Media Page and Info


About Gregory C. Randall, the Author
 
Shorter Bio:
Author: Sharon O’Mara Chronicles
Gregory C. Randall, Midwesterner by birth, Californian by choice, has lived in the same town as Sharon O’Mara for over twenty years. Old enough to be her father, he is enjoying the chance to share her life with our readers and fans. Greg also enjoys many of the same pursuits and activities Sharon does, but that only make sense, they have a lot in common. Greg taught Sharon to fish from a panga off the coast of Baja and gaffed her first dorado. Greg continues to work on the continuing chronicles of Sharon O’Mara and she is excited to be part of his family.

Short Bio - General:
Gregory C. Randall was born in the hot and muggy summer of 1949 in Traverse City, Michigan to a very young couple, and during the following years with brothers and sisters added, his journalism father and housewife mother moved and moved, always bettering the family's financial condition. Greg Randall studied architectural and industrial design at Kent State University and completed a B.S. degree in landscape architecture, with honors, at Michigan State University. In the space of a month he graduated, married his college sweetheart Bonnie (they are still married), packed up the car and trailer and moved to California, vowing to never to look back. From 1971 until the present (2010), he has worked as a professional urban and community planner and landscape architect. Since 1993 he has served as principal and president of Randall Planning & Design, Inc. in Walnut Creek, California.

They are owners of the Windsor Hill Publishing Company located in Walnut Creek, California. Greg is also a fiction writer whose scribbling's fall into the categories of mystery/detective and literary fiction. In the fall of 2010 his first book in the Sharon O'Mara Chronicles 4 Death, Land Swap 4 Death, then Containers 4 Death and the third in the series is Toulouse 4 Death series and are published by Windsor Hill Publishing. He has just published in October, 2011 his literary novel of a youngster's coming of age and awareness in the summer in 1956, Elk River.

Long Bio - Detailed:
Gregory C. Randall was born in the hot and muggy summer of 1949 in Traverse City, Michigan to a very young couple, and during the following years with brothers and sisters added, his journalism father and housewife mother moved and moved, always bettering the family's financial condition. In the early 1950's the family found Park Forest, Illinois, where Randall was raised. Dad was the quintessential Organization Man, commuting every day the thirty miles to Chicago's Loop by train. Always a drawer and sketcher, Greg Randall studied architectural and industrial design at Kent State University and completed a B.S. degree in landscape architecture, with honors, at Michigan State University. In the space of a month he graduated, married his college sweetheart, packed up the car and trailer and moved to California, vowing to never to look back. From 1971 until the present (2010), he has worked as a professional urban and community planner and landscape architect. His work in the Bay Area of California as well as in other regions of the United States involved him with many of the best planned communities in the region. Since 1993 he has served as principal and president of Randall Planning & Design, Inc. in Walnut Creek, California, a landscape and urban planning firm that specializes in large-scale master planned residential communities. He has designed over one hundred communities throughout California. He is still married to his sweetheart, now over forty years, and together they have started numerous businesses, written four books on the gardens of England and Scotland, sit on non-profit boards, and been involved in national business associations. They are owners of the Windsor Hill Publishing Company located in Walnut Creek, California. Mr. Randall has had a lifelong interest in the history of planned communities in the United States and Great Britain.

Greg is also a fiction writer whose scribbling's fall into the categories of mystery/detective and literary fiction. In the fall of 2010 his first book in the Sharon O'Mara Chronicles 4 Death, Land Swap 4 Death, then Containers 4 Death and the third in the series is Toulouse 4 Death series and are published by Windsor Hill Publishing. He has just published in October, 2011 his literary novel of a youngster's coming of age and awareness in the summer in 1956, Elk River, has been added to the catalog - watch for these releases.

Randall lives and works in Walnut Creek, California with his wife Bonnie. When not writing or designing cities, he devotes his time to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek (one of the western United States best succulent and sustainable gardens).

