No, this isn’t one of my political blog posts (see pubprogressive.com if that’s what you like). It’s about villains in fiction—my fiction and others’.

The new Indiana Jones movie has the Alan Quatermain-like Indy battling Nazi villains once again. He’s made a career fighting them. Every sane person hates Nazis. (Exceptions are found among the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Boebert, Cruz, Gaetz, Greene, and other fascists, of course.) Even Putin used them as scapegoats, comparing Ukrainians to Nazis—quite unbelievable considering that everyone outside Russia knew Zelenskyy is Jewish! (You’d think the Russians would know that too. Or maybe they do, and it’s only a return to their anti-Semitic ways? Stalin-like pogroms anyone?)

Yes, those old Nazis are ideal villains, but a fiction writer has to create period stories to employ them in that way. (Even one of the best sci-fi tales, James Hogan’s The Proteus Operation, which is time travel done right, is a period story.) Hitler and all his evil cronies make great villains. Very few characters, real or otherwise, can be so evil. Their reincarnations depicted in tales about more recent times also provide villains. Neo-Nazis in Rembrandt’s Angel want to establish a Fourth Reich, for example. (Only cartel leaders’ evil can begin to compare—see the same novel.)

As an author, I prefer to use the Nazis as models, and real life now seems to do the same. Putin and Xi are fascists comparable to Hitler, for example (yes, Xi, you are a dictator!), and so I often use them as villains, men so evil that even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates their guts. (Kalinin appears in many of my mystery/thriller novels.)

Putin is more like a mafia don, though, while Xi is more practical in sagely wielding his dictatorial power in China than Hitler ever was in Germany. Putin, of course, is more like Hitler than Xi; he’s stupid, not clever, whereas Xi is a smart technocrat. (Perhaps his Western education made all the difference?) Yet Hitler is the fascist who blazed the trail for them all. No ethnic cleansing before or after (e.g. Ottoman Turkey with the Armenians and Myanmar’s junta with the Rohingya) can compare to the Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews.

I feature Putin and Xi, both real-world fascist leaders, as villains in many of my later novels, most recently in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series. (Putin’s oligarchs first appeared in Gaia and the Goliaths, though, book seven in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series—that was long before they became such news items.) I will continue to use real-life villains whenever it suits my fancy.

Traditional publishers don’t like authors to use real-life people as characters, but these novels of mine are mostly self-published (all of Morgan’s, for example). Hence I can damn well use them as villains because there’s no way they could ever sue me! (Um, okay, if Trump is reelected, I might be in trouble.) I think that makes these novels (and others) come alive for readers. They relate to our real world today. And their villains are real-life dirtbags, not dead Nazis!

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“Inspector Steve Morgan.” Last week I featured an evergreen series. This shorter one (fairly new, compared to my others) containing three novels covers three aspects of evil. The first and third feature Putin and Xi as villains, respectively, who cause the clever inspector a lot of grief from their vultures’ perches far away. The direct threat comes from their lackeys, of course. (These villains always like to maintain deniability.) The second book in the series might remind readers of the cults organized by Koresh, Manson, and Jones (a Manson acolyte is about to be pardoned—why, I don’t know); an evil cult leader ruins his acolytes’ lives. Together the novels in this trilogy have enough evil villains to make the reader of mystery and suspense novels forget about Indy and the Nazis for a while.

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

Amazon has been anti-author/anti-publisher for quite a while (I boycott it as much as possible), belying its beginning as an online bookstore, and it has dragged Goodreads down ever since it was purchased by Amazon. Goodreads has become so bad that even the New York Times is going after it (article in the June 27 edition). That’s not surprising when you read the article. The Times caters to the Big Five publishing consortiums, and the latter’s authors are also getting whacked by trolls on Goodreads as well as Amazon.

In the years before Amazon, Goodreads was a neutral congregating place for authors and readers alike where genre and character preferences were more prevalent than politics and trolling. Many of its groups had lively and interesting discussions about books. I know; I was in some of them. Then the trolls took over. Many groups became anti-author and little personal kingdoms for their authoritarian monitors. I bailed out of a lot of groups when I dared express something the monitors and their toadies didn’t like. Goodreads has continued to be dominated by trolls, as the New York Times’ article proves. And Amazon has done nothiong to stop them.

I suppose the bifurcation of Goodreads and other book discussion groups into warring camps is only a reflection of what’s going on culturally and politically in the US in general, a separation into warring tribes out to destroy the other tribes. Social media has become a dangerous jungle, so Goodreads is not exceptional.

