#378: Big bad Bezos.  Most authors are sitting on the sidelines (including yours truly) wondering which gladiators, Amazon or Hachette, will win the skirmish.  A few like James Patterson and other Big Five mouthpieces are calling for a government lawsuit against Amazon, but everyone should remember that Hachette is a French conglomerate and the other company Amazon allegedly is stiffing is a German one.  Should the U.S. government try to referee a battle between feuding international corporations?  I think not, it would set a bad precedent, and the calling for it is another Patterson whine that should have made yesterday’s list, especially since his attitude is so anti-American!

#379: Summer reading.  Unless something’s settled in the feud mentioned above, readers can’t be sure they’ll get what they pay for, especially for summer reading.  I’m not sure whether they can ever be sure about that because authors are still giving away freebies on Amazon that are good quality reads on one hand, mixed in with a lot of crap; and Big Five publishers are gouging readers with exorbitant ebook prices on the other, most of it just expensive and/or out-of-date crap (oh yeah, they only do that for classics, right?).

Here’s what I do: I limit my serious book browsing to Amazon.  Bookstores—I’m talking about book barns and other commercial bookstores in bed with the Big Five, not your used bookstores or rare bookstores—just don’t carry all the books that might interest me.  (I’m pretty sure none of Hachette’s will, especially Patterson’s, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t buy them on Amazon right now.  Do you look to see who publishes the book when you buy?  Right, you look at the author, title, cover, and summary or blurb, maybe a few reviews, also easier to do on Amazon, although the latter aren’t worth your time—see below.)  I focus on ebooks under $5 to load up my old Kindle paper white for summer reading almost anywhere (yeah, it works in the sun—hmm, another Amazon product, go figure).

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What Happened to those Characters?  The Profiler (Virginia Morgan)…

[This is the sixth installment in a series of short stories titled “What Happened to Those Characters?”.  Each one revisits a character or characters from one of my novels and takes a peek at what happened later.  This one is about Virginia Morgan from The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, the bridge between “The Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and “The Clones and Mutants Series.”  Enjoy.]

The Profiler

Steven M. Moore

Copyright 2014

Virginia Morgan cracked open the door.  The man standing there put away the badge he had shown her through the peephole.

“I’m retired, so I hope this is a fucking social call!”

The badge said his name was Arthur Newcastle.  The badge had looked authentic.  Her hand behind her back still held a Glock.

“More than social,” said Newcastle.

Geez, this guy’s tall.  Maybe two meters.  Looks like an NBA star, and handsome too.  “I guess I can let you in.”  She opened the door wider.  Didn’t show the gun.  The agent had to stoop to enter.  “Have a seat.  Need some coffee?”

He drank it black.  She loaded hers with cream and sugar.  It was her third of the day, and she had progressed from black to loaded.  Whiskey would be added after dinner, maybe with a touch of ReddiWhip.

“I hope this isn’t about an old case,” she said after handing him his mug and sitting down across from him.  The gun was stored in the pocket of her bathrobe, ready just in case.  He fills up the whole damn sofa!

“No, but you’ve profiled some similar cases.  We need some help with a new one.”

“You telling me with all the people you now have profiling, you can’t come up with one for a current case?  I was good, but I’m sure you have better now.  Are psych grads that bad these days?”

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Maybe their bad rep is due to the fact that they’re second-rate citizens in the bee hive, but drones are under attack recently.  The more vociferous attacks come from people who decry how deadly they are in attacking terrorists.  They kill all those innocent people, don’t you know?  I’ve rebutted that in these posts, but I can’t refrain from summarizing: (1) Drones and Special Ops are our most effective weapons against terrorists, a battle that must be fought unless you want to return to the Dark Ages of a radical Islamic Caliphate; and (2) drones and Special Ops avoid thousands of battlefield casualties, among our own troops as well as innocent civilians.  Here stats don’t lie.

