The Hotline at the End of the World by Brady Koch

In a world paralyzed by an unprecedented outbreak, Clint mans the CDC hotline, a solitary beacon of dwindling hope. Then, one fateful day, a call comes in. Clint finds himself navigating a delicate situation involving a mysterious woman, hinted at in classified files, who may possess the coveted cure. As the world remains under a suffocating lockdown, Clint's every word, every choice, holds the weight of untold futures.

This is the third book in Koch's All Our Forgotten Futures series. And this one might give you Covid-19 flashbacks.

Years later, events at the slaughterhouse have boiled over to the country at large, and everyone is desperate. Social order is breaking down as people are becoming infected, and those who aren't infected are willing to do whatever it takes to avoid getting sick or find the mystery woman.

Clint is taking over the CDC's tip hotline. The current occupant, D'Angelo, has had his fill of the job. With the country in lockdown and people isolating themselves, he's watched as his team has been reduced to just him—the volume of calls no longer warrants a full-time staff. D'Angelo trains Clint, who has experience working other hotlines dedicated to assisting people with the virus or who have family members with it. The training and the off-duty conversations reveal a lot about the men. After the training ends and D'Angelo departs, it's just Clint and the occasional caller on the phone. It's a lonely life, and Clint has too much time on his hands.

Clint learns from D'Angelo that the standard approach to the calls is that the caller has not found the mystery woman with the cure. None of them are. There's just no way it can be her after all these years. Clint is to treat each call as if it were a hostage situation. There's a manual which Clint is instructed to follow. It's a de-escalation procedure that never fails. Clint has to stall for time so that he can track down the caller and alert the police to free the hostage before she gets hurt. It isn't easy on Clint, and Koch does a great job keeping the tension high. Eventually though, Clint gets that one call where abiding by the manual doesn't work, forcing Clint to think of a new way to rescue a woman a thousand miles away.

Despite the lack of action, The Hotline at the End of the World is a suspenseful thriller with an engaging protagonist. It doesn't matter that he's cooped up by himself, quarantined from the world. He's agonizing over the fate of this woman, unable to physically rescue her, relying solely on his intellect to outwit her kidnapper. Koch has skillfully developed his character so that you're right there beside Clint, rooting for him to succeed.

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Full Disclosure: I was hired by the author to proofread/edit this book. While you might think I'm biased, I suggest heading over to Goodreads for other opinions.

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The Forgotten Sons of Wyoming by Brady Koch

In the frozen heart of Wyoming, the Trinity Meat Processors stands as a beacon of rehabilitation. Here, men with no pasts and blank slates find purpose under the watchful eye of Pastor Isiah. Asher, unsettled by the sudden disappearance of his friend after a confrontation with a mysterious intruder, races against time, battling forgotten truths and moral dilemmas.

This is the second book in Koch's All Our Forgotten Futures series. And it's probably my favorite.

Asher is one of several men who work at the Trinity Meat Processors slaughterhouse. Koch pulls no punches when he describes the brutal work that the men do. There's a cold detachment from the process, stripping away each layer of the animal until there's nothing left. It's unsettling. It parallels the counseling sessions and church sermons that the men are required to attend as part of their therapy. They strip away the layers, trying to find the man underneath, but it's the same result: an empty shell.

Each man suffers from memory loss, unable to remember what happened before they came to work at the slaughterhouse. The "mysterious intruder," referred to in the blurb, knows. His presence disturbs the men. He accuses them of things they have no memory of. But Sonny, Asher's friend and the lead on the kill floor, has some idea, but he'll be damned if he's going to let this guy get to them. Of all the men, he's the least docile, which is unacceptable.

Asher desperately wants to remember his past and what his counselor won't tell him. It has to be something terrible, right? It seems that Sonny has the answers, which might explain why he's the most boisterous of the bunch. Events build to a head, and Asher comes to realize that things are terribly wrong. A character shows up from The Negotiated Death of Sara Glen which will cinch it for the reader. At this point, Asher and the men at the slaughterhouse are in mortal peril.

