Welcome to the Webpage of Author Derek Wachter

          SONS OF THE PROMISED LAND (Historical Western Fiction Novel)
(Release Plan for February/March 2025: Currently started writing June 19th, 2024.)
The year 1882 has been a struggle for the poor folks living in the small mining town of Montrose, Colorado. Promised a better life to live west of the Mississippi river, the town is more used for shipping supplies for the mining community through the Denver and Rio Grande Railroads, serving the mineral-rich San Juan Mountain ranges in the south. Life is difficult, as the small number of citizens continue to struggle living in the area.

John Ashberger is one of those men who dreamed of a better life for his family. Moving out west, he looks to escape the war-torn confederate southern states and for better opportunity of frontier life to start over. John purchases newly acquired government land just after it was taken from the Native American Ute tribes by violent force. Planting Red Delicious fruit trees across eighty acres of open farmland, John began to plant the seeds of a better and prosperous life for himself, as he slowly grows his empire in the agriculture sector of the west.

Meanwhile, Ute tribal leader Antero Black Hawk, whose family and tribe were violently forced from the lands John now owns, looks on the town of Montrose and the invaders now living there with nothing but sheer hatred. The lands that belonged to his family and lineage stolen. The graves of his ancestors, uprooted and discarded like wild animals. The buffalo that once roamed freely there, hunted and killed off by the men who took the lands merely for sport. Antero looks to any means to take back what was stolen from him. The rich, prosperous land of the Montrose Valley.

Meanwhile, James Hackenberry and Charles Sanderlin currently own Hackenberry and Sanderlin Real Estate in Baltimore, Maryland. Through fraudulent corporate land grabbing, Charles hears about the government selling land cheap out in the western state of Colorado, around the small town of Montrose. Charles and James meet with two crooked government officials who sell them forty acres of land and pocket the money for themselves near the apple farm belonging to John in Montrose. Surrounded by the photogenic mountain ranges of the Uncompahgre Plateau to the west and snow-capped San Juan mountains to the south. Their plan is to create a resort there, for the wealthy and privileged and build their mogul business empire in Colorado.

The conflict and brutal violence that ensues when John, the crooked realtors, and Antero clash with one another is the most grotesque any of the citizens living there have ever seen in their lives. Dead bodies begin to turn up on the lands around the town, killed in violent ways. All three groups, envious to control the land, gain their wealth, and take what they feel rightfully belongs to them at the expense of all others.

By any means necessary….


     WHILE WE WAIT (Psychological Thriller Horror Short Story/Novella)
(Release Plan for April 2025:  Currently started writing December 4, 2024)
Tyler Miller had it all.  A young man going into his fourth year of college.  He carried a high GPA in school, had a beautiful girlfriend whom he intended to ask to be his wife soon, and a bright future ahead of him as an accountant with a large corporation he had interned with in his junior year of college.  Until one day when he got a call from his girlfriend’s father, telling him that she had ended her own life in her room at home alone.  Stricken with grief and lost in depression, Tyler took time to heal himself, taking a week alone to do the only thing that would bring him inner peace before his senior year started: go on a camping trip in the forest.  With what positive energy he had left in his soul, Tyler packed his things and traveled to the Kwakwaka trailhead in Canada’s Vancouver Island.  Once there, he parked his car for the weeklong adventure and traveled up the lonely forest Trail alone.  Pushing himself deeper into the island’s dark secluded forest.  While hiking the trail, Tyler comes across a campsite with a burning campfire and an old Native American Indian sitting by the fire, silent, still, and stoic.  Without hesitation, he sits by the campfire with the man and begins to hold conversations with him as if he is drawn to the man by some unseen force.

Tyler’s experiences in the following days after meeting the man bring him to the brink of madness, as he experiences vivid and horrific hallucinations and delusions from the guardians in the forest.  Exposing his own past and the realities of the present until he uncovers the truths about what will happen to his life in the future. 

Can Tyler overcome the horrors of the guardians in the forest and expose the truths to right the wrongs that have been done in the present day and change his future?  Exposing the truth of events that have transpired.  Or will he succumb to the guardians and become lost in his own mind forever?


     SHADOWS OF SAMANTHA (Suspense/Thriller)
(Release Plan for Fall 2025:  Currently started writing January 15th, 2025)
Samantha Owen is a young, twelve-year-old girl happily living with both of her parents in their suburb home in Chicago, Illinois.  Every year the family takes a big trip in the summer months together and this year is no different, as they plan to go to Disneyworld in Florida together.  With excitement in her heart, Samantha and her parents fly from their home in Chicago down to Florida, where they catch a shuttle from the airport to go to the theme park.  After checking into the hotel, the family heads out to the park the evening of the first day.  Wandering through the crowd together, Samantha starts to trail behind her parents for a little bit, being cut off from them as they slowly disappeared through the large crowd.  Before Samantha knew it, a black sack went over her head, covering her eyes as a strong hand covered her mouth and picked her up.  Carrying her away from her parents and out of the park.

When the black bag finally comes off her head, Samantha finds herself in the back of a van with her hands and feet tied together, being driven out of the parking lot of the theme park.  Inside the van are two men who she doesn’t recognize who begin to take her across the country to California, to a private residence in the higher end suburbs of Los Angeles County.  A home synonymous with child sex trafficking for the higher elite class who will pay top dollar for children her age. 

As time begins to run out for her with each mile driven, Samantha works to find intricate ways to elude her captors and do whatever she can to escape.  Desperately trying to find help for herself, before she becomes the latest victim of child sex trafficking in the United States.

Samantha will soon find out at the tender age of twelve, that the scariest monsters are human beings, and what we will do to one another.