In his career as an architect, Peter has witnessed enough close calls, suspicious acts and outright skullduggery to lure him into writing mysteries. In his debut novel, Crimes of Design, architect Patrick MacKenna, Peter’s alter ego, discovers the body of the staunchest advocate for his controversial flood-protected dream project in the site’s storm water pumping station during a record flood in St. Louis. He is forced to become an amateur sleuth to save his career, his family and his very life.

A writer, architect and city planner reared in a family of journalists, Peter found his father’s 400 World War II letters, his humorous war stories, his mother’s writings and his family’s often hilarious doings too good a tale to keep to himself, so he launched a second career as a writer. After years of architectural work and proposal writing for his design firms, he went back to Washington University to study creative writing with such accomplished authors as Catherine Rankovic, Robert Earleywine and Rick Skwiot, resulting in the release in 2005 of his biographical memoir on the hilarious antics and serious achievements of his dad’s World War II adventure, Dad's War with the United States Marines, James A. Rock & Co., Seaboard Press (Florence, SC).