Baker Artist Portfolios

Security guard at the BMA by day; writer by night. My debut novel A Postcard from Cottonwood was inspired by true events in 1995, when I was held up at gunpoint on Calvert and 25 1/2 street. 

The premise is:

Neil Enright is an alcoholic polyglot with a photographic memory who has spent the better part of his life seducing women from one end of the globe to the other. During a respite from his travels, Neil returns to his hometown of Baltimore where he is held up at gunpoint and brutally kills a man in self-defense. Neil hops the first bus to anywhere and ends up in Cottonwood, Arizona where he meets Ana, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. With his newfound soul mate, he finds himself in a predicament, which far exceeds the mayhem he was determined to escape. Herein begins Neil’s existential crisis, a desperate search for meaning. Does Ana know more about Neil than he knows about himself, which would lead him to self-realization if she can find the key to unlock his psyche? Or, has Neil uncovered an elaborate hoax, exposing not only Ana as a fraud, but deception so far reaching that it extends from the microcosm of humanity into the macrocosm of what is writ in the fabric of the cosmos. A Postcard from Cottonwood is a psychological thriller and a philosophical dissertation intertwined that will leave one questioning the nature of reality itself.