But it never was a good place for self-published authors, and even less so after Amazon took it over. Most of my books are self-published, but my traditionally published ones weren’t received well at all either. And members of Goodreads can opine about any book without even reading it! At least the old Amazon site tries to avoid that; it just follows the old model: Anyone can review a book if they purchased it. Many do, get their one-star troll-reviews published, and then return the book. On Goodreads, though, it’s a free-for-all!

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Dan Brown made the phrase “divine feminine” famous in his Da Vinci Code. (My Son of Thunder does the same a bit more realistically.) But anti-machismo story lines have traditionally been rare in fiction. (I’ll give Dan the credit for trying to change that.)

From Bond to Solo, Reacher, and Rhyme, male detectives and PIs have dominated mysteries and thrillers. Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and other Hollywood hunks strove to project their macho allure to worshipping women by playing their signature roles. I suppose it makes sense: Men throughout history have erroneously thought they determine the fate of everything in the world, and that includes entertainment.

Early on in my sci-fi stories, I created a future where women had as many principal roles as men, if not more. So it was natural when I began writing mysteries and thrillers (the first was The Midas Bomb where Chen and Castilblanco are the principal characters) that women starred as much as or more than men. And that continued throughout my oeuvre!

I’ve admired smart, strong women for a long time, even before my first novel Full Medical, which features several of them. They see things differently compared to men, especially compared to those male characters who are stereotypically macho men filled with excess testosterone. Lincoln Rhyme tones that down a bit (or maybe Deaver thinks his character appeals to the mothering instincts of women?), but not much, especially when Denzel portrays Rhyme in the corresponding movies.

“Enough of that!” I said to myself long ago. “Fiction must reflect reality, and the reality is that the world would probably be a much better place if men paid more attention to women or women were in charge.” (Not ones like Keri Lake, of course, who are just imperfect clones of bad-acting testosterone-filled thugs.)

In both my series and stand-alone novels (seven of the former, without counting A. B. Carolan’s), either the principal characters are female or they share the stage with males. Some will say that’s silly on my part because men rule, but I can counter that perception with many arguments. If you force me to stick to the commercial viability of my books, let me only say that women read a lot more than men! It’s hard for me to believe that they’re only interested in reading about macho hunks. (I’m ignoring romance and erotic novels. Their audience is primarily female.) I believe women want to see female principals in sci-fi, thriller, and mystery novels. They can’t all be interested in those macho-male heroes!

But that’s all mostly beside the point. I, as an author and a reader. want to see more female protagonists. In my life, I’ve admired a lot more women than men at work and in my social interactions (especially when I used to participate in book events—men are rarely seen there unless a woman has forced a man to accompany them). The human feminine might not be divine, but women are also often a lot more interesting and more competent than men…at all levels! Let’s celebrate them in our fiction!

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Four strong, smart women. Dao-Ming Chen, Jenny Wong, Mary Jo Melendez, and Penny Castro have principal roles in the “Chen and Castilblanco,” “Chaos Chronicles,” “Mary Jo Melendez,” and “The Last Humans” series. You can meet them all by starting with the first books in each series, respectively: The Midas Bomb, Survivors of the Chaos (although that has a second edition in the ebook bundle of the entire “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy), Muddlin’ Through, and The Last Humans. Readers will find enough action, suspense, mystery, and thrills in these ebooks to last their entire summer and into the fall. And yes, there’s romance as well! (Some of these novels are on sale during June at the Smashwords store.) Enjoy!

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

Sci-fi authors often extrapolate current events, inventions, and issues into the future, so they run the risk of getting it wrong. Usually, the farther they extrapolate, the safer the extrapolation, because who knows what things will look like thousands of years hence? Near-future extrapolations can easily be proven wrong later on in the life of a novel. I’m more than a sci-fi author, of course, but I’ve written enough speculative fiction that I’ve guessed a lot about what will occur in humanity’s future, near or far.

Some of my guesses are more obviously wrong than others and soon proven wrong. Hydrogen-powered cars in the early “Chen & Castilblanco” novels are an example. A more egregious error perhaps, because I saw the intense hatred for our first black president among the far right (who became today’s MAGA maniacs—their future fuehrer championing that “birther theory” for years), I thought there’d be at least one attempt to assassinate Obama (the first novel, The Midas Bomb). (If Obama’s roasting of Trump in that national press event had already occurred—the latter’s expression is enough to betray his thoughts because narcissistic sociopaths can’t take humorous criticism—I probably would have guessed that the assassin would be a Trump supporter, not a Russian terrorist as in the novel.) These errors (and others) were near-future extrapolations that are surprisingly more difficult because they’re usually more detailed and specific than the far-future ones. They also turned my whole “Future History” timeline into an alternate history of humanity after the fact!

