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.
The Threads of What If explores what happens when fear, regret, longing, and uncertainty begin folding inward—when the questions we ask ourselves become assumptions, and the assumptions slowly become truths we never stopped to examine. These stories look at the quiet power of belief: how easily we can become trapped by the lies we tell ourselves, and what it takes to finally see beyond them.
What if good intentions are not enough?
The same truth can look very different from the other side.
The Mercy Cycle returns to the world and events of The Witness Cycle through perspectives the first story could never fully see. It is not simply a retelling, but a companion journey into motive, mercy, consequence, and the dangerous distance between what happened and what someone believes happened. Together, the two cycles reveal a larger mystery—one in which understanding another person may change not only how we judge their choices, but how confidently we judge our own.
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.