Oath and Honor. A Memoir and a Warning. Liz Cheney, author (2023). I have the official report from the January 6^th Select Committee. While there are glimpses into the author’s political thoughts here in this book, I hasten to state that, like that committee’s report, her book is more a bipartisan indictment of the ex-president Donald J. Trump and proof that he’s a clear and present danger to democracy in America.

There are a few nits to pick besides those I might have about the author’s political biases, though. Let’s consider them:

This book is not a memoir! You really need to read closely to find details about the author’s life. The book is truly a warning, one good people don’t need very much (except for my third point below). But isn’t any book about Narcissus le Grand a dire warning if it’s worth anything at all? The whole subtitle is therefore unnecessary.

An oath to the Constitution should not be taken as “originalist” fealty to a dated document! The very event that required VP Pence to stand pat and do his “constitutional duty,” much to his credit, would never have have been needed if the Founding Fathers had decided not to create the Electoral College that clearly violates the one man-one vote principle. This, among other mistakes, puts chinks in the armor of democracy America’s fascists have found; the Electoral College has guaranteed that GOP candidates have won the White House without winning the popular vote ever since Reagan. That’s not democracy; that’s fascism. The Constitution that Ms. Cheney so loves badly needs editing. And the Oath Keepers, after all, claimed to be keeping their oaths to the Constitution!

The author commits the same sin that many authors do when criticizing today’s GOP. Too many are afraid of not saying a person who talks like a fascist, walks like a fascist, and threatens people and institutions like a fascist, is indeed a fascist! Good political writers should make every effort to choose the correct words. Not calling Trump and his marching MAGA morons fascists only leads to some people conflating true conservatives, so necessary in our political system, people like Cheney, Kinzinger, and Romney, along with a few others, with those fascists. Even a progressive like me recognizes that we need true conservatives if only to balance the exuberance of progressives in a democratic society. We don’t need fascists!

All that being said, the best way to treat this tome is to consider it a guide to the full report. In fact, I’ll place both books side by side on my bookshelf…and recommend them as guides to anyone who considers themselves to be a responsible citizen of this once great country that Donald J. Trump has damaged so much.

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“Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. These books are fiction, but they’re ample evidence for my continuing concern for America’s future. The fictional prose here can only help people like Cheney and many others on the right and left who are also concerned about America’s future continue to raise the alarms. None of that will help unless people heed them and take action, of course, using the democratically established tools of ballot boxes.

These two NYPD cops provide a great example, in fact, of how people can agree on the bigger dangers for free societies. Castilblanco, the progressive, is the type of guy far-right traitors and so many others love to hate, even though he’s more American than most. (FYI to them and DJT if they’re possibly reading this: Puerto Ricans are Americans!) Chen, the conservative who’d probably enjoy talking with Cheney about America’s future, is a Chinese-American who teams up with Castilblanco to thwart the bad guys.  The eight novels (one, Defanging the Red Dragon, is a crossover and a free downloadable PDF) will provide readers with hours of reading entertainment…and hopefully spur them onto voting for truth and the American way!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I had a good laugh when I read “A Character-Driven Approach to Diversifying Fiction” in the NY Times a while ago (12/10/2023 “Sunday Business” section). ‘Twas a report on a meeting hosted by Electric Postcard Entertainment, and it provided some comic relief from all the bad news related to that “f&^%ing moron” (not my quote but ex-SecState Tillerson’s—Il Duce, he of the imperious scowl, would have fired him if he hadn’t resigned). Not to belittle Dhonielle Clayton’s creativity (she leads the afore-mentioned company), the article showed how out of touch with reality traditional publishers have become.

Yes, America is diverse. Yes, many readers want diverse characters in the prose they read. (In the TV shows and films they watch as well!) And the old far-right white boys running and ruining everything are still out of touch, so much so that Dhonielle’s little meeting made the front page of the NY Times’s “Sunday Business” section.