As I mentioned earlier, this story was my favorite in the series. Between Koch's descriptions of the men's lives, their work environment, and the surroundings, plus the way he builds dramatic tension, The Forgotten Sons of Wyoming makes for a solid thriller. But there's a scene towards the end of the book that really did it for me. Asher is standing in the middle of a road with the snow coming down. He needs to make an important decision. The imagery of the scene, coupled with how he comes to make that decision, is the cherry on top of a thrilling sundae.

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Full Disclosure: I was hired by the author to proofread/edit this book. While you might think I'm biased, I suggest heading over to Goodreads for other opinions.

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The Negotiated Death of Sara Glen by Brady Koch

Sara makes a startling discovery through an at-home ancestry kit: She possesses a unique immunity to the elusive Jessica Kitner Syndrome. This revelation doesn't go unnoticed. OriginPoints, the DNA test company, approaches her with a proposition that might demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Caught in the maelstrom of genetic intrigue and moral dilemmas, Sara stands torn. With a profound sense of duty on one hand and the weight of her own life on the other, she grapples with choices where clarity is elusive.

This is the first book in Koch's All Our Forgotten Futures series.

As stated in the blurb, Sara learns that she carries a cure for a disease that reverses the cognitive development of children. The problem is that in order to extract it, she must undergo a procedure that will kill her. She leans this at an engagement party for her sister. Over the course of the book, she goes back and forth between sacrificing her life to choosing to live.

While Sara attempts to keep the news of this to herself, the CEO at OriginPoints is eager to promote the technology that led to the discovery. It could lead to billions, which would make stockholders very happy and he'd wind up rich and famous. The pressure is on him to deliver.

So what's in it for Sara? Well OriginPoints will fully take care of her, pay for her to travel and see the world, memorialize her legacy, basically anything to make her out to be a hero.

The rest of the story, told completely from Sara's POV, has her debating her choice with herself. She volunteers to work at a daycare specializing in the care of kids with JKS to get the parents' perspective. She helps plan her sister's wedding; she even starts dating a guy. Sara goes back and forth until Koch throws in a couple of plot twists that change the stakes.

While Koch does a great job at developing Sara, he also does a solid job of developing all of the other characters that Sara interacts with as she tries to make her decision.

All-in-all, this story is a solid start to a great series. In the hands of a lesser author this could've been treated as a maudlin morality tale. Instead, Koch has crafted a fine dramatic thriller.

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Full Disclosure: I was hired by the author to proofread/edit this book. While you might think I'm biased, I suggest heading over to Goodreads for other opinions.

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Lines of Deception by Steve Anderson

West Germany, 1949. Former actor Max Kaspar suffered greatly in the Second World War. Now he owns a nightclub in Munich—and occasionally lends a hand to the newly formed CIA. Meanwhile, his brother Harry has ventured beyond the Iron Curtain to rescue an American scientist. When Harry is also taken captive, Max resolves to locate his brother at all costs. The last thing he expects is for Harry to go rogue.

Max's treacherous quest takes him to Vienna and Prague to Soviet East Germany and Communist Poland. Along the way, dangerous operators from Harry's past join the pursuit: his former lover Katarina, who's working for the Israelis, and former Nazi Hartmut Dietz, now an agent of East German intelligence. But can anyone be trusted? Even the American scientist Stanley Samaras may not be the hero Harry had believed him to be...

In the fourth novel of the Kaspar Brothers series, Steve Anderson cranks up the dramatic tension. The story is set in a postwar Europe transitioning to the Cold War. The Soviets have begun to flex their muscles in Europe, and the Americans are trying to hold them off while the U.K. and France are busy mending their wounds. Weary of war, all sides have resorted to brinkmanship to see who takes the leadership role for the second half of the twentieth century.

Into this setting, we reunite with Max, who we first met in The Losing Role, where he was an operative in Operation Greif during the Battle of the Bulge. Max spent most of that novel running scared, fearing for his life. He wasn't a hardened soldier or zealous SS officer. He was just a down an out German actor conscripted into service.

