Bekker’s Burial is a combination of domestic thriller, suspense, action mystery, and historical fiction. The 84,000 word manuscript is available online at Amazon, the author’s website, and many other booksellers.
A contemporary faith based Contemporary Fiction novel that starts in Walnut Creek, moves to Wilmington, and finishes in Amsterdam, the story is a search for happiness, identity, and meaning. Madison is a Dutch American who inherited a box of books and papers from her father. She follows the clues and discovers her family’s heritage in seventeenth century America. John is a Mexican American whose brother joins in searching for the MacGuffin . . . whatever it is.
Madison Bekker is a corporate lawyer and her husband, John Verano, is a former NBA player and now a college coach. They are on the verge of divorce when her parents are murdered, he is severely injured, and they both lose their jobs. They move from Northern California Bay Area to Suburban Delaware to get a fresh start in careers and marriage, but soon find themselves fighting for their lives.
A series of events including coercion, threats, violence, invasion of privacy, and kidnapping leads to a discovery that may be worth millions—if they find it first, if they’re not killed, and if their marriage survives. The FBI and the local police are looking for whoever is plotting and killing in Europe and America in order to inherit the massive Bekker fortune.
The story is comparable to We Don’t Talk About Carol (Kristen L. Berry, 2025) in terms of discovering family identity and secrets, a struggle with trust and happiness, as well as the process of making sense of one’s place in the world. It resembles Hidden in Plain Sight (Jeffrey Archer, 2020) in its simple linear writing style and a plot that includes personal struggles mixed with professional lives. And there’s a similarity with Camino Island (John Grisham, 2017) in terms of a search for lost historical documents, trying to get a fresh start in life, and showing character through their actions. There are similarities with Terri Blackstock and J. Sydney Jones.
After completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, I’ve written six nonfiction books, and contributed to several others. In 2019, I won two first-place writing awards for a memoir titled Safest Place in Iraq: a Gold from the Florida Writers Association’s Royal Palms Literary Awards in the Memoir category, and a First Place Peach Award from the North Georgia Christian Writers Conference in the Bible Studies and Nonfiction category. Two of my nonfiction books are being used as textbooks in several colleges and seminaries.
I participated in Writer’s Digest’s February Flash Fiction Challenge this year and self-published those stories. Bekker’s Burial is my first full-length fictional work.
Paul Linzey 