My characters are diverse. They’ve been diverse from the very beginning. In my very first novel, Full Medical (2006), one main character is Jayrashee Sandoval, a ‘zine reporter and daughter of an Indian and Latin immigrant. (No, she wasn’t modeled after Kamala Harris or Nikki Haley—I didn’t even learn about them until years later.) Another main character in the same novel is Kalidas Metropolis, a biogenetics expert and the daughter of Greek immigrants, but perhaps diversely more notable for being a lesbian!

When I decided to write a more conventional mystery-crime thriller, I wanted to avoid the stereotypical Irish cop, so I created NYPD detectives Rolando Castilblanco and Dao-Ming Chen, who first teamed up in The Midas Bomb. NYC is the most diverse city in the world. (Over 800 languages are spoken there.) So these Puerto Rican and Chinese-American cops only reflect a small part of that city’s diversity. Even in my latest British-style mysteries, there’s diversity. (That probably annoys the British royal family if their reaction to Meghan Markle is any indication, but who knows if these dolts read any fiction.)

There might be novels in my oeuvre that don’t feature diverse characters in the US and around the world, but none come to mind right now. There’s good reason for this: I grew up in California, probably the most diverse state in the union. (The state of New York can’t begin to compare with California outside of NYC; it’s more Trumpland, in fact.) In California, I experienced Armenian-, Chinese-, Japanese-, and Latin-Americans along with other ethnic groups as I grew up. That experience, together with living in Colombia for years and traveling in South America and Europe, helped me create and reliably portray many diverse characters. (Our two kids are both half-Colombian!) That background not only allows me to thumb my nose at those who scream “cultural appropriation”; it means that I can create diverse characters who seem authentic in my prose. Fiction must seem real, to paraphrase Tom Clancy, and our country and world are really diverse.

Of course, what the anti-cultural appropriation protesters really mean to say is that Latino authors should be the only ones to write about Latinos, Black authors the only ones to write about Blacks, etc., contrary to the title of the afore-mentioned article that characters drive the diversification of fiction. I’m not completely sure which side Ms. Clayton is on, but the characters must be the ones who exhibit the diversification. Otherwise, anti-cultural appropriation forces would go after any sci-fi writer who dares to write about ETs, which is completely absurd! Maybe someday traditional publishing and other entertainment sources won’t have to keep “rediscovering” diversity and worrying about “diversification”? I might never live to see that day, of course.

In these troubled times, there are persons who eschew diversity and never realize how strong it makes our country. I’m resigned to the fact that these morons will never read Ms. Clayton’s works nor my own. That’s their loss, but it also means that changing the minds of traditional publishers about what sells will be a long slog as their books ignore a huge audience of readers!

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Rembrandt’s Angel. Small presses can be traditional publishers who are exceptions to what’s analyzed above. They’re often more open to publishing novels with more diversity and subsequently originality. I have experimented with two: Black Opal Books and Penmore Press. While we’ve parted our ways, the reasons for doing so weren’t due to their lack of emphasizing diversity…in plots, characterizations, settings, etc.

The novel Rembrandt’s Angel is a great example. This first book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series is diverse in all these areas as Esther becomes obsessed with recovering a painting stolen by the Nazis during the war. (The title painting is real, by the way, and remains in some fascist’s private collection, I’m sure.) You will visit Europe, the US, and South America as an armchair-sleuth along with Esther as she battles neo-Nazis, a drug cartel, and ISIS terrorists, ably aided by her Interpol-agent paramour Bastiann van Coevorden. Available wherever fine books are sold in paper and ebook formats.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris liberta!

When writing her famous mystery stories, Agatha Christie must have had to decide whether her tale takes place in England or abroad. Death on the Nile, for example, has an international setting; Towards Zero has a national one.

