About Jim

I never decided what to be when I grew up. So I chose not to.

I’ve been an Air Force weather forecaster, a television meteorologist, a magician, a comic book writer, and an entrepreneur. I’ve lived across more states and countries than I can easily count, and the only constant has been forward motion.

I came to fiction the way I’ve come to everything else — sideways. Years of reading people professionally, studying how they deceive themselves and each other, gave me a particular lens for storytelling. I’m drawn to characters who operate in the space between what people say and what they actually mean. People who see the game, even when the game doesn’t want to be seen.

Second for the Dead is the first Benjamin Radcliffe novel. Radcliffe is a behavioral game theorist who sells his talent for reading people to the highest bidder — until an old mentor’s murder drags him into a forty-year-old secret someone is still killing to protect. It’s the kind of story I’ve been building toward without knowing it: part thriller, part puzzle, rooted in the idea that the most dangerous thing in any room is a person who’s paying attention.

More books are coming.

I write about the creative life, reinvention, and whatever else won’t leave me alone at Unfinished Man on Substack →