There’s a broad spectrum of readers who still prefer a print book—from young children just beginning their reading lives to young adults, and so on. Many readers avoid ebooks as a consequence. The situation is similar in the music industry where stereophiles still like their LPs even though the dynamic range and frequency range of CDs far surpass them—they just prefer analog to digital (or maybe don’t know the “sampling theorem”?). Many people also like to give print books as presents to their family and friends who are readers too.

From the authors’ and publishers’ point of view, this means there’s a market for print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Many readers “read” in all these formats. That drives up book production costs if an author or publisher wants to cover the entire book market.

The ebook has the lowest cost, but it’s still significant. It only needs a cover, for example, and that’s used more as a display icon that can attract the potential reader. A print book needs front and back covers and a spine. The ebook is a computer file often less than a megabyte in length. A print book’s innards are ink and paper, and cost is often determined by the quality of both along with printing the cover on thicker stock. It’s therefore reasonable that a print book costs more. (What’s not reasonable occurs when a publisher charges almost as much for the ebook version as the print version. The Big Five often do this.)

There are print books where I can’t imagine ever using an ebook version. Take Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci (I recently reviewed it for Bookpleasures). Thick paper was used because of the many reproductions. It’s not a coffee-table book either—the text, nearly 1000 pages of it, far surpasses the space for the reproductions—is essential to the book. Other books requiring print versions are most science and technology textbooks.

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We’re all familiar with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. We can’t by any stretch of the imagination call that historical fiction anymore—he was duped into using research elements that were later proven to be incorrect—but there’s no denying that Da Vinci’s art plays a role. I recently reviewed the authoritative study of Da Vinci, his life, his art, and his science: Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson—you can find the review here.

There’s no denying the role art plays in Mr. Brown’s fiction. Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” is used to justify the theory of the “divine feminine,” although Isaacson obviously doesn’t support Brown’s interpretation of that painting.

Fiction is art, so it makes sense that pieces of art and their artists appear in fiction. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical account of Da Vinci’s contemporary, Michelangelo, art and artists have played important roles in fictional storytelling. Stephanie Storey’s Oil and Marble even combines Da Vinci and Michelangelo into one historical novel, for example.

Art heist stories or tales about the recovery of stolen paintings are also popular, and not just in fiction. The Monuments Men (2009) by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter became a major motion picture (2014). This non-fiction book tells the story of how the Nazis stole many pieces of art, more as investments to finance their lives in exile than any appreciation for the art itself. Many of the pieces were recovered. Others were found in an apartment in Munich where the son of a Nazi hoarded many wonderful treasures.

In The Collector (2014), I first conjectured that stolen artwork could be used as collateral to finance other crooked and evil schemes. I don’t think any other fiction author has broached that idea, but, with The Monuments Men, it’s somewhat implied because Nazis considered buying art like a 401(k) plan or pension to finance their retirement—there’s not much to any other explanation—and that’s just as bad  as rich people buying stolen art so only they can see it, not the general public, which seems to be the motivation most of the time.

In Aristocrats and Assassins, you first meet Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden. In The Collector, you first meet Inspector Esther Brookstone of London’s Metropolitan Police AKA Scotland Yard, who works in the Art and Antiques Division. As often happens, these two characters and my muses (really banshees with Tasers) conspired to make me write a novel involving both of them, which I was happy to do in good time. The result was Rembrandt’s Angel, where yet another Machiavellian use of stolen artwork for collateral is presented. (Note: it also portrays the fate of the villain from The Collector if you’re interested, thus connecting up the two stories a wee bit.  Of course, you don’t need to read The Collector to appreciate Rembrandt’s Angel or vice versa—all my novels can be independently read in any order.)

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[This article is the second in a series about social media use by authors. Feel free to comment.]

Let’s see: I’ve disparaged Twitter—it’s mostly useless, for authors directly participating at least (your publicist might use it, though); and I’ve given my advice to use Facebook in a limited sense (you could limit it to just an author page—if they start charging, forget about it). What’s left?

Goodreads. This massive website for discussing books and reading used to be a lot better, but it’s gone downhill since Amazon took it over. It’s never been user friendly and allows cliques to develop without any adult supervision.  Anyone can form a group, and some of them are huge.  Groups are run by a monitor (maybe more than one for large ones), and submonitors often control subsections of groups. Rarely you’ll come across monitors or submonitors who are snarky individuals, little despots who like to flaunt their power.