Perhaps my choices about settings have  been easier than Christie’s in the sense that I had more options? I could go with the US, UK, countries in continental Europe, or others…or even outer space. (Many Dr. Carlos stories are sci-fi mysteries, as is part of Survivors of the Chaos and all of A. B. Carolan’s novels.) I have variety within series as well: Some novels in the “Chen and Castilblanco” and “Esther Brookstone” series are mainly national in scope (US and UK respectively), while other novels in those series take their MCs away from their home turf to other lands. (The first three “Esther Brookstone” novels are international in scope while the remainder are local.) Only the spin-off “Inspector Steve Morgan” series is completely local with the Bristol area of England as its setting.

Settings can make or break a novel for some readers, of course. If you dislike the UK, for example, you might not appreciate the “Esther Brookstone” or “Steve Morgan” novels. But Agatha probably created Poirot (a Belgium PI) for that reason, and my Bastiann van Coevorden (a Dutch sleuth) possibly serves the same function to mitigate your distaste: These two detectives (Bastiann even looks like David Suchet, the actor who so often portrayed Poirot) give an international flavor to the tale, even though the settings where most of the action occurs are local.

Carlos Obregon creates some mystery all by himself. He’s a doctor but no Dr. Watson aiding a drugs-addicted Holmes; he’s also clearly Hispanic, a sleuth whom you might think is a first in sci-fi literature. He’s not. Many of my novels have Hispanic main characters. The Midas Bomb in the “Chen and Castilblanco” series was one of the first, and Soldiers of God even features a Hispanic priest who’s an FBI informant!

Even if they have local settings, stories can have unusual ethnic characters. (Again, this might not please the “America first” white supremacist crowd of the MAGA millions, but they can’t even read. Their fuehrer certainly doesn’t! The anti-cultural appropriation crowd might not like my fiction either. To hell with them all!)

But I digress. International settings and characters have nothing to do with politics per se. I use the storytelling devices in the best way I can to make a tale interesting and exciting. My goal is for readers to have fun with a tale, as much fun as I had while writing them. You can armchair-travel with my tales, and you can learn about different ethnic groups of our world as well. And, by doing the research necessary to make my fiction seem real no matter what the settings or characters might be, I continue learning as well.

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“Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. The first three novels in this series hop around the world a bit. The last six stay in the UK for the most part, although number six, Defanging the Red Dragon, is set half in the US and half in the UK, as a crossover novel also featuring Chen and Castilblanco. (It’s also a free PDF download like the novel Intolerance. See the list of all freebies on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) In any case, that’s nine mystery/thriller novels that will provide you with many hours of reading pleasure!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

About this time every year, I start thinking about what has gone on in the previous ones, in this case, 2023 and before. With everything going on in the world and the US now—much of it not to my liking, to say the least—I couldn’t help thinking that I started to get serious about publishing my stories not lot long after 9/11. My first novel, Full Medical, was dedicated to someone we lost in that tragic, terrible, terrorist event, although it wasn’t the first that I’d submitted to agents and acquisition editors, mistakenly thinking that traditional publishing was the only possible way to publish a book.

Now, after many novels and short fiction works, I can’t say that I have a lot of fans (aka readers eagerly awaiting my next story?), but I can say that I’m satisfied with my professional writing life, as short as it has been. I can also wonder if my oeuvre would have been a lot more extensive if I’d been publishing my fiction all my life.

Looking back farther than 9/11, it’s not hard to imagine what themes I might have had in my fiction. Themes have always been important to me. A plethora of characters have expressed opinions on many social issues, and I’d have had many more expressing a lot more if I’d started earlier. Like the real world, different characters express different opinions as I try to present all sides of an issue associated with a particular theme. That’s not easy when there are many sides, or the one supported by a character is so evil and a sign of madness, but a wide spectrum makes the fiction seem more real, to misquote Tom Clancy a bit.

My aim has rarely been to settle an issue even though readers might think that they know which side of an issue I prefer. For example, my novel Gaia and the Goliaths (seventh novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series—see the ad below) has global warming and climate control as its major theme, but it offers nuclear power as part of the solution, something that tree-huggers and green parties would deny us although nuclear power is the non-fossil fuel par excellence and a lot more efficient, less costly, and less space consuming than solar, wind, and hydroelectric. (Nuclear power gets a bum-wrap because of bombs and waste products. The first causes people to become ostriches, burying their heads in the sand; the second is easily solvable by putting those nasty waste products where they can’t do any harm, i.e., off Earth.)

