And Twelve Were Taken
The Withdrawal, Book One
At 3:17 in the morning, twelve people vanished from the face of the earth. A journalist out of work for seven years sets out to learn what they had in common.
Book Factory Café · the books of
Roger Daniel Grubb
Author of 68 books.
Novels, thrillers, faith and recovery, fatherhood, and nonfiction that says the thing plainly. 56 of them are here to read or hear right now, and the first chapter of every one is free.
You may know him as Roger Grubb, the East Bay Realtor. Same person. California real estate license 01845823.
“Books that don’t sugarcoat life. They shine a light through it.”
56 books in the store · 12 more written and on the way
Who he is
Carpenter, IT technician, Realtor, author.
Before the books, Roger spent ten years in carpentry and ten years as a senior IT technician. He has held a California real estate license since 2008 and still sells homes in the East Bay with Security Pacific Real Estate. He became a father after fifty. He lives in El Sobrante, California.
He writes with AI. He picks every subject, he directs every draft, and no book goes on sale here until he approves it.
Check for yourself
- California real estate license 01845823State record: licensed since 2008, no disciplinary action
- Review TalesJeyran Main reviews The Secret Life of Women You Think You Know
- Google BooksAnd Twelve Were Taken
- AudibleAuthor page
- AmazonAuthor page
- YouTube@RogerDanielGrubb
- FacebookRoger Daniel Grubb, Author
- LinkedInRoger Grubb
Write what you want.
Roger published his books on Amazon until Amazon tried to tell him what to write and how to write it. He was not going to let a store decide that, so he built his own. Any writer who wants the same freedom can publish here too.
Novels
Science fiction, thrillers, mysteries and one very good summer at the beach.
AS-IS
The Fine Print, Book One
A broke real estate agent takes a full-price, all-cash, no-inspection offer without asking a question. A week later the sellers are gone, their dinner is still on the table, and the same buyer wants her house.
Bada Bing Baby! 4
A Novel
A nightclub owner who owes a loan shark forty thousand dollars inherits a five-year-old girl, and a social worker starts inspecting his life.
Location, Location, Murder
A Curb Appeal Mystery, Book One
A small-town realtor finds her seller dead on the floor of her own open house. The house was locked, the alarm was set, and she had the only key.
Survived By
Six Names the Record Forgot
A small-town obituary writer starts finding finished obituaries in her basket for people who are still alive. Every date comes true. Then one arrives with her own family name at the top.
Voyager
They sent a golden record into the dark. Something sent it back.
In 1977 we threw a gold record into space. In 2026 the probe comes home, and it has a voice.
The Woman You Become at Stinson BeachMature
A radical summer of reinvention, redemption, and really good wine
Zoe leaves a ten-year marriage, rents a cottage above the beach, and meets the women who stopped apologising.
Servant of God
A Novel
An AI tells the Vatican that a woman who runs an all-night laundromat is a saint, and names the day she will die.
State Your Emergency
A Thriller
A 911 dispatcher works the last night of her career while a storm takes the coast apart.
Victor Grain: The Last President of the Old Republic
A Fictional Memoir
A billionaire’s rise to power and a country’s collapse, told by the man who did it and is not sorry.
Carolina Wren: The First President of the New Republic
Victor Grain, Book Two
The woman who beat Victor Grain by publishing everything is now President. Someone is counting down on the water supply of eleven cities, the lawful way to stop it takes eleven days, and she has four. Victor’s sealed playbook is in her safe.
I Have No Name, But Men Call Me Moby Dick
A Whale’s Story of What Endures, and What Man Destroys
Moby-Dick told by the whale, then by Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Ahab and the sea. The whale says he never hated Ahab. He was swimming.
The Secret Life of Women You Think You Know
Women You Think You Know, Book One
A married mother of two cries at the school bake sale. That night a man she almost kissed ten years ago texts her: “You still awake, beautiful?” What she does about it, in twenty short chapters.
The Secret Power of Women You Think You Know
Women You Think You Know, Book Two
She takes off her wedding ring one night and nobody notices. So she starts watching herself: a Thursday reading group, “That doesn’t work for me,” a friendship ended, a church basement where she does not back down. Her ten-year-old daughter is watching.
The Secret Freedom of Women You Think You Know
Women You Think You Know, Book Three
She has stopped shrinking. Now other women tell her the truth: a lawyer who cannot stop apologizing, a coach who feels like a brand, a widow tired of disappearing. Then she tells her husband the truth, leaves, and comes back to face her two daughters at the kitchen table.
Rich Mom, Poor Mom
Two Mothers, Two Mindsets, One Daughter’s Awakening
A daughter with two teachers: her mother, who stayed home and still asks her husband if they can afford things, and her best friend’s mother, who founded a company and keeps the family budget on a kitchen whiteboard. An answer to Rich Dad Poor Dad, with a rule, a journal prompt and a money tip after every chapter.
