Guardian of Deceit

William H. Coles is a literary fiction writer, and winner of multiple awards including finalists in His publications include five novels, collections of short fiction, and three books on the writing of fiction stories. The William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition, The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and others. To learn the art of writing fiction he studied in more than 100 courses and workshops with more than seventy-five authors, editors, and teachers and created storyinliteraryfiction.com, a website with resources for fiction writers, illustrators, and avid fiction readers. He was an ophthalmic surgeon specializing in ocular injury repair and reconstruction, a professor and chairman at SUNY Buffalo School of Medicine, a Regent for The American College of Surgeons, and president of the Association of University Professors in Ophthalmology. He is an active jazz piano player, former President of the Gibbes Art Museum in Charleston, SC, and has lectured internationally on mechanistic biologic ophthalmic research, ophthalmic surgery, jazz, and valuing antique Georgian and federal furniture and 18th and 19th-century paintings at Emory University. He won a Mayor's award for contributions to historic preservation in Charleston, SC., and the Conrad Berens Award for best film on a medical subject. He lives and writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Darwin Hastings is seventeen and his dying aunt sends him from Pittsburgh to New York to a new guardian, a famous wealthy football player. He is excited and afraid; he wants to recapture the love he knew with his parents before they died and become a doctor like his father. But in his new home of celebrities, crooks, untrustworthiness, and excessively wealthy deviants, lust and want thwart his search for selfless caring love, and in his quest to become a doctor, he discovers the altruism of health care and scientific discovery riddled with profit motivation and deficient moral standards. A finalist in the 2012 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.