Authors should promote their books in the sections allocated to them, of course, but the definition of promotion is often distorted by monitors. I was censored in one chat thread about sex and romance in books just for mentioning my opinion as both reader and author—no mention of my books, so not really promotional at all.

Groups can be political too. I was kicked out of a discussion group for expressing an opinion contrary to the monitor’s (I can’t even remember what the thread was about, or what pissed him off—a mountain out of a molehill, to be sure, but the little tyrant booted me out without any explanation).  You never know when someone will get their hackles up and go after you. Back away from such people. They’re not worth your time.

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This article is about Facebook and is part one of two in a series on how authors can use social media. Please don’t blast me with your comments just yet: I’m not breaking my New Year’s resolution to avoid political op-eds (they take time to research I’d rather spend on fiction writing). This article is about Facebook and therefore about writing, at least for me. (OK, blast away with your comments after reading the article. That’s OK.)

Like many authors, I have a Facebook author page. You can “Like” it, but you can’t comment (comments are only accepted on this blog).  It’s a nice complement to this website where I can announce articles in my blog, post comments about important books in my life (not mine—consider them mini-reviews), and let readers and writers know about my own books (including any sales I might have on Smashwords).

Facebook is a tool that’s there, so I use it. So should every author, unless s/he’s an old mare or stallion in the Big Five’s stable, writers like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King, ones they consider the “sure bets.”  Facebook allows me more freedom than Twitter, which I refuse to use. I also post in my regular Facebook account, but you have to be a “friend” or a “friend of a friend” to see those posts. On Facebook these days, that doesn’t mean all my friends agree with me on everything, but, like true friends, we can agree to disagree and move on. I recommend this limited approach to Facebook for all authors.

Facebook’s business model expects me to use Facebook advertising (sorry, Mr. Zuckerberg, I don’t) and provide all my personal information so they can target me with ads from their other clients (I’ve turned as much of that off as I can). Maybe people sharing my tactics (or not using Facebook at all now) are killing Facebook because of their flawed business model, but it’s only flawed because it’s not regulated.  For some reason, the government thinks Amazon, Facebook, Google, and other internet mammoths can regulate themselves, but that’s what they do with Wall Street in general.

Self-regulation anywhere in commerce and industry (and even government failures to enforce regulations) can lead to the three-legged stool of the good, the bad, and the ugly, with the latter sometimes becoming longer and toppling everything. Organizations like Cambridge Analytica can target you; Russia can target you; and Democrats and Republicans can target you. By offering Facebook your personal data, anyone can target you, whether you’d like them to do so or not.

I’m a writer who uses the internet a lot. I still prefer to keep my author page on Facebook as a simple extension of my website. I’m running a business—authors have to do that these days, even if they hire people to help them because it’s so time consuming (I’m sure Stephen King avoids the internet because he or his publisher hires people to do that, but I might be wrong). By the way, my website is a major expense (it might become more so if net neutrality is trashed—I can only pay so much “protection money” to internet service providers). Sure I can live without Facebook; I can even live without my website.

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Whether there are even many YA (young adult) readers is a natural question to ask right up front. Here’s why: With so many distractions—music, videos, music videos, video games, movies, streaming video, social media featuring video (do you see the trend?)—do young adults have time to read a book just for fun? Sure, they have to read in their classes (more than likely, that just turns them off from reading), but would they rather pick up a book and read it for R&R, given all those distractions?

The Harry Potter phenomena proved something new could occur: an author could create a series of books where kids in the books grew along with kids in the books’ audience. To some extent, the Hunger Games series tapped into the same trend. This audience growing with characters is a dynamic phenomenon, so my question must now take a static form: Can a good static YA book focused on some particular kids at some particular point in time and space appeal to all ages in the 12-19 age group? In other words, do we now need dynamics in a series a la Rohling, not statics, for success in YA writing?

We can find encouraging data in the number of adults who read YA. It’s not just that many adults are young at heart. It’s also not just that many more adults are readers than kids. What happens is that a YA novel, even the static kind, squeezes the essence out of themes that resonate with both young and old readers. YA novels treat adult themes—power struggles, violence, and sexual angst are common enough, for example, as the two series I’ve mentioned show, as well as many other YA books (including A. B. Carolan’s second edition of my YA novel, The Secret Lab). Yet the themes are distilled and manageable—we can inspect them in detail without all the complications of the adult world. While adults love series, they are happy to read a more static and compact story, a snapshot of people’s lives. Is the same true of kids?