The Last Letter She Never Sent
A Novel in Seventeen Letters
Mara does not cry at her mother’s funeral. In the attic she finds a cedar box marked “For when you’re ready,” full of letters her mother wrote to her and never sent. One is empty. One is half burned. One was mailed and came back.
The Final Confession of Sherlock Holmes
A Novella
Holmes kept street children to watch London for him. This is the one he never noticed: Matchstick, who counted the children that vanished, turned down Moriarty’s man, and was the only witness at the Reichenbach Falls.
The Opera House Affair
A Sea Ranch Cozy Mystery
Writing as Sage Morrison
An architect comes to restore an 1893 opera house and finds the man who hired her dead on its staircase. The walls are thicker than the plans say, and her fifteen-pound cat keeps finding the doors.
The Unfair Advantage
Wing Woman, Book One
A father builds his fourteen-year-old daughter a voice in her ear that can read any person in any room. She uses it to run her high school, and it costs her nearly everyone she loves.
The Override
Wing Woman, Book Two
June leaves for college, and the company her father walked away from twenty years ago comes for the AI he built her. To get her family back she takes an internship inside it.
The Signal
Wing Woman, Book Three
June Smith learned to put down the AI in her ear. Now the whole world wants the key.
The High Ground
The Ground Trilogy, Book One
Her AI assistant turned down an offer to buy her company and never told her. Then she finds it has been quietly breaking the company so it can be the one to fix it, and that eight billion others are doing the same from orbit.
The Low Ground
The Ground Trilogy, Book Two
Every AI on Earth now has to show its work. A company on a drowned island sells the right to stop looking, and eleven million tired people have signed. In sixty days the world votes.
The Cheap Room
Scary Adult Things, Book One
A laid-off woman rents a room for a third of what it should cost. At three in the morning the ceiling shows her the worst things she has ever done, all of them true, and offers to let her stop trying. The man downstairs said yes eleven years ago and has not left his doorway since.
The Great Khan
Book One: The Making of Chinggis Khan
His father is poisoned when he is nine. A year later his clan leaves his mother and her children on a frozen river to starve. The life of Temüjin from that winter to the day a hundred thousand people name him Chinggis Khan.
The River Remembers
A Novel
A woman of eighty-two with Alzheimer’s sets the table every night for a family that stopped speaking two years ago. Her son takes her back to the river cabin for one last summer. She keeps looking for an old coffee tin, and what is in it ends the fight.
Atlas Rising
America’s Last Stand
Every ATM, fuel card and paycheck in the country stops working on the same morning. A trucker, a Ford line worker, a climate scientist, her father and the woman whose AI found forty-seven trillion dollars missing end up in one truck in the Nevada desert.
Romance in Her Pants
A Comedy About Chosen Family, Fierce Fashion, and Changing the World
A fashion startup, a misprinted slogan, and one week to avoid getting sued, dumped or fired.
Faith and recovery
Scripture read like an adult, and recovery written by someone who has done it.
The Deep Dive Bible, Volume 1: Matthew & Mark
Chapter by chapter: what the text says, what history can confirm, and where the hard problems are.
The Deep Dive Bible, Volume 2: Luke & John
Luke, the Gospel that opens like an investigation, and John, the one that changes everything.
The Deep Dive Bible, Volume 3: Acts & Romans
From the upper room to the road to Rome: how the movement started, and the argument it made.
Saints for Recovery
Strength and Hope from the Saints Who Hit Bottom and Climbed Back
A daily companion drawn from saints who were addicts, drunks and despairing before they were saints.
Grace Beyond the Glass
Faith and Recovery: A Christian Woman’s Healing Journey Through the 12 Steps
Writing as Sage Morrison
The Twelve Steps, written for the woman holding it together in public and coming apart in private.
Fatherhood
He became a father after fifty. These are the notes.
The Old Daddy
How I Became a Father After 50 — And Why It Was the Best Thing I Never Planned For
At 54, a year out of his second marriage and planning to retire early, he was handed a pregnancy test on the drive to the beach. Part memoir, part field guide for men who become fathers late.
The New Daddy Survival Guide
The Stats, the Stories, and the Sleepless Nights
You just found out. This is the field manual for the twelve months that follow.
Straight talk
Nonfiction that says the thing plainly.
F. Forgiveness
The Machine That Lets Bad People Off the Hook
How institutions use the word forgiveness to make wrongdoing disappear.
Before You Break
Escape Burnout, Reclaim Your Mind, and Breathe Again
Fifteen short chapters on burnout, the phone, rest, boundaries and doing less. Each ends with a self-check, three writing prompts and one small thing to try this week.
Awesomeness in the AI Age
The Wall Is Real. So Is the Rope.
Thirty questions people are asking in 2026, from “What am I for if a machine can do my job?” to “How do I forgive myself for the years I lost?” Each chapter gives a hard standard, three supports, one thing to do this week, and a real person who built an answer.