That timeline is also interesting because it predicts a slower turn to fascism in the world than what’s occurring, an eroding fascism in the US and elsewhere that basically follows the Chinese model—i.e. an Earth controlled by autocratic multinational corporations, their CEOs forming a world order akin to an oligarchy that doesn’t require a Putin or Xi. I believe that will still occur a lot faster now (I’m more pessimistic about this with every day that passes), but it looks like this Chaos I’ve postulated might arrive a bit later than I thought. People will have to get tired of personality cults first, Narcissus le Grand’s among them.

Moving along that timeline, the excesses of AI we now worry about (Chat-whatever is still very primitive, computer code that’s more brute-force than elegant) are seen in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (bridge novel between the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series and “Clones and Mutants”), and they naturally led me (I was already bored by HAL) into Full Medical (first book in the latter series) and the consequences of cloning. While AI might have more importance than I’ve projected, cloning has been simmering on the stove’s backburner and will probably soon rear its ugly head again. On the other side of the stove, you’ll find bubbling in the pot more atrocities and excesses created by radical religious fanatics like those that already exist because of these fanatics’ participation in the MAGA hordes; you won’t have to wait long for the consequences portrayed in Soldiers of God. Or maybe I just didn’t get the order right?

Of course, for me and many other sci-fi writers, these predictions about humanity’s future are just warnings that put flesh on the bones of a plot that is often an exciting adventure, mystery, or thriller. Readers are imaginative and smart enough to suspend belief and just enjoy the rides on these futuristic rollercoasters. I do that in my own reading, but in my writing I still feel bad sometimes when I got it wrong.

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The “Future History” mega-series of novels. This alternate-history timeline begins with The Midas Bomb and moves through six series of novels (“Chen & Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” “Steve Morgan,” “Clones & Mutants,” “Chaos Chronicles,” and A. B. Carolan’s YA sci-fi mysteries), three standalone novels (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, Soldiers of God, and Rogue Planet), and ends with the Dr. Carlos stories (see Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and elsewhere). The books can generally be found wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there are free PDF downloads containing stories that have settings on this timeline. (See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) A free PDF download covers most of the timeline. (I try to keep it up to date.) Enjoy!

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

I’ve explained a few times here in articles in this blog how I’ve chosen prices for my books, both ebooks and print versions (also see the little course “Writing Fiction,” the free PDF download). Some prices of print versions are out of my control for books published by my two small-press publishers, Penmore Press (Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder) and Black Opal Books (The Last Humans). Now pricing is out of my control for my other print versions—not that there are many (most of my books are only in ebook format), but there are some important changes for YA readers. Amazon has decided to unilaterally force price changes in all self-published print books that were published using their KDP POD service (print on demand—it used to be called Create Space), completely ignoring any considerations self-published authors might have against taking such an action.

This self-serving and egregious action by Amazon is basically a breach of contract, the one entered into between Amazon’s KDP and self-published authors. In other words, we authors who use that service chose Amazon over some other POD service (such services existed long before Amazon’s Create Space got in on the act, even before ebooks) because of the contract details existing at that time. Amazon shouldn’t be able to legally change that contract without the self-published author agreeing to the changes.

To give that breach of contract charge a bit more oomph, we self-published authors should make it into a class action lawsuit: All self-published authors with print books published (and sold!) by Amazon should sue the retailer for breach of contract. Of course, that probably won’t occur. People let Amazon get away with murder…at least commercially. They’ve ruined retail competition in the US and worldwide, basically creating a retail monopoly in so many consumer areas. The big evil Bezos bot and all his little evil bots at the top get rich on the backs of suppliers and consumers. It’s time they’re taken down a notch!

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From my own experience as a reader, I generally consider sci-fi tales as a young person’s sport, although that doesn’t stop a lot of people young-at-heart from being great fans of the genre. Some of those dedicated readers are purists too—people who avoid boy magicians and cute robots and androids from those slick fantasy tales and even the inheritors of all those Buck Rogers-style space operas—so the sci has to be in the sci-fi to keep them happy. But youth is always present if only in the sense that youthful imagination based on solid scientific extrapolation is required to totally appreciate it.

As a consequence, it’s no surprise that tweens or young adults are often main characters, as they are in A. B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young-at-heart). The first three are set in the sci-fi universe found on my extended “future history” timeline and feature three young women who can serve as heroes for both male and female young adults.