At the end of a linear spectrum we find twelve-year-olds who just enjoy a story about kids like them, and at the other we’ll find mature adults who see a lot more and perhaps reflect on their own childhoods. A similar spectrum exists for fantasy, which might explain why YA fantasy is so popular.

I’m not sure about YA sci-fi mystery, though. A. B. Carolan and I have e-chatted about this. There’s a fuzzy line between fantasy and sci-fi, of course, so YA sci-fi could be popular. YA mysteries? Maybe not so much. I was reading about the Hardy boys’ adventures when I was about eight. Does anyone read them anymore? A. B. has more faith in kid’s reading habits than I do. As a professor and researcher, I loved working with kids and probably relate to them better than adults—they’re creative, imaginative, and full of energy. A. B. agrees with that, but we don’t quite agree that the Harry Potter phenomena implies kids are reading more. And, of course, Harry Potter is about the magic in fantasy, not the magic in sci-fi.

I hope A. B. is right and that his rewriting and reediting will make the second edition of The Secret Lab a success. He has written a new novel, The Secret of the Urns, based on my short story “Marcello and Me.” Both of these books are YA sci-fi mysteries. I think you’ll like both books, no matter your age. A. B. knows you well.

***

The Secret Lab (2^nd ed). Four students on the International Space Station discover the origins of a mutant cat and uncover a conspiracy in a sci-fi mystery that’s sure to entertain young adults and adults who are young at heart. In a new second edition completely rewritten and reedited by Steven M. Moore’s collaborator A. B. Carolan. Now available in a print version (Create Space) as well as all ebook formats on Smashwords.

From a review of the first edtion: “I will disclose this: I picked up The Secret Lab because of Mr. Paws, the intelligent cat. Yes, I could not resist the temptation to read the adventure of a sentient, mathematics inclined cat, told by Steven M. Moore. It exceeded my expectations. Mr. Paws is the result of a genetics experiment aboard a facility orbiting Earth in 2147. The cat and his newly found friends, a group of four smart teenagers, find themselves in an intrigue with corporate agendas, young curiosity, dangerous and ethically problematic research, relationships and their difficulties when coming of age. The complexity is enthralling, but the author also makes it easy to follow, using a light, natural style to tell us their story.”–Alfaniel Aldavan, in a Smashwords’ 5-star review

In libris libertas!

[Note: This article is part of the new series of blog posts, “Character Bios”—you’ll find them all in the blog category of the same name.]

Carlos Obregon. As chief medical officer of the starship Brendan, Dr. Carlos had an illustrious career of saving lives and resolving situations and problems as he and his shipmates mapped out strange planets and encountered strange cultures in the service of ITUIP’s exploratory program of near-Earth space (ITUIP is an acronym for the “Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets,” sort of a European Union of near-Earth space planets). The good doctor is also a student of history and an amateur sleuth, so his adventures often have little to do with the medical profession. He’s like a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson all in one person, although his intern, Julie Chen, often plays the role of Dr. Watson.

Dr. Carlos was born on New Haven, an Earth-like planet in the 82 Eridani system. He gave up a promising career in medical research to become a starship medical officer, where he still managed to write many papers on ET physiology and infirmities. He never contracted for a dyad or triad, but he had one daughter with a woman he met once while on planetary leave. Dr. Chen cured the daughter’s blindness on a later visit when Dr. Obregon finally met his daughter. That very act created some cultural problems with the planet’s natives. He’s now retired, whereabouts unknown.

Julie Chen. Now also a starship medical officer, Dr. Chen interned with Dr. Carlos Obregon and resisted striking out on her own until he insisted she do so. She participated in many of his adventures as a consequence. Together the two doctors represent the most famous experts on ET physiology and infirmities during the early days when ITUIP exploratory starships probed near-Earth space.

Dr. Chen still serves as chief medical officer on a starship, and she holds the record of being the longest serving medical officer, even without counting the internship with Dr. Obregon. Like him, she doesn’t have time for permanent relationships, but she’s had her share of romances. She was also born on New Haven, but did her medical studies on Sanctuary, a planet in the Delta Pavonis system.

***

Short stories about Dr. Obregon and Dr. Chen can be found in the collections, Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and Fantastic Encores! These are only available on Amazon. A new one by A. B. Carolan, Steve’s collaborator, can be found here in the blog category “ABC Shorts.” There might be a few in “Steve’s Shorts” too, because Steven loves to tell stories about these two doctors’ space adventures.