But since the war, he's spent the time trying to forget it, except when he's called upon to do the right thing (as in Lost Kin) because the factions may have changed, but there are still evil men in the world bullying the weak and downtrodden. And it makes him angry. When he's visited by an odd, little man while working at his nightclub that anger resurfaces. The man claims that Max's brother Harry is being held for ransom, which Max must deliver. Max is furiously protective of his brother and can barely restrain himself from taking it out on the messenger. Later, when Max encounters the man responsible for the death of a dear friend, he so desperately wants the man to suffer, but as the man is necessary to complete the mission, he has to tamp down that anger.

As suggested in the book blurb, no one is completely forthright with Max. Whether that's to protect him or deceive him is dependent on the person in question. It leads to a constant string of surprises for Max (and the reader), forcing him to react quickly or change plans in order to find his brother and get home safely. He reacts differently to these deceptions. They become a way for him to work through his anger, on some level accepting what he cannot change, which leaves him exhausted.

Lines of Deception is another solid entry in the Kaspar Brothers series. The setting is thoroughly researched with Anderson dragging in historical events to craft a credible and entertaining story. Strong characterization leads the reader into believing what the characters are telling Max, but when their deceptions are revealed, it doesn't strike one as being out of character. One realizes that Anderson left clues all along the way. Ultimately, it enables Anderson to turn a spy thriller into catharsis for his protagonist.

4 stars

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Lost Kin by Steve Anderson

After the events in Liberated Harry Kaspar has been relocated to Munich. As he enters the final weeks of service as an administrator for the military government, his life is good. He resides in a nice house with cushy amenities, has a former WAC girlfriend, and the locals appreciate his efforts to restore some semblance of pre-war normalcy. And then a cop shows up on his doorstep one night informing him that there's been an incident and his brother may be involved. Having not seen nor heard from his brother for several years, Harry's interest is piqued, though for a German-American, he knows this could be a scam, or worse. What follows is an investigation into a murder, black market sales of the spoils of war, and old scores that demand to be settled in blood.

There are elements of noir in this story. Harry's girlfriend has a bit of femme fatale to her which both excites and worries him. Meetings with informants take place in dark alleys and secluded rooms, forcing Harry to always be alert for the double cross. The atmosphere of downtrodden Munich is leaden with cold autumnal rain and early snow. And the American military government is seen through a lens of world weary cynicism.

She knew so many majors, colonels, and generals, all rearguard types who'd never seen combat but rode desks like gladiator chariots except their shields were their puffed-up chests done up with medals of every color, the swords their sharp tongues and stern memos, the feints and thrust their back-room whispers and leaks applied with extreme prejudice. Opponents cowered, colleagues awed, and mistresses swooned.

As with Liberated, Anderson has done the research. The deal that FDR and Churchhill made with Stalin in Yalta would soon turn out to be a Faustian bargain. I don't want to spoil it, but Anderson explores an aspect of that here as a way for the two brothers' paths to cross again.

Lost Kin is a strong addition to the Kaspar Brothers series. The noir elements spice up the intriguing plot, and Anderson's characters are well-developed. I got caught up in their predicament as Anderson entwined their fates with historical events. I'd recommend the series as a whole for WW2 historical fiction fans looking for something different from that time period.

4 stars.

Lost Kin was published by Skyhorse/Yucca Publishing.

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Just to be clear. This book was not submitted to us. I went out and bought it on my own.

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Liberated by Steve Anderson

In the early days of post-war Germany, Captain Harry Kaspar has been assigned by the US military government to oversee recovery efforts in the town of Heimgau. Unfortunately, the post is already occupied by Major Membre. It seems that the office that assigned Membre supersedes the one that picked Kaspar, and obviously the major outranks the captain.

Kaspar and Membre butt heads from the start. Besides smarting from missing out on the position that Kaspar feels should've been his—he trained for it after all—Membre comes across as a self-serving opportunist, more interested in personal gain than helping this Bavarian town start over. Kaspar heads off in a huff to survey the town when he discovers three German men lying in the road, evidentially tortured and murdered. He now has a mystery to solve.

With the aid of Katarina, a former German actress, Kaspar navigates black markets, systemic corruption, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and a disgruntled conquered populace in an effort to solve the murders and right some wrongs, all while trying to avoid getting killed.