A recent editorial in the NY Times (5/21) titled “The Limits of Armchair Warfare” basically ignores both points in a Ramboesque plea about returning to a conventional boots-on-the-ground mentality championed by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team of brilliant strategists.  Our troops fought valiantly, but Iraq is still an ethnic battleground.  Wrong in so many things, Biden was right with this one: Iraq should have been divided into at least three countries.  That worked in Yugoslavia and will end up being the right solution in Iraq.  McCain, that vengeful champion of the surge, also favors boots on the ground.  And Mr. Obama’s mistakes in Afghanistan can be summarized succinctly: he listened to that old Pentagon doggerel, although he knew from experimental evidence that drones and Special Ops are the solution.

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Whoever you are and wherever you go this weekend, please pause and remember our service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice.  They are the true heroes of this great nation….

[This is the fifth installment in a series of short stories titled “What Happened to Those Characters?”.  Each one revisits a character or characters from one of my novels and takes a peek at what happened later.  This one is about Denise Dupont, the CIA operative in Evil Agenda, the second book in my “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.”  Enjoy.]

Channeling Idi Amin

Steven M. Moore

Copyright, 2014

                Denise Dupont knew she looked stunning but felt groped.  The dictator’s eyes were all over her.  Part of the job.  He flashed a toothy smile.  She smiled back.

She was dressed in a flowing gown, its multiple hues like a neon sign in Paris inviting the fat man to dine on her.  The native headwear and large golden earrings topped her off, but Samuel Chibuzo wasn’t looking at the top.  Spike heels made her as tall as any man in the ballroom, but he wasn’t admiring those either.

God, he’s repugnant!

The self-declared Black Pope and leader of the Christian Brotherhood of West Africa, Royal and Divine Monarch and President of the Federal and Independent Republic of West Africa, and chief and principal shaman of three major tribes in the country, already had eleven wives and twenty-three children.  She was trying to tempt him enough so that he wanted to make her number twelve.

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In one meaty item in my last Irish Stew post, I reflected on the abysmal proficiencies of our high school grads: 28% in math; 34% in reading.  In that same post and in comments to it, possible reasons for this were listed.  One commenter pointed out that maybe it’s because parents just don’t care anymore.  That’s one reason we need immigrants.  Many immigrant parents care about education.  They want their kids to have a better life than they had or even have now.  Moreover, they take pride that their children excel.

After World War II, many parents of baby boomers exhibited these same attitudes.  That’s one reason that era in U.S. history was golden, except for the scourge of Communism.  Parents or grandparents who suffered through the hardships of the Great Depression and a terrible war had their priorities straight.  Without being immigrants, they had that immigrant attitude.  And there were many postwar immigrants too, ones who reinforced that attitude.  There was also social upheaval, because baby boomers wanted more than just the good ol’times—they wanted a better world, thinking that their own kids would benefit.  They did and became the generations where too many think that life owes them everything, including a living—or, at least, their parents owe them that.  There are many exceptions, of course; many of these exceptions are children and grandchildren of immigrants.

There are stats to back this up.  For example, examine lists of recent winners of the Intel Science Talent Search (it used to be known as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search).  An eyeball estimate using last names (as a writer, names are important to me) tells me that about 50% of them are probably children or grandchildren of immigrants.  These kids are smart, but they’re also highly motivated and work their butts off to learn too, in order to make their parents proud.  That’s in science and technology, of course, but kids like this also dominate other fields.  Just consider the top kids in the national spelling bee every year.  They aren’t all going to be scientists, by any means.

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Item: Dalai Lama, persona non grata.  The Scandinavian countries have a reputation for being progressive and wonderful places to live, albeit too cold.  But the Daliai Lama was dissed by the Norwegian government.  Turns out they bowed to Chinese pressure.  Now, China invaded and took over Tibet.  Sound familiar?  Reminds me of recent decisions made by ye olde ex-KGB homophobic dictator of Russia.  No wonder Norway says nothing about the Ukraine.  They’re afraid of the giant shadows China and Russia cast, even though they have plenty of oil.

Of course, Mr. Lama was just there in Norway for the silver anniversary of his Peace Prize.  I guess even the Norwegians are hypocritical.  Maybe it’s the effect of all those Northern Lights putting them into a hide-our-heads-in-the-fjord-sands stupor.  The Dalai Lama was one of the more justifiable Nobel Peace Prizes (why does Norway hand out that one and Sweden the rest?); Obama’s and others didn’t make sense.  Yet, twenty-five years later, they throw it back into the old man’s face.  I’d be pissed even if I were the Dalai Lama.