The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns might remind readers of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, but their principal characters are very much young ladies of our far future. Shashibala Garcia is the leader of the nerd herd (loosely modeled after my own in high school—I wrote the first edition, A. B. reedited and republished it) on a futuristic version of the International Space Station (more a depot for solar-system commerce), although Mr. Paws, a mutant cat who can help young people with advanced math like calculus, becomes her partner in sleuthing.

Asako Kobayashi, the daughter of two Human scientists, part of a group studying some strange ETs native to a satellite of a Jupiter-like planet, forces Humans there to face their bigotry and prejudices. One of the ETs plays Dr. Watson to her Sherlock Holmes/Indiana Jones-like character.

Della Dos Toros has the most interesting role in those first three ABC mysteries, though. A, B, has gone where author hasn’t very often. There’s a lot of ESP in Mind Games (explained mainly in the same way FTL travel is explained in the “Chaos Chronicles”) that I only touched upon in Sing a Zamba Galactica and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! (both novels found in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection,” a three-novel ebook bundle), but not in Rogue Planet, which could be considered a prequel to Mind Games. But the latter novel is as much a celebration of ESP storytelling as The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse is of time travel (these novels both use the multiverse concept). Combining a great principal character with a exciting and suspenseful plot (at least that was A. B.’s intention!) should have made Mind Games into a sci-fi classic. (That it didn’t must have some deep significance that’s a mystery in itself!)

I won’t dwell on Origins, A. B. Carolan’s fourth YA sci-fi mystery. It’s supposed to be part of a trilogy describing an entirely new sci-fi universe. The concept is an interesting one: The real prehistorical Denisovans are a recently discovered offshoot of the Human family tree like the Hobbits, Cro-Magnons, and Neanderthals, so the storyline provides a theory about their origins on Earth, and future novels (to make a trilogy) will supposedly be filled with the intrigue and suspense as competing factions vie for power in an ancient galactic empire. If his cameo in Intolerance is any indication, A. B. is having problems writing the next two novels. I suppose that might be because the first novel is quite self-contained. (You can tell him using my contact page to get on with it!)

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Mind Games. Humans in the future want to give androids ESP powers. What could go wrong? Set in the same sci-fi universe as Steve Moore’s “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” Rogue Planet, and Dr. Carlos Stories, this sci-fi mystery for young adults written by A. B. Carolan features a principal character and plot filled with action, intrigue, and suspense that is sure to please every young adult and adult who is young-at-heart. It’s an ideal book for those book reports tweens and young adults have to write as well. Give your tween and teen the gift of exciting reading! Or enjoy a mind-bending (literally!) tale yourself!

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

Literacy is not equivalent to reading and writing. You can be literate without even reading a book. (Baldacci’s literacy project is a misnomer in that sense.) Today’s younger generations might be literate but most are not readers. I can’t blame them too much because they have so many entertainment alternatives now besides reading a good book. I pity them instead because they’ll never have the wonderful experience of reading a good story that grabs them and makes their imagination run wild. Their minds need the crutches of technicolor images and bombastic soundtracks because they’ve never fully developed those imaginations…or even tried.

Adults who have stopped reading earn more pity. They often offer other excuses—lack of time, waning attention spans, too much reading in their working lives, and all those temptations that affect younger generations. I used to do book events (Covid ended that activity), and the scientific observer in me noticed back then that audiences were getting progressively older.

Many older adults, myself included, started reading at a young age. We didn’t worry about literacy or experiencing new places and cultures (although that was a side benefit our parents could applaud); we simply wanted to be entertained, and we did that with heroes and villains much more developed than those two-dimensional caracitures found on TV and in the movies. Audiovisual media eliminates all the good stuff that goes on in our minds when reading, a book’s author doing a far better job of explaining their actions and struggles than any Hollywood director, no matter how gifted they are at their trade. That director is not a writer, and they can’t compete with an author who stimulates a reader’s imagination!

Avid readers will understand what I’m writing here in this post; non-readers never can. And that’s sad…for the writers and readers among us and for the future of human beings on this planet. Storytelling and reading stories are essential to making us human; by not telling stories and reading them, we have lost some of our humanity. Given the current sorry state of humanity, we can ill afford to lose even a little of what makes us human.

When someone says to you, “I saw a good movie the other day,” counter that with “And I read a good book, which is more fulfilling, so why don’t you try that?” In other words, let people know you’re an avid reader. Some might just wonder what they’re missing!

