Description

Winner - International Book Awards, Fiction: Gay & Lesbian

Simon Says marks the beginning of the Powell Legacy Series, a powerful literary journey tracing one man's fall, flight, and fragile steps toward healing.

Simon Powell has just broken free from the Unification Church-a decade lost to a rigid spiritual regime that promised salvation but fed his self-loathing. Back in his Southern hometown of Sibley, Arkansas, he's struggling to reconnect with a father who never accepted him, and a self he barely recognizes. When grief and guilt collide, Simon flees again-this time to Los Angeles.

In Hollywood, Simon leverages the discipline he honed in the Church to carve out a new life in the film industry, working first under a shady foreign distributor, then building a company of his own. But behind the surface of professional success lies a life spiraling into chaos. Each night ends at the Spotlight Lounge. Each love affair ends in heartbreak-or worse. And when he meets Thad, a troubled young man who mirrors Simon's addictions and fears, their bond threatens to consume them both.

As Simon's past and present crash into one another-through betrayal, ruinous deals, and dangerous entanglements with a criminal Spanish syndicate-he sinks into a cocaine-fueled haze of delusion and despair. Only when Thad, now in recovery, returns to pull Simon from the wreckage does hope return.

Set between small-town Arkansas and late-1980s Hollywood, Simon Says is an unflinching portrait of addiction, faith, and identity. A story of survival, redemption, and the first fragile steps toward love-not as salvation, but as truth.