Howard Tucker

ABOUT HOWARD TUCKER

Howard Tucker writes with the instincts of a session musician — shaping stories through rhythm, tone, and pacing the way he once shaped music.

His background in cognitive therapy gives his characters their emotional depth: the quiet tensions and human edges that make them feel real, even when the world around them has stopped behaving like the one we know.

As an artist, he works in colour, texture, and atmosphere — and those same instincts bleed straight into his fiction, building worlds that feel vivid, moody, and just slightly off-centre.

The result is a body of work driven by sound, psychology, and imagery — and by a lifelong fascination with the places where reality thins and imagination takes over.

THE BOOKS

The Quantum Shore

Speculative fiction / family drama with a quantum-physics heart.

A father leaves for one night. A boat comes back without his family. What follows isn’t a missing-persons story — it’s a slow unravelling of what grief does to the laws of physics themselves. Set in the hush of 1950s coastal Maine, The Quantum Shore blends small-town Americana with a creeping, genre-bending mystery about the moments reality refuses to stay still.

The Quantum Shore II

Speculative fiction / psychological mystery.

One river. Two shores. Only one of him can stay. The sequel pulls the threads of the first book tighter, following the people left behind as the boundary between what happened and what almost happened starts to dissolve. Quieter, darker, and more intimate than Book One — this is where the emotional cost of the first book’s mystery comes due.

The Six States

Speculative YA / ensemble coming-of-age thriller.

Six teenagers, six different states, six different kinds of damage — thrown together by a prize ticket to the same pageant weekend, and bound by something none of them can explain. Echoes of a decades-old tragedy ripple through their lives before they even understand they’re connected. Fast, voice-driven, and built around a found-family ensemble, this one reads like several character studies colliding into a single unstoppable plot.

Where the River Takes You

Small-town mystery with a supernatural undertow.

The town forgot. The river didn’t. A quieter, more haunting entry — a story about memory, water, and the things a close-knit community agrees not to talk about. Sets the stage (literally — same town, same river) for Hatchet Lodge.

Hatchet Lodge

Cold War mystery-thriller, with humour.

A retirement lodge. Five new residents. Five pieces of a secret nobody was supposed to survive long enough to keep. Set in Cutlass Cove in the autumn of 1959, Hatchet Lodge is a slow-burn spy mystery disguised as a cosy — think Hearts in Atlantis crossed with a very dangerous game of bingo. Gentle humour, real stakes, and a narrator who isn’t quite who the reader thinks he is.

All five novels share the same fictional town of Cutlass Cove, Maine — a small harbour community where the ordinary and the uncanny have learned, uneasily, to live side by side.