In libris libertas!  

Whether you’re just a reader interested in how the current publishing business works, or an indie or traditionally published writer wanting to know what works in marketing, in this article I consider some book marketing advice that I call myths. With 10+ years in this business, these are still just opinions. Yours might be different. Here we go:

Low-price books sell better. First objection: A reader might just think your low-priced book is crap. If you set the price at $0.99 or worse, give it away, you’re sort of implying that, after all. Let’s consider indies: you’ll pay $500-$1000 just to get your book to market (you shouldn’t be 100% DIY, after all, if you want a professional product), so you need to sell at least 600 copies of your book to break even—that doesn’t happen on the average. (I’m talking about nominal prices, not sales prices, but you still shouldn’t give your book away).

Second objection: A reader might wonder why you bother to write a book and wrap it in a nice, professional package if you don’t put any value on all that hard work. Are you some kind of masochist?

Third objection: Free and low-priced books often appear on websites looking to advertise them for a substantial fee (will you sell more than they charge plus your production costs?), so you’ll be hawking your cheap ebook with many other similarly priced ebooks, and your book will just become part of the noise.

A related myth is that the ebook sweet spot for indie prices is $2.99 to $3.99. Readers will pay more if they’re interested in your book, something the Big Five counts on because their ebook prices are almost as high as the ones for print versions, which makes no sense at all (small presses are usually smarter). What’s common sense (for fiction) is to charge proportionally to the number of words, in steps starting from $2.99, but $6.99 isn’t out of the question for long novels (whether anyone wants to read anything anymore, especially long novels, is another question). At least that would be using a logical measure of your hard work (we can argue about that base price for 45k to 55k words—it’s increasing—but even small presses should have a similar pricing model).

Amazon is essential to sale books. Penny Sansevieri, well-known book marketing guru, says “…Amazon can also be an author’s best friend,” my emphasis on “can.” They’re usually not! In fact they exploit both readers and writers. Take Prime. I don’t care how much you read, you can probably get more for your money if you just watch for sales and avoid that Prime fee. Book borrowing? You’re better off with your public library or Smashwords’s affiliated lenders. Amazon’s KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited aren’t an author’s friend. No way.

Authors get little help from Amazon because they (1) artificially drive prices low (as I’ve noted, you’re your low price, even that 70% royalty means you still need to sell a lot of books to break even), and (2) they spend no money on marketing until the book has lots of reviews (most of which aren’t really reviews, of course) and a high rank, a vicious circle that’s obviously difficult to break out of. (For the second point, there are orgs who ask for 5 or 10 5-star reviews and/or low prices and still require you to pay quite an advertising fee, like BookBub, but you’ll require a second mortgage to pay for their services even at that).

Mark Coker has called December 8, 2011, Dependence Day for indie authors—that’s the day Amazon announced KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited. He states, “Today, over one million ebooks are exclusive to Amazon via KDP Select and KU [Kindle Unlimited]. Those books are like leeches to slowly drain other booksellers of their livelihood.” A recent TED Talk considered the situation with Amazon, Google, and so forth and their negative influences on American retailing.

I’m not saying that you should skip putting your book on Amazon—readers do go there to look for books, after all, and they dominate the retail market, but Amazon trains authors to undervalue their hard work and readers to expect the same. But it’s time to join the Revolution! Declare your independence and don’t be exclusive to Amazon. (Oh, and by the way, I’m tired of authors like Eisler and Konrath or marketing people like Sansevieri who sing praises to their Amazon god, but you might have figured that out already.)

Books that don’t sell a lot of copies are bad. Amazon and the Big Five would like readers to think that.  That’s a bunch of malarkey too. There are many good authors and good books that aren’t bestsellers, and bestsellers are just as likely to be of inferior quality as books that don’t sell well (I could name some representative titles from the entire spectrum from 100% DIY self-publishing to Big Five books, but I’ll not do so). On the flip side, books that win literary prizes often don’t sell well at all either. If you can believe Amazon stats, they’ve stated that most books (on Amazon) sell no more than 300 copies. That “most” implies they can’t all be bad, can they?

What’s this mean to a reader? Maybe you should avoid jumping onto some of those bandwagons, especially those Amazon ones that are so artificially created. I’ve been impressed with only about 10% of the books on Amazon I’ve read that have 1000+ reviews (again, that goes for indie as well as Big Five books). And Amazon’s 4- or 5-star rank is in doubt when I buy a book with 2 or 3 stars and like it. (A major reason why I don’t pay attention to reviews or rankings as a reader—see below.)

