The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan…
This romantic sci-fi thriller is a “bridge book” (see my last post for an expanded definition!). It now leads readers from the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy to the “Clones & Mutants” trilogy. It features some characters from the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series and a few new ones. And like some of my novels, it was inspired by a short story; that tale asked what a future paranoid US government will do when it discovers its aging agents with Top Secret information in their heads start becoming senile. Will they leak that information to US enemies? How can that be avoided?
I wrote this novel long before we had two old senile codgers running for president. Otherwise, the story might have been about them! Of course, their memories aren’t so good now either, at least not good enough to avoid keeping some of those Top Secret SCI documents around to jog their failing memories.
In any case, that’s one theme of this novel and the only one in the short story (which came first). The novel was written, though, to give DHS Ashley Scott a starring role. She’s a secondary character in the “Chen & Castilblanco” tales, albeit often an important one, so I thought it was only fair to give her a leading role in her own thriller. She’d been very patient while awaiting stardom. Of course, I had to put her into some dangerous situations! But my tough female protagonists can handle them!
Ashley is nearing retirement in this novel and feels very alone. That leads to this story becoming a romantic sci-fi thriller in a way like Rogue Planet, but The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan takes place in a much less distant (and therefore scarier?) future: An evil AI is one of the villains, and it makes HAL (the 2001 version, not the 2010 one) look like a wuss. That and other features of the themes and plot make this novel a lot darker compared to Prince Kaushal’s “Games of Thrones”-like adventures as he wins back his planet.
The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan is as dark as the three “Steve Morgan” novels (if not darker) although it’s intended to follow them now on my extended timeline. It’s better as a lead into the very dark “Clones & Mutants” trilogy, which was my intention. All the action takes place in the NJ and NY area while the trilogy hops around a bit (US, Africa, Spain, China, and Korea) as that extended series of novels fills out a timeline covering millennia and heads into the solar system and beyond. Readers shouldn’t ignore this novel for that reason.
But it also treats questions very relevant to today’s politics. No, I’m not a seer who can predict the future, but, as a fiction writer, I’ve studied human nature. It can be very dark! Writing about that darkness can serve as warnings that might create some light. That’s always been one motive for my writing!
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The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. Virginia is a retired FBI agent whose retirement doesn’t quite go as planned. She gets involved in a government conspiracy run by an evil villain and the AI he has created to do his bidding. DHS agent Ashley Scott and a handsome Latino investigative reporter get involved in many ways, including romantically. “Evergreen” in the sense that the plot and themes are even more current than when I finished the manuscript, this novel is full of surprises. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
