“Street-park it,” Jake said, pointing to a row of open meters along the front of Hoppy Time Liquor. “I’ll run in. Want anything?”
Drew pulled the van to the farthest meter, shoved the shifter into park. “Yeah, get me a slice of apple, too.” He dug into one of the cargo pockets of his pants, pulled out his wallet, and handed his debit card to his brother.
Jake lifted his backpack from between his feet, rested it in his lap. He took the card. “Thanks, bro. Be right out.”
“No rush.” Drew watched Jake hop out, shoulder that well-worn green backpack of his, and disappear in the van’s blind spot.
After stretching, he let his arm hang out the window. The Tudor house across the street—the Millers’ old home—grabbed his attention. The front porch overhang sagged and the wood siding needed a fresh coat of paint. Staring at the window of his old bedroom, Jake’s comment from a day earlier echoed in Drew’s head.
Think you’re holding on to some shit it’s time to let go of?
Drew rubbed his forehead.
He’d never really tried to “let go” of any of it. How would that even work? He realized then there must be a reason he was a regular of a liquor store right across from his childhood house, yet he always tried to ignore it. But what reason? It wasn’t like he never thought about that night. The night of the raid. About Joe and Rose. Far from it. They were always somewhere in his mind. How they’d twisted his perception of what good parents were.
Drew could still feel the cool breeze that drifted into his room that night, carrying with it the sounds of the North Park neighborhood after midnight. Clinking glass bottles. Someone digging recyclables out of trash cans along University Ave. The neighbors’ sprinklers. A red-eye flight on final descent into San Diego International Airport. The plane had made him think about Jake taking off two months earlier. He’d lost his someone. Someone to play catch with. Someone to listen to music with. Someone to give him girl advice, even if he was too chicken shit to follow through on it.
WAVES OF BURDEN
Genre: Crime Fiction
Release: June 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Drew Jones is trying to scrape a life together. A long-time resident of San Diego County’s foster care system, distrust, shock, and danger are all he’s ever known. Now married, with a contracting business he’s trying to get off the ground and a kid on the way, all he wants is enough for a down payment on a house and to know his family has the kind of security he could never have dreamed of.
But when his foster brother, Jake, a nomad van-lifer who never met a problem he couldn’t run from, returns to town, the distrust, shock, and danger return with him.
After witnessing a convenience store robbery gone wrong, Drew assumes his foster brother has done what he’s always done: run. But when cops begin poking around, followed by armed men threatening his family, Drew comes to understand what happened in that convenience store wasn’t really random, and that his brother hasn’t actually run.
Now, caught between his commitment to keep his growing family safe and his oldest bonds, Drew has to navigate a world he has no knowledge of, a world in which one false step could see his body washed up on one of San Diego’s picturesque beaches, or lost forever beneath the waves.
In this shocking, mysterious, and deeply-felt novel, Anthony and Derringer Award-winning author Curtis Ippolito probes what, exactly, makes a family, and how much weight they can put on someone before they begin to sink.
Meet the author
Curtis Ippolito is an Anthony Award- and Derringer Award-winning writer. He is the author of WAVES OF BURDEN, and Burying the Newspaper Man. Additionally, his short stories have appeared in numerous prominent publications, as well as being featured in several anthologies. He lives in San Diego and is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and serves as vice-president of the San Diego chapter of Sisters in Crime.