Advertising sells books. Depends on the kind of advertising. The Big Five seem to think mega-advertising sells books, but endorsements by other Big Five authors from their stables of old mares and stallions who they think are sure bets on the race course, full-page ads in the NY Times (the paper enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the Big Five conglomerates, to state it nicely), and TV spots of some old author pimping his new release (so far I’ve only seen ones by old stallions, who are frankly ready for the glue factory), turn me off. (For every such book…or author…I can always think of at least ten better ones that don’t get this kind of marketing help.)

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[Note: It has come to my attention that my settings for comments to these blog posts were incorrect…probably since the last WordPress upgrade. They are now correct, so feel free to comment. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.  Also, as an FYI, your comment has to be approved by me to avoid trolls who rant and use foul language, but I get an email for each potential comment, so that approval is usually quick. I check my WP spam folder on a regular basis too. I don’t mind differing opinions—it’s good to have discussions. I do mind strong and insulting language.]

Water is rarely mentioned in fiction unless it’s almost a main character (thirsty party lost in the desert, villain poisoning a water supply, lack of water on the moon, etc—writers, are you jotting down these ideas?). In Niven and Pournelle’s Fallen Angel, it is a main character, in the form of snow—lots of it produced by extreme weather. In London’s “To Build a Fire,” it’s the snow again. (Anyone suffering through recent blizzards in the high Sierras, Midwest, or Boston area will probably agree that snow can become a villain.)

I’m surprised there aren’t more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels about extreme weather. Maybe The Wizard of Oz was the last one to be really famous, but that tornado in Kansas only had a cameo role. Tornados are spawned by thunderstorms—lots of water. I once saw a tornado in Kansas—it was impressive but far away on the horizon, so it seemed not to be such a villainous character. But it was soon raining like hell!

Drought has more than a cameo role in my new post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Humans (scheduled for publishing in 2019), but it more enables the prose rather than being a main character. My protagonist, Penny Castro, is preoccupied with water.

First, she’s an ex-USN search and rescue diver who ends up recovering corpses for the LA County Sheriff’s Department—ponds, rivers, and the ocean are where she works as a CSI. Second, after the apocalypse (a bio-engineered contagion delivered by missiles), she spends a lot of her time searching for and collecting water just to survive, or to help others survive. Third, she wants to grow things—understandable when she can’t find much to eat except dog and cat food—so she needs more of it. And fourth, she hates water because her brother almost drowned her as a kid, but she met her fear head-on to become a champion high school swimmer and Navy diver.

California, even before the apocalypse, worried about having enough water. Desalination platforms dot the coast and pump fresh water to thirsty Californians. Survivors of the apocalypse become even thirstier when the platforms stop pumping and mountain snow packs diminish. Drought seems like a villain.

Fresh, potable water is, of course, a big deal. Life on Earth couldn’t exist without it. Lack of fresh, potable water is already a problem in many areas of the world—emphasis on “clean, potable.” Lack of water will become even a bigger problem over time. As often happens when a problem is big and no one can think of a solution, people ignore the problem.

In my novel, Penny Castro can’t ignore it. Even with not many people left in the world, those last humans still need water to survive. That’s a theme in the novel. The jury’s out on whether we can solve this problem in real life. Stay tuned.

***

The Secret Lab (2^nd Ed). Four students on the International Space Station discover the origins of a mutant cat and uncover a conspiracy in a sci-fi mystery that’s sure to entertain young adults and adults who are young at heart. In a new second edition completely rewritten and reedited by Steven M. Moore’s collaborator A. B. Carolan. Now available in a print version (Create Space) as well as all ebook formats (Amazon and Smashwords).

From a review of the first edtion: “I will disclose this: I picked up The Secret Lab because of Mr. Paws, the intelligent cat. Yes, I could not resist the temptation to read the adventure of a sentient, mathematics inclined cat, told by Steven M. Moore. It exceeded my expectations. Mr. Paws is the result of a genetics experiment aboard a facility orbiting Earth in 2147. The cat and his newly found friends, a group of four smart teenagers, find themselves in an intrigue with corporate agendas, young curiosity, dangerous and ethically problematic research, relationships and their difficulties when coming of age. The complexity is enthralling, but the author also makes it easy to follow, using a light, natural style to tell us their story.”–Alfaniel Aldavan, in a Smashwords’ 5-star review

In libris libertas!

