A body in a barrel just appeared on the shore of Lake Mead, and Lenny Battaglia is worried.
“...a gripping crime drama
...draws you in from the very first page...thoroughly engrossing.”
—Readers’ Favorite (5 stars)
Looking for more of Lenny & Grace?
Subscribe to my Substack for a bonus chapter ("Chapter 9¾") and news of a sequel.
ABOUT
the professional
Aaron Mead is the author of Body in a Barrel. His other work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and has been covered by NPR. He lives with his family in the Los Angeles area.
the Personal
My hippie parents met at Berkeley in the 1960s. To protest the Vietnam War, my Dad once lay down under the front wheel of a truck delivering napalm at Port Chicago Naval Base (he got maced). Before completing their degrees, they moved to Vancouver, Canada, where I was born and raised, so my Dad could avoid the draft.
After high school, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend Stanford University and explore my roots. Despite my spiritual thirst, a passion for philosophy, and a latent love of words, my pesky aptitude for math and science suckered me into studying engineering. I worked as a consulting engineer for twenty-four years, and I tried to escape for at least twenty-two.
My most heroic escape attempt was the fourteen years I spent in graduate school between 2001 and 2015, which started at Fuller Theological Seminary where I earned an MDiv (2005), and culminated in a PhD in philosophy from UCLA (2015). My hope was to become an academic, but the financial transition proved too challenging with two soon-to-be-teenage daughters.
One consolation of this slow-motion academic train wreck was my discovery of joy in writing: the dissertation ("On Loving Some People More Than Others") was my favorite part of the PhD. After graduating and returning to full-time engineering (*sigh*), I started work on a non-fiction book related to my dissertation. During my research for the book, a novel-sized story dropped in my lap and insisted on being written.
I finished that manuscript—Neither Slave nor Free, a biblical-historical novel that tells a dramatic backstory to the New Testament letter, Philemon—and plan to publish it serially on my Substack. My crime novella about a washed-up Las Vegas mobster, Body in a Barrel, was released in September 2025, and I'm working on some new stories. My fiction tends to focus on themes of forgiveness and reconciliation. The Los Angeles Times published an OpEd I wrote, and NPR subsequently covered it. My original non-fiction project also remains on the back-burner: a pop-philosophical theology book titled How to Love Your Neighbor.
I was fortunate to attend The Glen (2024), where I studied with novelist, Jamie Quatro, and the GoodLit Writers Retreat (2022), where I studied with novelist, Bret Lott. I've also studied fiction with the Gotham Writers Workshop.
Why do I write? On one level, I find that words, sentences, ideas, and stories simply offer themselves to me, and I take great pleasure in writing them down and tinkering with them. It feels like part of my nature to write; if I don’t do it, I begin to slide toward misery. But, on another level, I write because the words, sentences, ideas, and stories feel important to share with the world. For example, my novel, Neither Slave nor Free, raises questions about the relationship between Christianity and slavery, and about the limits of reconciliation. These questions seem especially important in the current American moment as we continue to wrestle with the legacy of slavery and strive for racial healing.