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The Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries. In the first book of this trilogy, Muddlin’ Through, ex-USN-Master-at-Arms Mary Jo is working in corporate security and is framed by a secret organization to cover up their incompetence for letting the Russians steal the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”); she struggles to prove her innocence. In Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By, she takes a new job in security at a computer games company, but CIA and Russian agents are after her; they want to know where the MECHs are. In Goin’ the Extra Mile, Chinese agents kidnap her, and the MECHs set out to save her. Action, intrigue, and thrills characterize Mary Jo’s travels as readers follow her adventures around the world. These “evergreen books” are as fresh and entertaining as the day the author finished their manuscripts. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

Most readers who visit this website and especially this writer’s blog know that I’ve been boycotting Amazon KDP (“Kindle Direct Publishing”) services for a while. No recent books have been published by KDP or even appeared for sale on Amazon. In general, Amazon is not an author’s friend—far from being one; in my case, its abuses and atrocities have led to my complete boycott. (My latest books have been released by Draft2Digital and not distributed to Amazon as a retailer.) The atrocities have been committed by the big bot Bezos and his inept little bot buddies working like an evil Santa Claus and his evil elven helpers.

Here’s the latest atrocity, and it can affect most authors: I once used KDP (originally called Create Space), the Amazon POD service, for my trade paperback versions. I don’t have many. (I no longer publish them, because they kill forests. Don’t like that as a reader? Tough!) POD or “Print On Demand” means that Amazon prints them as orders come in. Now Amazon’s evil bots have decided to charge more for the printing. They offer two options to authors, neither one good.

First option: We authors can increase the prices of our print versions to cover the extra printing costs. Second option: We can cover those extra printing costs by receiving fewer royalties.

The first option is a non-starter: I won’t raise my prices! I chose the lowest price possible originally allowed by Create Space (later KDP) to make my print versions’ prices more attractive for readers than anything offered by traditional publishers, including the Big Five’s overpriced trade paperbacks. This motivation was especially strong for A.  B. Carolan’s sci-fi mysteries, The Secret Lab, The Secret of the Urns, and Mind Games, designed for young-adult audiences (adults who are young-at-heart seem to enjoy these books as well). The print version of each novel is priced at $8.99. This is low enough that a young-adult reader can even purchase the book by  themself. Raising that price diminishes that option.

So, my only possible option is the second, and I’m willing to take that hit for my readers. I will get fewer royalties and have the satisfaction that my readers and I have stuck our thumbs in Bezos’s greedy eye, but I’ll certainly tell everyone I can that this egregious action taken by Amazon is more proof that this publisher-retailer is far from being an author’s friend and never the friend of the consumer. Pox on Bezos’s house!

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Sci-fi mysteries for young adults. The three novels, The Secret Lab, The Secret of the Urns, and Mind Games, all take place in my usual sci-fi universe, the same one created in the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, Rogue Planet, and Dr. Carlos stories. Whether in ebook or print format, they’re set at different times in the future, and they’re ideal additions to your young adult’s summer reading list and school-year book reports. Give your tweens and teens some exciting sci-fi reading that will stretch their imaginations.

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

“So You’re Looking for a New Book to Read?” (in the 5/3 NY Times “Arts” section) provided me with a good laugh. I have to confess that many things the NY Times states about reading, writing, and publishing just provide me with more evidence that their editors and critics are full of it! Unfortunately, that history of arrogant advertising also proves they think avid readers are too stupid to choose their own reading material, an insulting attitude that the Times exhibits with many news items, not just those about art and culture. Hey fellows, NYC isn’t the center of the Universe!

Of course, the Times is no worse or better than other news sources—or Oprah, once upon a time—so perhaps we should analyze why media in general believes people need to be told what to read…or do. Is the public who reads the media’s pablum really incapable of making its own decisions? After all, the media often sugarcoats this advice by implying that you’re not a cool person if you don’t do X, whether X is reading a certain book or voting a certain way. When considering books and other consumer items, the Times is just aping the apes of Madison Avenue (that’s insulting the great apes, of course), but Madison Avenue is NYC, and so is the Times. They all think they’re the center of the Universe, so it’s natural that the editors just echo the very organizations they think are so necessary to keep their rag alive. Our last president, king of the White House prevaricators going from Jackson and Grant all the way to the present day, learned how to lie from Madison Avenue, after all.