Anderson's story was born out of research he did in Munich to get his master's in history. Besides touching on prejudice towards German-Americans stateside, the book calls attention to Allied looting in post-war Europe. While it might be dismissed as stealing from Nazis, it should be noted that the Nazis stole it from innocents. Be sure to check out the afterword to get an idea as to the extent of the theft.

While the story was intriguing and rooting for Harry was easy, Liberated didn't resonate with me quite as much as the previous work—The Losing Role, a story about Harry's brother Max who fought for the Germans—did. I feel that certain characters weren't as developed as I think they could've been. Still, I liked it and plan on reading the next book in the series.

3.5 stars

Liberated was published by Skyhorse/Yucca Publishing.

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Just to be clear. This book was not submitted to us. I went out and bought it on my own.

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Speck by L. Marshall James

A dark speck slips from dormancy, where it has been trapped for millennia. It is utterly alien, singularly enthralling, and devastatingly lethal. What follows in its wake are chaos and death.

There will be no escape.

The opening strikes me as a mashup of the first third of King's Dreamcatcher (the good part) and an incident that took place near the end of Koontz's Watchers. James offers us a lovely picture of an idyllic natural setting and then unleashes his "speck" upon a hapless marmot. The speck has the ability to control minds in close proximity through suggestion at the most primal level. As the speck grows in size, it gains strength and sophistication. Things spiral out of control, leaving the reader to hope that someone can get the speck under control before its destruction reaches catastrophic proportions.

The story starts with a universal omniscient narrator but switches to third person subjective once humans get involved in the story. The narrative is relayed through several characters, primarily those that encounter the speck. Characters are only given a chapter to carry the narrative, but James has them make the most of it. I never got the impression that these were disposable characters. Although their appearance on stage is brief, James invests the time in each to develop them. If the book had been a novel instead of a novella, I don't see any reason why the characters wouldn't be able to carry the story further.

But the length of the story is also something of a negative. The story reaches a point where the reader says, "Oh crap! What now?" The fast pace of the story comes to an abrupt halt. The ending comes as a bit of unsatisfying diabolus ex machina, which is followed by an epilogue that struck me as an outline for how the story could've carried on from novella to novel. I feel like the author hit a wall and either couldn't think of a way to continue or didn't want to (hence the epilogue).

Although only a novella, Speck demonstrates an author with a talent for creating believable characters, setting a good narrative pace, and establishing a realistic setting. He understands King's idiom that "bad things happen to good people" and handles it well. As James continues to develop his craft, I have no doubt that his potential will be realized.

For more information about Speck, please visit Goodreads.

Quest for Kriya by Rahul Deokar

Cover image - Quest for Kriya (Goodreads)

Haunted by tragic loss in the 1993 India earthquake, a broken Shakti with a tenuous hold on life is sheltered by her soul-sister Kriya. But when Kriya vanishes without a trace, Shakti is unwittingly swept into a cataclysmic vortex of greed, lust and betrayal. Shakti meets Shiva, a struggling Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and discovers that love is an enigmatic cosmic force.

Shakti and Shiva are thrust on a frantic race against time through the dark Mumbai underbelly, forbidden Thailand islands, and treacherous cliffs in the Andaman Sea, where danger lurks in every shadow. As they get closer to the truth, they realize that millions of innocent lives are at stake.

Quest for Kriya is an epic saga of love, friendship and sacrifice. The journey is incredible. The emotions are real. The transformation is eternal.

I was drawn to The Quest for Kriya by the names of some of the protagonists—Shiva, Shakti, and so on. I had imagined that it would explore deep issues, and make interesting mythological or religious connections. The preview passage that you get to see on Amazon and elsewhere tends to support this idea. The opening chapter, set around one person's terrible experiences of the 1993 Latur earthquake in India, was very successful at drawing me in and built up a lot of promise.

But we then jump to what might vaguely be called an earthquake-like change in another character's life in the United States. The parallel was loose, seeing as how the person concerned only lost their job, and was therefore motivated to start something new. Compared to losing one's home, family, friends and neighbours, suffering betrayal, and having to relocate to Mumbai, this seemed kind of lightweight, but I think the purpose was to set up friendships and enmities which would persist through the rest of the book.

