Revenge is sweet and, bonus, not fattening.
-Grace Wilder, The Swamp House Diaries
A murdered geneticist.
A missing diary.
A kidnapped son.
The police called Dr. Emma Wilder's sudden drowning a tragic accident. Her daughter, Cassie, knows it was murder. Walking away from her legal career, Cassie slips into the shadows of the elite Sweetwater Research Institute under an alias, hunting down the powerful biotech executives who silenced her mother.
Her brother, Peter, is blind to the nightmare. Once a Major League pitching phenom whose dreams died on a single historic pitch, Peter is just trying to stay afloat in a coastal Florida paradise haunted with ghosts ...until a multi-million-dollar luxury yacht washes ashore on his beachholding a dead executive and a gold yin-yang amulet belonging to his late mother.
When Peter uncovers his mother's hidden journal, he is forced onto a violent collision course with the Genesys Project. The pages don't just expose the corporate greed that cost Emma Wilder her life; they reveal a monstrous Al-driven genomics experiment where therapies trigger dormant ghost genes... volunteers go missing... and Cassie has become one of its victims.
When Peter's twelve-year-old son is taken as trade bait for the explosive journal, the former Big Leaguer faces a grave decision. Save many innocent lives entrapped in the rogue experiments—or save the one that matters most.
Set against a backdrop of corrupt Big Sugar and unregulated genetics research, The Swamp House Diaries is a razor-sharp Florida noir thriller, exploring the toxic intersection of betrayal, vengeance—and the lethal consequences of men playing God with the life code.
​Steven C. Vogel is an
award-winning freelance
writer and editor,
magazine contributor
and creative director,
who migrated to the
corporate world,
completing thousands
of writing assignments for some of the biggest names in the Fortune 500.
The Swamp House Diaries is his debut novel. He published a nonfiction memoir The Prostate Storm (Amazon) and a travelogue photobook Up Kilimanjaro, both raising funds for prostate cancer research.
A graduate from the University of Florida, Steve grew up on the beaches of South Florida, the backdrop for his recently completed YA novel, Raising Sloop John B—the first in a series of sports/mystery adventure stories about the Barlow brothers and friends. Steve and his wife, Lorraine, live with their two cats in Northeast Florida, just outside Jacksonville.
—Coming soon—
When a split-second decision
changes everything.
​​​ Teenage friends take refuge on a remote island off the Florida coast after a storm capsizes their sailboat, only to discover they aren't alone—the uncharted coral cay is a yacht chop-shop and smuggling haven for modern-day pirates.
But when Jake and Luke Barlows’ damaged sailboat, the Sloop John B, drifts into their cove, the teens plot their escape. Their plan: A daring night raid on the pirates' camp. Steal the parts for repairs and refloat the sailboat—before being discovered.
It doesn't go exactly as planned.​
Scheduled publishing date:
Early 2027
Raising Sloop John B launches a fast-paced YA sports mystery-adventure series, about the Barlow brothers and their teen friends getting in and out of mys-adventures.
Imagine the Hardy Boys, but with a serious upgrade: the series is more tech-savvy, the teens more athletically gifted, and together they must navigate more socially-relevant topics, not unlike Mike Lupica-style sports stories, such as Heat and Strike Zone.
These tightly-plotted novellas deliver brisk pacing, ideal for young readers, particularly boys, who are discovering reading and crave action-packed stories.