Books & Stories by Jeff Sustersic
Stories of truth, grief, mercy, consequence, and the unseen threads that connect us.
The stories we tell ourselves can become the worlds we live in.
What if you could step into the life that might have been—and discover you were never meant to come back unchanged? In Threads of What If, Jeff Sustersic explores the haunting pull of alternate lives, lost possibilities, and the choices that make us who we are. Through a mysterious technology known as the Thread, ordinary people are given access to lives that never happened here: loved ones who survived, relationships that began years too early, and versions of themselves built from choices they never made. But the deeper they go, the harder it becomes to know which memories belong to them—and whether returning to the life they started with is still possible. Intimate, emotional, and mind-bending, this speculative trilogy asks a question almost everyone has wondered but no one is prepared to answer: What if the other life really was better?
What if good intentions are not enough?
When magic proves an innocent child committed murder, who dares question the evidence? In The Witness Cycle, Jeff Sustersic follows Elandor Voss, an overlooked hedge wizard with little magical power and a dangerous habit of noticing what everyone else dismisses. What begins as an impossible murder investigation becomes a fight for a child the city has already decided to condemn. Alongside an unlikely circle of thieves, guards, scholars, and outcasts, Elandor uncovers a conspiracy that can manufacture proof, manipulate memory, and turn the promise of safety into a means of control. As each mystery reveals another thread, their fight grows from saving one life to defending a civilization’s freedom. Blending intricate magical investigations, sweeping fantasy, and the hard-won bonds of a chosen family, this seven-book saga offers mysteries to unravel, loyalties to question, and people worth fighting for. Begin with The Unseen Thread—because sometimes the first act of courage is refusing to believe the case is closed.
The same truth can look very different from the other side.
What if the person taking away your freedom genuinely believed she was saving your life? In The Mercy Cycle, Jeff Sustersic follows Maevra Sorn, a woman determined to reduce suffering—and willing to make choices others cannot bear to make. From a murder conspiracy that threatens an innocent child to a city where mercy leaves little room for refusal, her interventions force her to confront the people behind every supposedly acceptable sacrifice. She is often right about the danger. That does not mean she has the right to decide. Blending fantasy, mystery, and intimate human conflict, this companion series to The Witness Cycle invites you inside the decisions that look very different from the other side—and asks you to care about a woman whose compassion can make her dangerous. Begin with The Seen Thread, and enter a world where good intentions offer no protection from the harm we do in their name.
The same truth can look very different from the other side.
What happens when humanity creates something smarter than itself—and it actually makes the world better? In The Unfinished Species, Jeff Sustersic brings that future home: to a woman whose hands are healed, a husband whose life’s work is disappearing, and families learning to love one another through changes no generation has faced. As extraordinary discoveries transform ordinary lives, the minds humanity creates begin to claim futures of their own. The question is no longer simply what technology can do, but who gets to decide what a life should become. Blending sweeping science-fiction imagination with intimate human drama, this series explores love, belonging, and the courage to embrace a future we cannot control. Begin with The Years We Were Given and continue with A Place Inside the Living—because building a better world is only the beginning of learning how to live in it.
About Jeff Sustersic
Jeff Sustersic’s stories begin where certainty ends: with an empty chair, impossible evidence, or a memory belonging to a life no one lived.
He is the author of ten novels across two completed series: The Threads of What If trilogy and the seven-book Witness Cycle, featuring Elandor Voss. He is also developing The Mercy Cycle, a companion series to The Witness Cycle.
The Threads of What If follows a grieving mother given eleven minutes inside a reality where her husband is still alive—and the daughter left waiting for her in this one. Across shifting memories and alternate lives, the trilogy asks whether healing sometimes means surrendering the life we wanted in order to choose the life still before us.
The Witness Cycle explores truth through fantasy mystery. Elandor Voss, an overlooked hedge wizard with a narrow Spark and an inconvenient devotion to facts, confronts impossible crimes, manufactured histories, and systems that can shape what people believe. Beneath the mystery are questions of power, loyalty, manipulation, and the courage to pursue truth when a lie has become more comfortable.
Its companion, The Mercy Cycle, reveals that same world from another side, following people whose intentions may be sincere even when their understanding is dangerously incomplete. Together, the two series ask an uncomfortable question: what happens when good people, convinced they are doing what is right, act on radically different understandings of the truth?
Those themes are deeply personal.
Jeff spent years beside his wife, Erin, through cancer treatment. After her death, he faced raising their two children while rebuilding life around an absence that could not be repaired. Grief taught him how easily we can believe the stories we tell ourselves, mistake escape for healing, and overlook the people who are still in the room. It also taught him that the lies we choose to believe can wound the people we love—and that one of the hardest truths to accept is that we are not always the hero of our own story. Sometimes, we are the villain.
Before becoming a novelist and entrepreneur, Jeff spent more than three decades in the automotive industry, experiencing both success and failure while working with people from nearly every walk of life. Along the way, he encountered an unforgettable range of personalities, ambitions, contradictions, strengths, and flaws—the kind of characters no novelist could invent quite as well as real life does. He also learned that outward achievement can conceal how far a person has drifted from peace, purpose, and the people who matter most.
His Christian faith became central to that reckoning. Proverbs 3:6 challenged him to surrender the illusion of control, acknowledge God, and trust Him with the road ahead. He writes not as someone who has mastered grief or faith, but from the unfinished work of telling the truth, accepting grace, and beginning again.
That same conviction led him to found Medina Adventure Company, a Northeast Ohio outdoor-experience business built around helping families slow down, reconnect, and make time together while they still can.
Its calls to “Fight the Drift” and “Live Stories Worth Telling” are the thread connecting all of Jeff’s work.
Face what was lost. Tell the truth about what remains. Choose the people who are still here.
The life in front of us is not a consolation prize.
Jeff lives in Northeast Ohio with his family.