About the Books

The Sharon O’Mara Chronicles
What are these books and who is Sharon O’Mara?
The Sharon O’Mara Chronicles are a series of books (three done – fourth in production) that develop the ongoing story of Sharon as she returns to private life after the Army. She was a lieutenant in the Army Military Police and spent two tours in Iraq. These books show her as she finds a new career, first as an investigator for an insurance company and, after she was fired for bringing a man to justice, and then goes on her own to help others in need. She is an investigator and facilitator for those with a difficult problem to resolve. She, like her hero Travis McGee, not only helps her friends but their friends as well. She has a big heart, red hair, a lovable dog named Basil, and carries a Beretta. She is in her mid-thirties, athletic, fights her addiction to cigarettes (very difficult), yet still gets the bad guys (mostly bad girls) every time. She has the scars to prove it.

Her best friend and confident is Kevin Bryan, a detective with the Lafayette, California police department. They are very close, but not that close.

She has dueled with arrogant developers, oversexed environmentalists, evil Chinese tongs, and leftovers from the Third Reich, all were vanquished. Where she goes next, I am not telling.

Land Swap 4 Death
Sharon O’Mara, ex-MP and now detective, faces the fact she isn’t cutout to okay death benefits – not for murder. Can Sharon find the killer or will he find her first?

Short Description:
Sharon O’Mara, ex-MP, over thirty (who’s counting), tough as nails, smooth in all the right places, works for an insurance company sucking the life out of her soul, faces the fact she isn’t cutout to okay death benefits – not for murder. Rain, miserable Bay Area traffic, a dapper yet shady developer and a horny environmentalist all point the wrong way to why a man had to die in a BART parking lot. Can Sharon find the killer or will he find her first?

Containers 4 Death
Sharon O’Mara finds that guns and handbags are all you need to start a war. Can she find out what’s in those ocean-going steel containers before young Chinese girls die?

Short Description:
Hot Mexican days, deep blue seas, huge gamefish, and shipping containers full of death; why does Sharon O’Mara find ways to wreck her vacations? What’s in those millions of steel containers crossing the oceans and our highways? Thanks to the Chinese Tongs and the Mexican Cartels, it’s a mixture of knockoffs, sex, and death. Sharon O’Mara has to pull out all the stops and reload often to stop the meeting of Eastern and Western evil on San Francisco Bay.

Guns and handbags, all the things you need to start a war.

Long Description:
"Guns and handbags, all the things you need to start a war."
Hot Mexican days, deep blue seas, huge gamefish, and shipping containers full of death; why does Sharon O’Mara find ways to wreck her vacations?  What’s in those millions of steel containers crossing the oceans and our highways? Thanks to the Chinese Tongs and the Mexican Cartels, it’s a mixture of knockoffs, sex, and death. Will she rid the world of these evils or will they kill her first? Sharon O’Mara has to pull out all the stops, and reload often, to stop the meeting of Eastern and Western evil on San Francisco Bay.


Toulouse 4 Death
Sharon O’Mara is hired to return an incredible Toulouse Lautrec painting to its rightful owners after it was lost for over seventy years since the Nazis stole it in 1938. There neo-Nazis that do not that to happen.

Short Description:
Once again Sharon O’Mara has a job to do: Return an incredible Toulouse Lautrec painting to its rightful owners after it was stolen by the Nazis in 1938. Sharon quickly discovers there is more to her client’s secret treasure than just a few paintings. After seventy years an American GI and a Nazi SS soldier are again pitted against each other. Gold bullion and Impressionist paintings are nothing compared to the rumors of billions in hidden World War II treasure. Can Sharon solve the mystery or will she die before she can foil the evil goal of world domination by the ‘New Reich.’


Elk River
Short Author’s Bio for Elk River:
Greg was born on a hot and muggy day in the summer of 1949 in Traverse City, Michigan. He spent many summers of his youth and college days on a farm near where he was born. His father, a journalist and entrepreneur was raised in Elk Rapids. Greg, like his father, went to Michigan State University and has never forgotten his Michigan roots. Greg’s non-fiction work has focused on the Midwest region. Californian by choice, Mr. Randall makes his home in Walnut Creek, California with his wife, his constant companion and business partner.

Very Short Description:
Elk River weaves a tale of secrets in northern Michigan during the stormy summer of 1956. A dying uncle forces a boy to realize there’s more to life than baseball.