Technically speaking, saying I don’t advertise at this website IS an advertisement—in another words, it’s a feature readers might like. But why don’t I advertise here? I could make some extra green. Many websites do so, even many authors’ websites—from popup ads to services and affiliations with the 800-pound elephant in the retail room, Amazon.

When I go to a website and get bombarded by popup ads, though, it irks me. I get enough of that from Amazon, Facebook, Goodreads, Google, and LinkedIn, not to mention other websites, so much so that I’m often tempted to end my participation on all those social media and retail sites.

I mute TV ads—too bad there isn’t a “video mute” as well, but then I guess I wouldn’t know when the show starts again. I let telemarketers’ robocalls just ring—if I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer. Period. (That robokiller app for the smart phone sounds like a great invention.) An annoying ad makes me less inclined to buy a product or use a service, exactly the opposite of what the advertiser wants, I’m sure.

With those negative experiences, why would I bother you, dear reader, with even more ads? I wouldn’t feel good about it. It would also seem unethical. There’s little moral integrity left in America, but that doesn’t mean I have to add to the decay. Most internet commerce is more than decay, of course. It’s like a toxic landfill where you need a hazmat suit.

Sure, I list some trusted websites on my “Join the Conversation” webpage that either offer services I’ve used or sell products that I approve. Some of these might have their own ads for other products and services—I can’t control that. Besides, that’s not the same thing, because nothing happens until you click on my website’s link to that other website.

In fact, it’s the same thing as clicking on the link to one of my books that takes you to the Amazon page (you didn’t know the cover icon links to the book’s Amazon page?—try it!). You can buy the book there, of course, but I do it more so you can see more info about the book that’s not available on the “Books & Short Stories” webpage—the latter is really only a summary. FYI: I’m not encouraging you to buy on Amazon—I don’t think this huge retailer is a friend of readers and writers. I’d just as soon have you buy the book elsewhere—on Smashwords or their affiliates, for example, or at the publisher’s website or a bookstore or other online retailer like B&N, where applicable.

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[Note: This article is part of the new series of blog posts, Character Bios—you’ll find them all in the blog category of the same name.]

Dao-Ming Chen. Born on Long Island in the state of New York to Chinese immigrant parents, Dao-Ming was an accomplished diver in high school and college. After studying economics and training in the Army ROTC, she became part of an experimental and secret special ops group for women in the Green Berets (U.S. Army). Many of her activities in that group and its very existence are still classified Top Secret. She joined the NYPD where she first met Castilblanco as a uniformed cop; the case involved the murder of a Central Park carriage driver (“The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” in World Enough and Crime).  She spent time in the narcotics division (some cases are described in Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java), and has partnered with Rolando Castilblanco since 2014 (their first case together as detectives is described in The Midas Bomb).

She is a tall, strong woman who doesn’t smile much—Castilblanco calls her his “Asian Mona Lisa”—but she’s in excellent physical shape and is good at martial arts.  She speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin as well as English.  She is married to A.T.F. agent Eric Kulmala, and they now have one child.

She’s Catholic and a conservative, and she and Castilblanco are like yin and yang, but a great crime-solving duo.

Rolando Castilblanco. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, Rolando became interested in history in high school. He studied criminology at John Jay College and entered the U.S.N. after graduation, where he became a SEAL and participated in many special op missions. He also started as a uniformed cop in the N.Y.P.D. and soon became a homicide detective; the murder of the carriage driver described above was his first homicide case. He’s progressive, but still works well with his partner, Detective Chen. Major cases appear in the seven novels of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” Some minor cases are short stories in Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java and various PDFs Steve has free for the asking.

He’s a tall, corpulent man who often mixes barbs, similes, and metaphors in his speech.  He speaks Spanish and some Urdu and Pashtun as well as English.  Because of his love for ethnic foods, he tends to have weight problems and suffers from acid reflux.  He is married to the TV news reporter Pam Stuart. They adopted his cousin’s too kids.

He recently converted from Catholicism to Buddhism.

***

Gaia and the Goliaths. #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is on sale at Smashwords until March 31, a 50% price reduction. The NYPD homicide detectives are given the case of a murdered environmental activists. Like many of their cases, it blows up to have international ramifications. Available in all ebook formats, including .mobi (Kindle). Use the coupon code on checkout.

In libris libertas!