving, character-driven mystery that twists and turns and leads to an unexpected ending.

Skip Chase

Skip Chase, a novel of 97,000 words, is a fast-paced, character-driven story following the up and down adventures of thirty-eight-year-old Noah Crawford, a small-scale Montana rancher and reluctant bounty
hunter, process server, repo-man, and part-time private detective: all jobs Noah does to earn enough to keep the bank at bay and his land out of the hands of a group of developers who want to turn his property into a resort destination for the ultra-wealthy.
The humorous story moves from one bounty hunting, process serving, and surveillance job to the next and plays host to a variety of quirky characters both friend and foe. With his laid-back style, quick wit,
and need to avoid pain, Noah does his best to out-plan and outwit those with whom he must deal. His final challenge is hunting down the murderer Lucas Lingaard. Noah must come up with an insane plan to catch an insane man. It will come down to which one Noah will be, the hunter or the prey.

One-shoe highway

In 2017, World War II veteran Frank Ryan decides he has loose-ends to tie up before he dies.
So, when his seventy-year-old son Mikk, offers to accompany his ninety-five-year-old father on
an honor flight to see the WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., Frank seizes the opportunity.
But he won’t fly. Instead, Frank insists they drive and refuses to go unless the RV trip includes
Mikk’s best friend, Casey Many Horses, and Frank’s great-grandson, Jack, an autistic twelve-
year-old.
Frank’s route takes them west from their home state of Montana and then loops south and
finally east to D.C. Along the way they visit the sites Frank selects, a new one revealed each
day. But the real purpose of Frank’s trip emerges when Jack, after hiding for days in the bed
above the cab, takes a sudden interest in the lone shoes he sees on the side of the road. Frank
decides they will pick up a shoe a day and tell a story over the campfire each night of how the
shoe became lost and alone.
The stories evolve from tales about the shoes to pivotal vignettes from the three men’s
lives—turning points, moments they still wrestle with, and dark events that haunt them. For
Frank it’s the death of his brother when they were still boys and, later, the death of the only
woman he loved. Casey faces the recent and tragic death of his wife before they had a chance
to finally be together—their careers having separated them for months and years at a time.
Mikk and his sister found their mother’s body after she committed suicide when they were
children, and now he is experiencing a sudden onslaught of nightmares about his time in
Vietnam that have never happened before. But even as the men open to one another via the
abstraction of this storytelling mechanism, questions linger. What is it that still haunts Mikk?
And what is the significance of the box Frank packed into the RV, its contents still a mystery?
And will Jack finally come out of his shell, and will he, finally, have his own story to tell?
Threaded in and out of the 2017 narrative is the story of a similar road trip Casey and Mikk took
in 1974 when both were fresh from the Vietnam war, trying to pull their wounded lives back
together. The parallel narratives intertwine and provide deeper context for the ghosts that
haunt the men at the twilight of their lives and give deeper meaning to the ultimate revelations
Frank has in store at the end of his final trip across the country. Frank doesn’t plan to return
home. The unknown contents of the box are a few personal pictures and mementoes he will
take with him to a monastery on the shore of Lake Superior where he plans to spend his last
days. Before departing, he gives Mikk, Casey, and Jack each a gift only to be opened the next
and final day on the road. That box contains duplicates of the medals Mikk and Casey threw on
the lawn of the White House back in 1974 in protest to the war and how the veterans were
being treated. For Jack, he receives a medal of his own inscribed with words of support and hope. Those words trigger Jack, one shoe in hand, to finally tell a story of his own the next
night.

At a length of 84,000 words, One-shoe Highway is a character-driven literary novel.

Joseph Eckert

The Traveler

Coming June 9, 2026! Order options:

US – MacMillan

The Traveler follows a Madison, Wisconsin computer programmer named Scott Treder who, without warning, begins jumping forward through time. The first time he travels 24 hours into the future; at the same time the next morning he travels 48 hours forward; then 4 days; then 8 days, 16, 32… As his life and marriage unravels, Scott teams up with his genius son Lyle – just 10 years old when the transits begin – and attempts to find a means of stopping what’s happening. But despite Lyle’s multilayered cleverness and ingenuity, Scott continues traveling relentlessly forward, and the world grows increasingly stranger around him. As he struggles to survive, Scott becomes a religion, a hoax, a terrifying figure of prophecy, a vague figment of historical trivia, and both a witness to and a shaper of the future.

T.C. + Joseph Collaborations

Fulton Gentry Series

We’re collaborating on a murder mystery series. More to come soon!