Short Description:
In this debut novel, Gregory C. Randall weaves a tale of secrets in northern Michigan during the hot and stormy summer of 1956. With the constant fear of nuclear war, an exploding Middle East, and memories of World War II still fresh with flowers on soldier’s graves; a young man realizes that he is growing up. In Howie Smith’s world of primal forests, orderly orchards, and Lake Michigan; he learns about life and begins to understand death. A crazy aunt, a dying uncle, and the unyielding pressure to bring in the demanding crop of cherries, forces Howie to realize there is more to life than baseball.
Randall unveils, during this brief summer, a family’s fears and triumphs. He explores a region of America left apart from the chaos of the world. It is a place of unwanted migrant pickers, backwoods people who must live off the land, and the grand lake that encloses them all. But Howie discovers it is also a realm of miracles.

Short Synopsis:
It is the summer of 1956 and Doug and Anne Smith with their boys, Howie and Bill, have returned to the family cherry orchard in Elk River, Michigan to spend the summer. They live in Chicago, 250 miles south, the rest of the year. Doug will return to Chicago almost every week to be at his job at the Tribune newspaper, returning when he can, he desperately needs the job. The orchard is still run by Doug’s parents Charlie and Liz Smith. The main character is Howie, fourteen years old, and handicapped since birth with a withered arm. This is the story of a family’s struggles with change, death and coming of age. It is also a story of intolerance, fear, and paranoia. It is a narrative of racial bigotry, sexual misunderstanding, and psychological problems. It is also a story of art, hope, and understanding in a part of the world that has been lost to America since the Depression. There are no werewolves, crystals, vampires, zombies, and superheros, only people struggling to survive and succeeding.

The story begins with Howie deep in the woods he loves watching the antics of a muskrat after he has fled the insults made by his drunk aunt Eve about his deformed arm. These woods of maple, pine and hemlock, separate the farm from Lake Michigan. Howie hikes back to the farm and his younger brother’s return with their mother from a visit with their aunt who is a drunk and who, Howie is sure, is crazy. Eve is a sad product of the tragic first marriage of Charlie. The boys are waiting on the porch when Charlie returns from town after meeting the canners to talk about the cherry crop. He gives a package of medications to Howie and asks him to take them out to Liz’s brother Frank Rex, a painter and loner who lives in a small studio that straddles the boundary between the orchard and the forest. Frank is dying of cancer.

The next day the boys go below the hill into the woods to collect bugs and tadpoles for their aquarium. They spy a huge buck deer that owns the whole forest. They reach the small pond set in a depression within a large clearing and begin to collect their bugs. A rifle shot startles them but not as much as the same majestic buck topples into the pond, almost on top of Howie, blood flowing from a mortal wound. The boys escape back to the farm and Charlie and one of the workers, Roger, go below to find out what happened. They return and have no answers other than the deer has been gutted and is gone. The weather closes in that night and a thunderstorm dampens the dry farm. This rain will allow the huge pile of winter tree trimmings to be burned that night. Doug has returned and the family gathers for the bonfire and as it burns Howie sees a vision of a giant wearing on his head the huge rack of antlers from the buck, they are illuminated by the flames and against the forest. Howie collapses.

During the next few days the boys go into town with their Dad and Charlie to go fishing at the power-plant that sits on Elk River. While there they witness a young man drown trying to catch a huge fish. Bill snags the man’s fishing gear and a huge muskellunge that is still hooked to it. A giant man, standing on the top of the dune, tells Howie to let the fish go, it has already killed one man, and that is enough. Howie and Bill release the fish, Bill never saw the giant.

The farm expects the Martinez family in a few weeks; they are migrant workers from Texas that will do the picking of the cherries. They will live in the picker’s quarters behind the barn. The building was a chicken coop during World War II. Charlie continues to have trouble with his daughter and Anne and Charlie go into town to deal with a drunken brawl she has gotten into, they decide that something must be done or she will hurt someone. Howie visits his Uncle at the studio and is surprised by a lovely woman, Jennie, who is modeling for a nude painting. Howie and his Uncle discuss art and drawing and Spain where Frank usually spends his winters. Again Doug returns to the farm from Chicago. At the traditional Elk River Fourth of July celebration Howie meets his cute red-haired cousin; she thinks Elvis Presley is the greatest. That evening at the fireworks Howie again sees the giant backlit by exploding fireworks and a burning grove of birch trees. Again he thinks he is seeing things.

