Trade Secrets

Parents know children can be incorrigible; sometimes a piece of writing is the same. What this author began as a simple short story defiantly grew to a full length novel.
TRADE SECRETS fictionally combines "chance" occurrences and people in the author's own life: living in a small town (not unlike Chandler's Wharf),witnessing massive flooding of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, serving guard duty at a military stockade,observing some people thriving where they live while others seem cruelly out of place.

Like a child, this novel demands: "Do events occur and people appear by chance coincidence or are these a series of planned miracles without flash and bang accompaniment ?"
Every skillful planner uses trade secrets to achieve goals. Isn't it possible the planner himself is someone else's trade secret ?