From here on, though, the story suddenly diverted into a long, complex plot all about crime syndicates and drug dealers in India and nearby countries. Our two protagonists manage to break all this up almost without meaning to, by successfully threading their way through a series of amazing coincidences. Their rather bumbling approach to the whole affair mysteriously carries the day, aided by timely intervention from friends and well-wishers.

The plot is suspended between two cataclysms—the above-mentioned Latur earthquake and the 2004 Asian tsunami—and this basic device worked very well. But I got a bit lost in the intervening drug dealer story and didn't find the rather gooey romance between the male and female leads very believable. They seemed never able to get beyond a kind of adolescent idealisation of each other into a more credible and adult relationship. Insofar as the characters developed at all, they basically learned to conform to a set of behaviours and expectations set up by others. This is not a story of individuation or self-actualisation, but rather it is one of submission to external norms. As a result, everyone's emotional responses are very muted, as they increasingly take on board the philosophical position that nothing should disturb one's equanimity, and in the long run over many lifetimes everything will pan out for the best.

On the plus side, the book has been extremely well and carefully prepared, and for all of its heavy reliance on coincidence, the plot does keep moving along. I couldn't say if it accurately reflects police practice in the various countries, but to a casual reader it seems credible. And the basic structural device of hanging the story between two Asian natural disasters was a really compelling feature.

I guess my main difficulty was the mismatch of expectations. If there are parallels with any of the original tales of Shiva and Shakti, they are extremely well veiled. You will find little of the lively and authentic passion of the Khumarasambhavam, for example. The protagonists' potential for spirituality or real emotional engagement seems to be increasingly marginalised through the story, rather than liberated. I felt let down by the ways in which these two protagonists conducted themselves, given that their names hold so much mythological weight.

So, if you go in expecting a pacy crime plot set mostly in Asia, you will probably enjoy Quest for Kriya. If, like me, you were looking for something with more cosmic depths and resonances, it is best to revise your expectations and just go with the flow of what's there.

The author's website can be found here.

A Coup' of Sorts by Howard Rosenzweig

The story takes place in 1979 South America in an unspecified country, where a successful rebellion against a Communist regime has proven to be the same, if not worse, than the last government. Father Lupe, a village priest, and his brother Dr. Aramos, decide to take matters into their own hands to save their people. Rather than lead a rebellion that would result in thousands of lost lives and dubious victory, the brothers turn to a rabbi, Avenidas, with a solid knowledge of Kabbalah mysticism to create a golem. However, the golem is not made from dirt and clay, but instead from Dr. Aramos himself because he has been rendered emotionally hollow from a great tragedy and loss from a few years ago. According to Rabbi Avenidas, the reasoning is that a human golem can make judgments based on how humans think instead of blindly finishing the task with a great deal of collateral damage. If the golem goes rogue, the rabbi can end its life; if the golem kills the rabbi who created it, the golem dies as well. With the help of an American mercenary named Les Cohen, Dr. Aramos embarks on a journey for personal revenge and public liberation at the expense of his own soul against The General, who rules the region, Colonel Sanchez Rodriguez, and the Muertemos who work for The General.

Rosenzweig's idea to combine the mysticism of Kabbalah with vampirism, which is what the human golem becomes, is ripe with possibility. The immense power with which Dr. Aramos is imbued is enormous, but the fact that he stays true to his course of revenge shows the restraint and control he has of himself. Learning what he has already endured in his life, it is gratifying to see him use the power properly instead of going on a murderous rampage. Having an inside man in The General's camp allows the reader to believe in the possibility of the coup going to plan. The brutality of The General, his right hand man Rodriguez, and the rest of the Muertemos lays the stage for why the coup must occur and why we, the reader, should support Dr. Aramos and Father Lupe.

The problem with the story is that it doesn't immerse the reader enough into the created world for us to connect with the characters, meaning that we are rooting for them because the other side is so odious that to cheer for The General's side would be cheering for evil incarnate. Instead, the story barrels headlong to the end. This fast train to the end of the story makes a quick read, but I was left with a feeling of being unsure why I had really supported the coup.