Item: Sotheby’s bomb.  No, Sotheby isn’t some wacko English terrorist.  Sotheby’s Spring Auction was a bomb in the sense of kaput, failure, crashed, etc.  One-third of their art items didn’t sell.  The official explanation—from the NY Times, as official as I can get because I’m not a Snowden working at Sotheby’s—is that the art work was overpriced.  I bet!  My explanation is that no one wanted those artworks because they were crap.  Or, we can just write it off to a bad economy—the one-percenters don’t think artworks are a good investment anymore.

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[This is the fourth installment in a series of short stories titled “What Happened to Those Characters?”.  Each one revisits a character or characters from one of my novels and takes a peek at what happened later.  This one is about Jay Sandoval, the ezine investigative reporter in Full Medical, the first book in my “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.”  Enjoy.]

Daddy’s Girl

Steven M. Moore

Copyright 2014

                Jay Sandoval often reminisced while she ran.  Her life with Boston cop Chris Tanner had turned out better than she hoped.  Chris was still only a detective, albeit a successful one, but he had turned down two promotions, not wanting to be chained to a desk.  They had their little house in Medford, bordering on the Fells, her usual choice as a jogging spot.  Their two adopted kids were doing well in school and the oldest would enter kinder in the fall.

All the turmoil associated with the cloned children had subsided as far as she knew.  Their good friend, Kalidas Metropolis, was busy at the Center taking care of them; they’d soon be released into the government’s witness protection program.  The cover-up, engineered by the government, would be complete.

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Two recent events portray two different sides of domestic violence.  The first is the case last week of the family renting the luxury home of a tennis star down in Florida.  A man apparently killed his wife and two teenage kids and then set fire to the entire place.  The second is one that happened last Saturday in nearby Lodi, New Jersey (near to my new hometown of Montclair), where a man stabbed his estranged wife and took off with the kids.  The common denominator is a desperate man doing terrible damage to his family.

We don’t know the details of either case at the time I write this, but I can guess.  In the first, I suspect the fortunes of the SOB went south for whatever reason, he didn’t want to live, and he didn’t want to put his family through hardship.  Relative to living in a mansion, anything is a hardship, I suppose, but it still sounds crazy.  Of course it’s crazy!  Murder-suicide is the work of a crazy man.  The guy flipped and his family suffered.  His unilateral determination brought way more suffering to his family than poverty would have.  Of course, the guy could also have had a bad trip with some bad drugs, but buying all those fireworks and gasoline ahead of time sure looks like premeditation.

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#369: Titles don’t have copyrights.  That’s fortunate for Nora Roberts.  Her new book, The Collector, was released 4/15/2014.  An excerpt from my new book, The Collector, appeared in Aristocrats and Assassins, released 3/9/2014.  I imagine that such a short title has been used before, though, so both Nora and I would be in trouble if titles had copyrights.  Writers shouldn’t get the idea that it’s clever to reuse some famous author’s title just to come up in a search with them.  In my case, The Collector doubly matches what goes on in this mystery—I don’t know about Nora’s—and that’s what a writer should strive for.  A title should be a short blurb reflecting the content of the book.

#370: GoodBadBizarre review.  There’s a new review website, GoodBadBizarre.com.  The reviewer there just wrote an extensive in-depth review of my new thriller Aristocrats and Assassins.  As a reviewer, I can only admire the thoroughness.  This is the epitome of what we mean by an honest review, and I’m not saying that only because it was a positive review.  The condensed version posted on Amazon has five stars, but the reviewer still found negatives—the bad and bizarre.  More than anything else, though, I’m pleased with the way the reviewer got inside my head to determine what I was trying to do with A&A.  Eerie….

#371: Pseudonyms.  The person that runs GBB above uses a pen name.  I respect that.  In fact, I often wish I had used one from the get-go.  There are too many Steve Moores out there—just Google Steve Moore, Steven Moore, or Steven M. Moore (yeah, that’s one of my old math papers—really old!—from one of my previous lives). I should have picked something less common, like Deaver or Baldacci.  What’s your opinion on pseudonyms?  If you’re a reader, do you mind if an author uses one?  If you’re a writer, do you use one? (more…)