Another storm hits the afternoon that Eve is brought to the farm for dinner by Doug. The storm turns into a tornado, Charlie is injured by lightening, the farmhouse is damaged by a fallen tree and Eve is killed. The funeral for Eve is held and her ex-husband and their two children attend, they are as strange as their mother. Later in the week the Martinez family arrives and they settle into their quarters and begin to prepare for the cherry picking. The next week brings the Cherry Festival to the region, and again, Howie has an encounter with the giant. Confused, Howie again takes a hike into the woods and finds the muskrat dead, caught in a trap. He continues up the beach and finds his Uncle painting another nude of Jennie, this time in the sand dunes. He is aroused by what he sees and for the first time masturbates while being slyly teased by Jennie. He walks into the lake and immerses himself in the water, a self-baptism into manhood. He meets the giant on the way back to the farm and learns his name is Gideon Walker. He knows nothing else about the man.

The picking begins and the work of hauling the lugs of cherries in an out the orchard starts. An accident happens to one of the workers and Charlie has to force the hospital to help the man and his broken arm. The hospital won’t accept migrant workers; Charlie forces them to care for the man. Again Doug makes the long return trip from Chicago. The boys continue with their art lessons with their Uncle who is getting sicker. Later that day there is a fire in the picker’s quarters and Bill runs away, feeling that no one wants him. Another storm hits and it is Gideon Walker who finds the boy with a broken leg at the base of a pine. Bill is taken to the hospital, where surgery repairs the leg and he has to wear a plaster cast. Howie takes his Uncle back to the studio after a family gathering. Howie puts him to bed and after exploring the studio he finds nude oil paintings of Gideon Walker among the canvases. Howie is confused. Howie challenges Walker in a confrontation at Walker’s cabin and finds out that Walker and Frank Rex are lovers and have been for almost twenty years. They spend the winters together in Spain at Frank’s studio near Barcelona. Howie’s uncle confirms what Gideon has said, Howie has great difficulty accepting what his uncle is. The picking is complete and the Martinez family moves on to pick tomatoes in Indiana.

Frank’s health continues to worsen and he is working hard to finish a painting of the Crucifixion of Christ before he dies, he wants to die with his life complete. Gideon is taking care of him and staying in the studio; the family knows who he is and his relationship with Frank. On a Sunday morning Walker comes to the farm and tells Liz that her brother has died during the night. The wake is held in the studio; Frank did not want to be embalmed. The funeral mass is held at the church and after the burial the family returns to the farm. Howie gives the eulogy.

Summer is over and the family prepares to return to Chicago. After the car is packed Doug drives down the long gravel drive and Howie watches as his grandparents disappear behind the curve of the road. Rows of dark cherry trees flash past as the car leaves the orchard and heads toward Chicago. He wonders if the woods can survive the onslaught of man.


America’s Original GI Town, Park Forest, Illinois
About the Release of the Second Edition of America’s Original GI Town, Park Forest, Illinois – 2010

In the early 1990's Randall began exploring the relationship of Park Forest and American community planning. He learned that the two are intricately woven into the psychic of Americans, post-World War II growth, and suburban expansion. During the early growth of his new planning and design firm he researched and wrote what has become the definitive story of the Village of Park Forest, Illinois; the seminal community in the suburban growth of baby-boom America. Originally published in 2000 by Johns Hopkins University Press, the new edition of his book, America's Original GI Town, Park Forest, Illinois, was released as a new edition in the fall of 2010 (Windsor Hill Publishing).

The initial research and work for this book was done between 1994 and 1998. Through the editorial efforts of George F. Thompson and the Center for American Places, the manuscript and artwork were published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000. The release was reasonably successful for an academic book of this type and was released as a paperback edition in 2005. Significant changes have happened to the village in the twelve years since the completion of the original manuscript and the author believed that a new edition would help to tell the story of those years. The second epilogue is his attempt at placing before the interested reader those changes and concerns that the village has as it ages into the most challenging period in its history. Cities never grow up, they are never finished: they only age, react, change, and hopefully survive, so that someday a new author will recognize the value and importance of this small village on the Midwest prairie just an hour south of Chicago and continue its story.

Very Short Description:
GI Town is the dramatic biography of the first post-World War II new town that changed community planning and design throughout the United States during the last sixty years.


Short Description:


Long Description: