Perfect Timing explores the mind of a man on a riotous adventure through heaven, hell, and Myrtle Beach.

Ford Clayton is a music professor at a small conservatory in Asheville, North Carolina, facing a thinning hairline, a crumbling marriage, and the failure of his dreams of symphonic genius. Worn out from wrestling with the triple burden of marriage, music, and maturity, and in need of some resolution inhis life, he is startled to recognize his first live, a formerly gifted pianist, in a television documentary on the homeless. Accompanied by his recently paroled, born again, and hilariously insane cousin, Ford sets out on a mission to rescue Camille Malone from the ranks of the homeless, to confront his past, define his future, and to finally finish something he’s started.

Alternately comic and tragic, Perfect Timing is an off-beat coming of age tale, and a laugh-filled journey to the heart of a man who hasn’t seen his heart in years.

Hardcover, Peachtree Publishers, 1990
Softcover, Penguin, 1991
Literary Guild selection, 1990