Three Strikes and You're In
Overview

Three Up, Three Down is the story of bestselling novelist, Albert Gordon. Al has written two very successful thrillers detailing the exploits of gentleman thief, Richard Deming. Both novels have a very James-Bond feel to them, and Al is working on his third book in the series, the titular Three Up, Three Down, when the action of the story begins.

However, as the book opens, Al is interrupted by the unexpected news of the death of his father, Jack. On his way home from work one night in mid-Spring, Al's father suffers a heart attack and crashes his car into a tree. Al and his wife, Phoebe, return to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they grew up, and Al engages in the unenviable task of giving his father's eulogy.

As Al helps his mother clean out his father's office, though, he discovers four letters written to his father in the weeks leading up to his death. These letters are threatening, and the last of them promises revenge from the author. There's just one problem: all of the letters are written in Jack's handwriting. They are signed, "D.P.," as though someone else had written them, but they were clearly composed by Jack.

When Al and Phoebe return home to Lawrence, Kansas, Al finds the mystery of these strange letters to be consuming, interfering with his ability to work on Three Up, Three Down. He begins to suspect that his father was engaged in some sort of automatic writing, wherein a vengeful ghost was using Jack's hand to write threatening letters to Jack. If that's the case, then it seems to Al that his father did not die by accident. He was murdered by a ghost.

Worse, the mysterious "D.P." begins writing to Al. This time, though, the ghost does not use automatic writing to compose letters. Instead, he begins speaking through the text of Al's unfinished novel. Instead of writing about Richard Deming's latest adventure, Al's fingers type messages from the other side. And the ghost who murdered Al's father isn't finished. It isn't satisfied with just killing Jack; it wants to kill his son too.

When he comes to this realization, Al's world begins to unravel. No one will believe him, of course -- not his wife, not his family, and certainly not his agent. He must find a way to exorcise the vengeful "D.P." himself. To do so, he'll have to dig into his past and come to terms with the reason for his own birth. Even then, it may not be enough. Guilt is a powerful emotion, and it has the ability to bring otherworldly forces down on those who give it too much control over their lives

Like John's first novel, Little Girl Lost, Three Up, Three Down is a literary novel with supernatural overtones. It explores the relationship of children to their parents, particularly after a parent dies, and deals with personal feelings of guilt over being alive when others are dead. At some point in life, we all ask, "Why was I born?" Albert Gordon learns the answer to this question and struggles to come to terms with it.