Malcolm Douglas runs out of a convenience store and ignores Officer Mike Hargreaves’ order to stop. He raises his hand with an object firmly in his grasp, and Hargreaves shoots him.
Douglas was holding a hot dog, not a gun.
Hargreaves, a White policeman in small town Louisiana, has fought against racism in his department but, after shooting Douglas, a Black teen, he feels forced to defend himself. When his cause is joined by a shadowy White nationalist organization and is manipulated by politicians, he gets caught up in a political firestorm.
The storm is stoked by a power-hungry Vice President who tries to manipulate a newly installed U.S. Chief Justice, with whom the Vice President previously had an affair.
Hargreaves teams up with a marginalized television reporter to uncover the secrets behind the shadowy organization and behind the Vice President, who has institutionalized his wife to keep a past scandal secret.
As the stakes rise, the nation is plunged into a constitutional crisis, pitting states’ rights against the federal government, and the Second Amendment against the U.S. Constitution, resulting in violent protests and the second American secessionist movement.
This political drama highlights contemporary conflicts to explore how small, individual decisions can build to a cumulative effect that reaches a disastrous point of no return.
Some reflections as of June 2025
nine months since the release of Splintered River
We are all familiar with that old cliché about life imitating art.
The recent political and legal controversy about the president’s deployment of the National Guard in California eerily echoes the constitutional crisis depicted in my novel, Splintered River.
In the novel, the ambiguities in the Constitution about command of the National Guard troops—whether and when they are under the command of the governor or the president—get exploited by a power hungry politician to sow chaos and public unrest that eventually lurches out of his, and everyone’s control.
The history of our country’s founding, with the distrust of a standing army, the prohibition of having the armed forces deployed in domestic situations, the delicate and inexact balance of the sovereignty of the individual states within a strong federal system, and the need for a strong federal government to preserve the integrity of our country, comes into play in our current political situation as it does in the novel.
And then there is the right to bear arms. This aspect of the Second Amendment gets highlighted as well in the novel, with unforeseen contradictions between that right and the integrity of federal sovereignty over the states, and the ambiguity over what, exactly, constitutes a “militia.”
In the novel, these issues are brought to life through the stories of the characters caught up in events that are larger than them, that they are trying to understand, control and, ultimately, survive: a Black teenager having prophetic visions shot by a white police officer who mistakes him for a threat; the police officer, who has taken a stand against racism in his department, now coping with his guilt, self-doubt and need to defend himself; a small-town mayor with white supremacist leanings; the first Black governor of his state, caught between powerful public and political figures more ambitious than himself; a Black preacher with political ambitions pushing the boundaries of the white political establishment in order to do the right thing for his followers; an enterprising reporter trying to reestablish her good name; a vice president seizing an opportunity to wrest power from a weak president; the vice president’s wife, medicated and institutionalized, in whom the memory of a long-buried scandal reawakens; the U.S. chief justice; a young woman with a complicated history with the vice president; and the grieving mother of the slain teenager, trying to survive with her sense of purpose and her dignity intact.
These events we are living through have real effects on the lives of real people, and Splintered River takes us into the hearts and minds of ordinary people trying to cope with and make sense of these forces before being crushed by them.
Parisian Phoenix Publishing 