Most fiction (especially that published by the Big Five publishing conglomerates) is pablum because it ignores the difficult yet important themes. In other words, it violates Tom Clancy’s rule that fiction must seem real. I have no “official stats” to prove it, but I suspect that’s why my stories don’t sell well. Many readers don’t want to be reminded about real-world problems, so, to maximize the number of readers, the Big Five insists that its authors avoid important themes. That’s why silly romance novels, cozy mysteries, and fantasy are so popular—most fiction read is pure escapism.

Instead, the entertainment aspect is of secondary importance in my storytelling; writing a tale with a meaningful theme and plot that features it has always been more important to me. I can understand why many readers don’t like that. That’s okay. If my stories can only reach out to a few readers who want serious fiction, I’ll consider my writing life a success.

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Note: I’ll now take a wee vacation from writing this blog. May everyone enjoy this holiday season and read some meaningful fiction during their time off. I’ll resume this blog on January 3, 2024.

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The “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. This entire eight-book series treats many important themes as these NYPD detectives solve crimes occurring in NYC, the US, and beyond. Please note that the eighth novel, Defanging the Red Dragon, is a free PDF download (see the list of all free PDF downloads on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page) that was an earlier holiday gift from me that’s still “evergreen,” i.e., as fresh as the day I wrote it (which is true of all my novels). The others are ebooks available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Every so often I write an article about book piracy. It affects the whole industry negatively, of course, but it hurts self-published authors more than other authors and publishers. (Most of my books are self-published, hence my personal interest.) One of my doubts about the still-ongoing Draft2Digital (D2D)-Smashwords merger was that Mark Coker, the Smashwords owner, never saw piracy as a problem. It seems that his attitude has contaminated D2D. Let me explain.

Most of my books are self-published ebooks. These are just computer files, and computer files can be copied and/or changed. Moreover, diabolically clever people can turn those files into PDFs, and those, as most people know, are transportable across many electronic platforms, which is an ideal situation for book pirates. Amazon tries to combat this by using .mobi with DRM, but many readers don’t like DRM because they can only use the ebook on the computer they used for downloading the ebook; i.e., they can’t share the book with family members. (I have no problem with that, by the way, and wouldn’t even call it piracy because it’s akin to common praxis with print versions.)

There was even a “legal website,” OceanOfPDF.com, where the above process was done for visitors to that site; they could download a PDF for free. (For those who are slow on the uptake, let me state that “for free” means that the book’s author receives zero payment!) Authors naturally complained, and OceanOfPDF was offline for a while; but it came back, and even two of my most recent books, Legacy of Evil and Cult of Evil, both published via D2D, became available on the site.

I choose to offer free PDF downloads at this site (see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page); they only represent a (big!) investment of time on my part, not money, and are my gifts to readers. An ebook I self-publish with Amazon, D2D, or Smashwords also represents an investment of time and money I’d like to at least recover by selling it and have a bit of spending money left over to invest in future books.

Bottom line: You’re participating in a criminal activity when you become a book pirate. You might consider it only petty theft (your Venti at Starbucks generally costs more than my ebook!), but it’s still a crime. Don’t do it!

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Rogue Planet. Did you like the “Game of Thrones” fantasy novels? This novel about an evil Iranian-like theocracy in the far future and a prince’s fight to overthrow it is hard sci-fi not fantasy. There are no dungeons, dragons, sorcerers, or other fantasy creatures, but you might think the stuggles are somewhat similar and perhaps more believable. Hard sci-fi is an extrapolation of reality not fantasy, after all!

