In his late fifties, Jake Davis comes home to Southern Maryland for the funeral of Kenny Barnes, the catcher who caught every pitch of his boyhood. Among the handshakes and folding tables of the repast, Jake is pulled back to the summer of 1978: a nervous twelve-year-old lefty, a crushing loss, and a handful of patient adults who gave him belief before he had earned any confidence. A dual-timeline novel about failure, friendship, and the people who see who you are becoming before you do. 

Distant Fires is a literary ensemble novel set on a Walnut Creek cul-de-sac over a single school year. Davis MacNally, a widowed detective novelist, is so afraid of losing his teenage daughter, Sam, that he is smothering her. When a near-collision on the highway where his wife died brings Eva, a divorced publishing editor, into his life, Davis, Sam, and the neighbors and family around them must learn how to love again without holding on too tight. 

In the late summer of 1967, the Best Barbershop is the heart of a Northeast Washington, D.C. neighborhood, and its owner, a devoted S.C.L.C. man, expects both of his sons to carry his civil rights legacy forward. But when a charismatic old friend comes home preaching Black Power, the brothers land on opposite sides of a widening divide, and the months leading to April 1968 will test everything the family believes about loyalty, inheritance, and finding one’s own place in the sun.