But back to you readers. The following might seem harsh, but let me state that if you need the NY Times editors and critics or anyone else to tell you what to read, you’re no avid reader. (You’re excused if you’re being bullied by an overzealous high school or college English professor, of course.) Avid readers insist on making their own decisions about what books to read, and they will resent anyone who tries to dictate that to them. (I’ve resented a few English professors in my time as well as the Times’ editors and critics!) Any article in the Times that tries to do that (including the one I mentioned at the beginning) would be better used to paper the bottom of your bird cage.

So, you ask, why do I read articles from the Times about books sometimes? Am I a masochist? No, just hopeful. I can only hope that they or some other media sources might say something intelligent about reading, writing, or publishing. And, at the very least, journalistic media usually gives me something to complain about! Similarly, beyond the ad that follows this article and unlike Big Five authors’ advertising blitzes (even video teasers are used nowadays), I’ll not pay the Times or any other media to advertise or say good things about my books. The following ad is more just a reminder to you that I’ve written a lot of them, and you might find some of them interesting!

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The “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy. NYPD detective Castilblanco (a seven-book series) led me to London-based art detective Brookstone (a nine-book series), and she led me to Bristol-based Inspector Morgan. Although he only has a supporting role in The Klimt Connection (“Esther Brookstone” #8), he became a principal character in the three very different cases forming this trilogy: Legacy of Evil resolves and expands some things from Celtic Chronicles (“Esther Brookstone” #9), Cult of Evil finds Morgan’s team chasing a maniacal cult leader and scam artist, and Fear the Asian Evil expands their fight against autocratic elements that began with Russian operatives in the first book to Chinese agents and assassins in the third. You’ll never see any of these books mentioned in the Times (self-published and small press books are rarely mentioned), but I offer them for your consideration in choosing your reading entertainment.

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

They naturally appear in mystery and thriller stories, and mine are no exception. Some are evil—China and Russia’s come to mind—and some aren’t supposed to be but can be warped. Many have appeared  in some my novels–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Democracies should want their security agencies to be beyond reproach and just do the necessary work to keep the countries safe. Most of them do, of course, but there are bad apples in any barrel. “Bending the rules” to get a positive result might be a good policy once and a while, but doing that against the greater good is always questionable.

While I feature mostly UK and US agencies in my novels, I realize that the complete acronymic zoo can be confusing to readers. To help remedy that problem, I define these agencies and their acronyms at the beginning of some of my novels. You might also find the following list helpful in your other reading as well:

British national police—the Metropolitan Police System (“the Met” aka “Scotland Yard”) and its regional affiliates

British national crime agency—National Crime Agency (NCA)

British internal security—MI5

British external security—MI6

Chinese security—Ministry of State Security (MSS)

French internal security—DGSI

French external security—DGSE

Irish Republic’s national police—An Garda Siochana (Gardai or “the Guards”)

Russian internal security—FSB

Russian external security—SVR

US internal security—ATF, DEA, DHS, FBI

US external security—CIA, sometimes FBI

Notes:

The Metropolitan Police System, also called “the Met” or “the Yard” (for Scotland Yard, which is often used for both the Met and the independent but closely related City of London Police), and their regional affiliates represent the general policing organization for England and Wales; it covers general crime throughout that region with its many police districts, but it also covers background checks and crimes associated with the Official Secrets Act and railroad terminals and some local airports. Individual cities’ police departments are now considered part of the overall system (e.g., Bristol or Reading PD).

Police Scotland was created in 2013 to unify policing in all of Scotland, and it’s basically a copy of the Metropolitan Police system with all its own divisions and bureaucracy.

MI5 and MI6 were created during World War II. (The MI stands for “Military Intelligence,” and “Section Five” and “Section Six” are now just reduced to the numbers in general parlance.)

The National Crime Agency was also created in 2013 to lead efforts against organized crime, including human-, sex-, and drugs-trafficking.

One can equate MI5 + NCA to the FBI. ATF, DEA, and DHS, which are relatively recent in the US.

DGS is short for Departement Generale de Securite, and the I and E mean interior and exterior, respectively (these are the successors to the Surete).

FSB and SVR are the remnants of the old KGB, Putin’s old employer.

Of course, when in doubt, just use Google to check what an author means (or see if he got it right!).

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The “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. This nine-novel series might even have a few more security agencies and services not listed here because some novels are quite international in scope, including the first, Rembrandt’s Angel. Esther’s long career is portrayed in this series, from her work as an MI6 spy in East Berlin to various adventures after retiring from Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques division. Two novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, are free (see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). The others are available as ebooks, and the first three also have print versions. Enjoy!

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