This novel is set on a world outside the International Trade Union of Independent Planets (ITUIP), but ITUIP, created in the “Chaos Chronicles” series, plays an important role. From palace spies to warring armies, there’s enough intrigue and military action to keep the most adventurous sci-fi readers happy. Available wherever fine sci-fi literature is sold, in ebook or paper format (even on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I read a lot more crime fiction than I write. In my earlier bows to British-style mysteries, I published a list of novels I’d read and could recommend reading. The number of books in this list has probably at least tripled as I kept my Covid-reading pace going, going, going…. But what’s clear about that list is that it’s better described as one for recommended crime fiction and its authors from all over the world, not just British authors (mostly English-speaking authors, of course, although I’ve been known to read a few crime stories written in French or Spanish, and the various English dialects might be considered to be foreign languages as well).

Classification of books is a dangerous game that I try to avoid playing, but there are many types of crime fiction. My use of the label “British-style mysteries” originally described mysteries following Agatha Christie’s blueprint, but even she tweaked and varied her crime fiction stories. Today we can say that they include police procedurals; special agents and spy stories, both domestic and foreign; investigative journalists and PIs; financial and political conspiracies; and many others. Many of their criminals come from all walks of life as well. In other words, the genre offers a lot of possibilities for plots, characters, settings, and so forth.

I’ve written some crime fiction about investigative journalism, most notably the novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, where one main character is an investigative reporter; but I combined that with his sharing adventures with a special agent, a DHS profiler. Most of the “Esther Brookstone” novels contrast the work local police officers do with that of special agents going after national or international criminals. This blurring between the local and the national or international makes the plots more interesting!

Yet the motivations for the criminals seems to cut across all these subgenres of crime fiction; it’s summarized as follows: Human weakness including jealousy and greed leading to heinous acts of evil. That much is common enough, but also more common than not is the uplifting parts of the tales that show a variety of human beings rising up to bring criminals to justice. (Of course, they don’t always succeed, especially if the villain appears in multiple series.)

I usually respond to the question “What do you write?” with “mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi.” I probably should simplify that answer even more: I write crime fiction. Consider my sci-fi trilogy “Chaos Chronicles.” Those three novels, Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Zamba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! are all about crimes committed on Earth, in the solar system, and in the galaxy beyond. Those battling the criminals aren’t always professional crimefighters, of course; they’re often not in more conventional crime fiction either. The villains also aren’t typical—they might even be ETs!—but they can be rather nasty at times.

I can summarize this article by stating that crime fiction, at least as I treat it, is a lot broader category than most readers think, and it often covers futuristic situations as well as past ones in historical crime fiction (see that list mentioned above—you’ll find it in the short-fiction collection Sleuthing British-Style). This breadth of crime fiction blows away the formulaic rom-coms, cozy mysteries, and fantasies that now glut the publishing world, from formulaic Big Five authors in particular.

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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This crime novel features a DHS agent and an investigative reporter who uncover a government conspiracy. That conspiracy is run by a devious criminal mind who uses AI embedded in US agencies to further his evil plans that include the assassination of a US presidential candidate. The book is a bridge between the “Chen & Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” and “Steve Morgan” series and the “Clones & Mutants” trilogy, but it can be read and enjoyed independently. (Most of those novels have the same villain!) Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

You have to give that big Bezos bot and all his little bots credit: They’re very inventive about creating clever and multiple ways to scam readers, writers, and other customers. Are you surprised that Prime keeps going up and up? Are you surprised that they don’t stand by merchandise sold online?

For readers and writers, Vella is the new kid there on the Amazon block ready to fleece you. Maybe some people think they qualify as avid readers if they peruse Vella’s serialized prose, but no true avid reader would do that. Sure, you can get the first three chapters free, but then you need to buy tokens (Bezos’s version of FTX’s bitcoins?) to get the remainder of the novel. Your stash of tokens represents a zero-interest loan to Bezos until you cash them in, of course. The book’s author (c’est moi, par exemple) gets half the proceeds of the tokens you spend on their book; Amazon keeps the other half. The author still has to write a complete novel that people participating in this scam may or may not finish. Amazon as usual gets a lot for doing very little.

