Character bios: Dao-Ming Chen and Rolando Castilblanco…
[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.
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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!
