Mark Pople
writing tutor, editor, ghost writer
"Deliciously candid and refreshingly irrepressible. Mark Pople is one of the most interesting new
voices on the scene. His story rolls off the page
with intriguing vitality."
- Roger Paulding, author of the Jazzed series and the Seney Chronicle series
A shortcut led to the longest six weeks of Brian Casey’s life.
A high school English teacher and self-proclaimed Alfred Hitchcock junkie from a broken home, Brian has spent his entire life in Rogers Park, an urban enclave of North Chicago. He longs for a Hitchcockian revenge on the father who deserted him as a child.
Turning into the Farwell-Pratt alley on a bitter February afternoon, little does Brian know that the decision to take this particular shortcut will set into motion a chain of life-altering events. The first link in the chain is a stuffed trash bag dropped from a fire escape. The final link is a choice: forgive his father or watch him die. The links between - kinked and tangled, as happens when chains are kept in closets with skeletons - include addiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald, plagiarism, blackmail, and murder.
Rogers Park is a novel about the long road to forgiveness and the harrowing journey one man must endure to reach this destination.