Even worse for readers, it’s impossible to get the Vella link off their Kindles! And that link now takes the place of the one for the Kindle store’s book section! In other words, you must go to the full Amazon site with all its nightmarish swamp of retail clutter to look for your next read, a damn waste of time! Pox on their house!

And Vella creates the same problem for authors as many of Amazon’s other “author services” have created: Exclusivity is required to use it. An author’s book has to be exclusive on Vella and not appear for sale anywhere else. That means a reader who wants to read it can only find the book in Amazon’s Vella list and not at any other online retailer. In other words, Vella is indeed a monopolistic service offered by this greedy retailer to scam readers and writers.

I will treat Amazon’s Vella the same way I treat all of Amazon’s nefarious “author services” that provide nothing positive for readers and writers: Boycott it! None of my recent novels are even on Amazon because I want to distribute them to as many online sites as possible, reaching out to readers everywhere. Amazon is no longer an online retailer readers and writers can trust.

But I’ve digressed. Does anyone want to get into a book and then have to purchase and spend some tokens to continue reading the next installment? How does that even work? If a novel has fifty chapters and I want to read beyond the first three, will I have forty-eight different ebook files? This whole concept doesn’t make sense! And you can bet that the publishers of books authored by Stephen King, David Baldacci, and other famous formulaic mares and stallions ready and waiting for the glue factory in the Big Five’s stables will ignore Vella to protect both their readers and big-name authors!

There are no positives for Vella and a whole bunch of negatives for both readers and writers. I don’t recommend it at all! Amazon continues to be the enemy of consumers with Vella.

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Evil Agenda. Some of my readers might remember that I serialized this second novel in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and later published the full novel, but not on Vella! In other words, I invented Vella before the big Bezos bot and all his evil little bots ever thought of it! I didn’t see a great response to my serialization, and it might have reduced readership of the complete novel. In other words, my version of Vella was a flop as far as I’m concerned.

This novel still has a lot of good points, though, mostly because it’s a logical bridge to the third novel and shows how diabolical the villain Vladimir Kalinin really is. One mutant joins a clone and friends to do battle with old Vladimir in various parts of the world.

Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon, because it was published before my boycott). Of course, you might want to peruse the first and third novels as well, Full Medical and No Amber Waves of Grain. (Gee, I wonder how Vella handles series. The retail site’s bots don’t do too well matching books in a series either. Is it possible that the people at B&N are smarter than Bezos? Maybe Bezos is just an AI who hates humans? Where’s the Terminator when you need him?)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

After writing my review of Jake Tapper’s new novel (last week’s post), I realized I could summarize it by saying it contains complexity but is lacking in plot. Like some of my own stories, it mixes real-world characters (Evel Kneival and Ronald Reagan, for example) and some based on real-world characters (Rupert Murdoch’s family, for example) with fictional characters. (My latest “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” and “Inspector Steve Morgan’ novels do that as well.) But mine are more than complex; I also emphasize plot!

Yet the question remains: Does complexity get in the way of the two more common elements of storytelling, namely plot and characterization? The answer: It depends. I’d suggest that Mr. Tapper and I share a common belief with many authors that our readers should have to work a bit as well, simply because fiction must seem real, and real life is complex. Ignoring any of our flaws for the moment, I and others (mostly small press- and self-published authors, of course—the Big Five’s authors are always perfect, aren’t they?) are told we have to sacrifice marketability to the masses to remain true to those more important literary standards. Said another way, authors who write pablum like Mr. Tapper and other celebs rarely write complex tales that make readers think about issues that go beyond pure entertainment, existential issues of our time, for example. Mr. Tapper perhaps focuses on a minor one in the grand scheme of things: Sensational journalism created by bending and distorting the truth. That’s too obvious a topic for arguably the best reporter on TV. I’ve considered it a few times but many more themes as well. The latter is why my writing must be complex.