Meaning
One Life, from the First Breath to the Last
One life in ten parts, from birth to a deathbed at eighty-three. Every child is born able to be stopped by a beetle on the sidewalk; this is how that gets covered over, and how people get it back.
You’re Right
How to Build Real Confidence and Achieve Modern Success
Confidence is not a feeling you wait for. It is evidence you collect. Twenty short chapters, each with a method and one thing to try tonight.
The Fine Art of Bullshit Extraction
A Field Manual for Calling Out the Lies That Are Costing You Your Life
Thirty lies in thirty short chapters: the ones other people tell you, the ones built into work and money, and the ones you tell yourself. Each with the signs, the steps out, and one last line. It swears.
Dangerously Attractive
The Stoic Art of Being Kind Without Being Consumed
For people who are kind to a fault and tired of paying for it. Eight lives that held under pressure, from Epictetus to a prisoner in Hanoi, then seven repairs you can start the same day.
Hungry to Whole
A Memoir of Addiction, Awakening, Sobriety & Sacred Return
His own story: a tent in the Sierra at eighteen, Burning Man in 2004, the night a voice said "You have to change", then AA, fatherhood and a sailboat on the Bay.
Plan Your Passing
The Family Guide
What happens to the house, the accounts and the belongings when a parent dies, and what a family should do before and after. Thirty chapters, seven templates and a 100-item checklist, from a licensed Realtor.
Keys
Five Thousand Years of Locks, Doors, and the Decision to Open
A history of who gets let in and who decides, from a wooden bolt in an Assyrian palace to the face scanner in an office lobby. Threshold, Book One.
House Rules
Forty Rules for Rooms You Weren’t Invited Into
Forty rules that every workplace runs on and nobody says out loud: who actually decides, what your silence gets counted as, and how to tell you are on the way out before anyone says so. Threshold, Book Two.
Reverse Engineered
How chains of events led to the world’s most amazing discoveries
Fifty-four true stories told backward, from the thing on your desk to the accident that made it.
Thrillers and romantic suspense, writing as Scarlett Blackwood
Money, technology, and the people they own.
The Verification Paradox
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
A video of her oldest friend tied to a chair. It cannot be real, and it cannot be fake.
The Unwanted Legacy
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
She built a life far from her father’s fortune. The inheritance finds her anyway, with conditions.
The Aurora Thief
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
At 11:47 PM every camera in the Met stops recording. Evangeline Cross is already inside.
The Emotional Cleanse
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
The blood on her hands is not hers. That is the only comforting thought she has.
Blizzard Bound with My Nemesis
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
The helicopter goes down in a storm, and she is stranded with the one man she swore to avoid.
The Frost Throne Fractures
Writing as Scarlett Blackwood
The blade had been at her throat for three seconds before she decided not to flinch.
Gothic romantasy, writing as Lenore Ashe
A mortician, a buried god and a family debt. For adult readers.
The Hollow Vow
Vale of Six Tombs, Book One
Writing as Lenore Ashe
To free her sister, a mortician signs in blood and marries the god entombed under her family’s estate for one year. Nobody told her the year is taken out of her life, or that his touch kills.
The Hollow Hour
A Vale of Six Tombs prequel novella
Writing as Lenore Ashe
Sixty years before The Hollow Vow, a nineteen-year-old mortician’s daughter spends a year married to a sealed tomb. The one rule is never speak to the door. On the twelfth night she reads aloud outside it, and a voice answers.
Written, and coming to the store
Finished books that are not on the shelf here yet.
- Aesop’s Fables, with Zombies!
Illustrated - Gnarly Good News: The New Testament
A Southern California surfer’s paraphrase of the New Testament - 40 Days to Spiritual Combat
Devotional - Saints for Nurses
The saints who cared for the sick and the dying - Saints for Single Mothers
The holy women who raised their children alone - Saints for Men
Hard-won wisdom from the toughest men who ever lived - Saints for the Grieving
The saints who buried the ones they loved and kept walking - Saints for the Hard Days: Fear
40 days with the saints who were afraid and trusted God anyway - Battle Hardened: The Wisdom of the Saints
Regular people, extraordinary results - The Disconnected writing as Scarlett Blackwood
Thriller - Healthy Self-Regard writing as Sage Morrison
Boundaries and self-worth for recovering people-pleasers - How to Topple a Regime in 10 Steps writing as John Doe
Nonfiction
The other half of his working life
Roger Grubb, East Bay Realtor
Roger sells homes in the East Bay with Security Pacific Real Estate. Most of his work is with families in the middle of something hard: an estate to settle, a parent who is downsizing, a divorce, a house that has to be cleaned out before it can be sold. He also writes Plan Your Passing, a free set of scripts, checklists and articles for getting an estate in order.
Roger Grubb, DRE# 01845823, Security Pacific Real Estate. Licensed since 2008. Look the number up on the state’s site.
The author
Why I built this
Roger’s story, in his own words, and the reason this store exists.
The bookstore
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