Many people don’t want complexity when they read a book, if they read them at all. Subgenres like sappy romances, cozy mysteries, flighty fantasies, and others have become popular simply because readers can peruse them without thinking about the important topics too much. Books in these subgenres aren’t complex; they’re less deep than most young adult books, in fact!

Yes, complexity isn’t popular because it makes people think. Recently (10/23/2023), I saw an article in the NY Times about how quantum computers can end encryption schemes as we know them. I had to smile. This is the main theme of Leonardo and the Quantum Code (#5 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series); that novel is complex. (I even define what an “entangled state” really is. Surprisingly, many researchers in that arcane area of science and technology don’t know the simple definition, which makes the topic complex, of course.) If this novel, where Russia, the UK, and the US are after the quantum tool that goes far beyond the one to decrypt the Enigma Code isn’t complex enough for you, or even just right for your reading adventures, you’re my kind of reader. If you say it’s too complex, I’m sorry. Please go away and find a silly romance or cozy mystery to read.

Complexity isn’t everything I look for in my own reading, but it’s important to me as a reader as much as it is for me as an author. Mr. Tapper’s book wasn’t satisfying for me in that sense as much as other mystery/thriller novels (if that’s what it was). And I certainly can’t criticize it for being too complex.

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Son of Thunder. While Leonardo and the Quantum Code isn’t the most complex novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, this second book in the series probably is because it’s historically complex. Three stories run through it until they finally come together, similar to Mr. Tapper’s sister-and-brother stories mentioned above, but these are much more meaningful. The reader can think of this novel as The DaVinci Code done right because historical events contained within are real and true (most of Dan Brown’s weren’t, but that was because he was scammed into believing questionable sources!). The earliest story is about the life of St. John the Divine: I conjecture that the missing years between the Crucifixion and his death were spent as a rebel and missionary with time off taken to care of Mary, the mother of Christ! The next story is where Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli goes to Turkey in search for St. John’s tomb. The third is where Esther tries to prove the artist was never there, but she must change her mind when documents found at the “House of Mary” shrine lead her to that very tomb! (That house is indeed a Vatican shrine; Botticelli’s visit was my invention…but it could have happened.) The complexity here is intentional, of course, making this Esther Brookstone story one of the best in the series, a mystery/thriller story certainly differing from any other you’ll read and designed to make you wonder, can all this really have occurred?

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

All the Demons are Here. Jake Tapper, author (2023). It seems that everyone wants to write a novel now. Actually not—most people don’t have the endurance to run that literary marathon—but Mr. Tapper has written three. I read a previous one, The Hellfire Club (I can’t remember if I wrote a review of it because I’m not that motivated to help out Big Five publishing conglomerates), and this one is a mixed bag in comparison.

The historical setting might interest a lot of people of my generation. (As an observer of society in general and a political observer in particular, necessary for my own writing, post-Nixon, pre-Reagan years represent the times many of us came of age like Ike, one of the protagonists—the other is his younger sister Lucy.

However, you might get the feeling that “Hey, I don’t remember that happening!” or “I never heard that song!” or whatever, and more often than not you’d be justified. Check the end notes. Tapper made up a lot of stuff and admits it, and that all became annoying to me. (This includes stuff about Evel Knieval and Elvis Presley.) Join me in feeling a bit swindled.

Those examples are minor criticisms, though, compared to the feeling that it’s hard to know where Jake is going with the plot. It alternates between Ike and Lucy from chapter to chapter, their two stories written in the first person. Do they come together? Beyond certain limitations (mostly with point of view), there’s nothing much wrong with this ping-pong match between main characters. I used it myself a while ago in A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. (It’s a sci-fi rom-com, so the two protagonists are intimately involved from the start—Mr. Tapper’s never really are.) But Ike’s story revolves around the drunk, show-boating Evel; and Lucy’s around sleazy Max Lyons and his family, a fictional caricature of the Murdoch family. You wait and wait for the two stories to come together. It takes fourteen chapters to even get to where something interesting occurs that brings the siblings’ stories together and make the plot worthwhile. Maybe you should just read this novel for its chapters fifteen to eighteen? Of course, that all occurred on a dark and stormy night!

The reference to Agatha Christie is almost blasphemy, by the way. This is no mystery tale. Is it a historical thriller? Maybe. Is it a political thriller? Perhaps. Or maybe a manual on how to ride a motorcycle? Whatever it is, it’s not a mystery. It’s more an anthem celebrating how honest journalism always wins, as it should, considering it’s Jake Tapper writing!

I’m not sure it’s a thriller either. The book is advertised that way, and the endorsements (Connelly? Coben? Really?) express this, but its thrills are few and far between and mostly in those last three chapters.

I don’t know how to classify this novel, but I have little to recommend it, even if you think Mr. Tapper is the best political reporter on TV now. (He is.)

Note to Jake: I generally don’t purchase Big Five books. This one was a gift.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules indicated on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. There are a lot of historical events, politics, and comments of human societies, past and present, in this sci-fi rom-com that unlike many time-travel stories does time travel right, by jumping through the multiverse among different possible states of the universe we inhabit. It gives a new meaning of “lost in space-time” to “lost in space,” and the protagonists, physicist Gail and her tech Jeff, have many adventures along the way as their relationship matures. You’ll either hate me or love me for my comments on our past, present, and future as you read about their travels. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Post-apocalyptic literature considers a possible if bleak future, so I suppose that one quality might make it sci-fi. It also teaches important lessons and provides warnings about when human beings are currently making mistakes, something it also shares with general sci-fi literature. But it’s often far from space exploration and ETs. The standard trappings of sci-fi, especially those of space opera (like movies from the Star Wars franchise), just aren’t there, though.

It’s hard to write post-apocalyptic literature. First, you have to create a believable apocalypse. A beta-reader for The Last Humans (the first novel in the trilogy of the same name) didn’t find its apocalypse too believable. I’m guessing that the Covid pandemic changed that opinion. The apocalypse in the novel is a bioengineered virus that spreads around the world. If you believe the Chinese, Covid wasn’t bioengineered in their Wuhan lab, but it still spread around the world. We know now that a viral apocalypse is a real possibility!

For that novel, I was more interested in the survivors. The main character, Penny Castro, an ex-USN SAR diver working for the LA Sheriff Department, rises to the challenge of surviving that apocalypse. That first novel (published by Black Opal Books) ends with some semblance of normalcy as Penny and her new family create a new life on a citrus ranch.

Of course, unless an apocalypse kills everyone (then there are no stories to follow!), there are the good, bad, and ugly among the survivors. Penny, her family, and her friends are among the good ones; others might want to finish destroying the world; and still others, driven by different motives, might want to stop them. The second novel in the trilogy, A New Dawn, picks up this theme. That theme continues in another part of the world in the third novel, Menace from Moscow (published just this year), tests Penny and her family again.

Now that I’ve finished this trilogy, I must say that it doesn’t seem to be much like sci-fi! A worldwide pandemic is clearly possible (Covid was one!), and the post-apocalyptic situation that follows that apocalypse is more like a standard thriller story. Penny is a noble warrior, a survivalist who changes history and leaves the world in better shape by doing so. This often occurs in real life: So many of our veterans are heroes in this sense.

In brief, I’ll continue to call this trilogy a collection of three post-apocalyptic thrillers. Readers can call it sci-fi if they wish. In any case, I hope readers will find it both profound and entertaining.

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Comments are always welcome. (See the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

“The Last Humans” Trilogy. Ex-USN SAR diver comes up after locating a victim for the LA Sheriff Department only to find a world gone mad. Missiles targeted at the US West Coast have released a killer virus that goes round the world on the prevailing winds. Her initial struggles for survival are described in the first novel, The Last Humans. Her battle to prevent an “improved version” of the virus to be released is found in the second, A New Dawn. And preventing enemy-survivors from recovering nuclear missiles tests Penny’s resolve even further in the third, Menace from Moscow. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first novel also has a print edition.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!