Character motivation is what is most lacking in the story. Dr. Aramos' motivations are clear, but the other characters' motivations are left to conjecture. Is Father Lupe doing this for the people as he says, or does he have his own political agenda? Does Les Cohen care about the region, or is this a way for him to grab at power while clearing his conscience in the meantime? Why is the General so brutal—are the people difficult or is he just a bastard who likes power? What is Colonel Rodriguez getting out of all this—is power and absolutely authority enough? I have more questions, but those were some of the main ones I had regarding character motivation.

There were some minor characters whose presence is not explained until a plan is executed later in the story. These characters work for Les Cohen, but there is no other offered explanation until the last quarter of the story. To me, this is too far. There is a flashback to Cohen's time in the Vietnam war where he is saving soldier from the Vietcong; names could have been dropped here to help connect the dots in the middle of the novella. Because this wasn't done, I chalked that vignette up to the author showing us that Les Cohen has a good moral character, even if his employment choices have not always been the most ethical. While I got to make Cohen a more rounded character in my mind, I lost the nuance of the kind of people he employed that would have rounded him out further and made me understand his motivations much more clearly.

Finally, the flashbacks to explain the Maya sacrificial temple and past golems who have failed would be best placed in chronological order. At the moment, these vignettes of the past are jagged and abrupt, which served to jar me from my engagement of the story. I felt like I had to start over again and again, trying to engage myself with the characters and immerse myself in the world the author created. They also needed a little more information to tie them back to the main story, allowing readers to connect the information to what will happen later and having to stretch less to connect the dots. Trust me, I wanted to be engaged with the story. It is an intriguing idea for a story.

I understand that short stories and novellas are brief on purpose, but that doesn't mean that the story should plow through so quickly that the reader doesn't have time to become invested in the characters. This story is ripe with possibility and contains a world that wants to be breathed to life. With editing, this story will be rich and engaging, sucking the reader into a world rife with moral questions. Do the ends justify the means? How far would you go for your own personal revenge? If your personal revenge would also benefit others, is it still worth giving up your soul?

Thank you, Dr. Howard Rosenzweig, for allowing me the privilege of reading your work. Should you consider editing this, please allow me to read it again. I honestly see so much potential in your writing that I want to see it go further.

A Coup' of Sorts is available from Amazon.

This Darkness Light by Michaelbrent Collings

A man with no past, but who holds the future of the world in his hands. A woman who has sworn to protect him, for reasons she does not understand. A killer who must destroy them, or lose all he holds dear. They are running—from each other, from the plague that is killing all around them, from the dark forces beyond their understanding. Running from shadow to shadow. From dark to dark. Hoping to find light. Hoping that this darkness is not all there is. Hoping…because hope is all they have in This Darkness Light.

The book starts out like a Stephen King thriller, like the kind he wrote during the seventies and eighties when he was still hungry. Back before King started writing cinder block-sized epic tomes filled with meandering storylines that wandered off on tangents. It grabs your attention, hints at something terrible just outside your vision, and convinces you to keep reading because you have to know how this is all going to play out. And there's certainly a nod towards King with an all-obscuring fog and strange creatures that lurk within, a la The Mist. Unlike King, Collings is still hungry, and it shows. With only a couple of exceptions, Collings stays focused on the plot and the characters in said plot. There's plenty of action with several fight scenes and car chases. Horror is used to reveal the monsters living within people in a very literal sense.

Collings provides us with three likable protagonists: John (the man with no past), Serafina (the woman sworn to protect him), and Isaiah (the killer). Collings goes in depth with each of them, revealing their pasts and their struggles to hold it together as their worlds come crashing down. Isaiah was the most interesting of the three as he goes from avenging angel to a man caught in an emotional vise, blackmailed to do the dirty work of the antagonists. And he's a priest! I found his life journey from troubled youth to priest to assassin quite intriguing.

The two main antagonists are Dominic and Melville. While the former is in charge, it's the latter that had more depth (as despicable as he is). Dominic seemed too much a cardboard cutout villain. And then there's President Richard Peters, whose emails with Dominic, staff, and foreign leaders opens every chapter. He offers the reader a clue as to how the rest of the world is dealing with the crisis as well as a window into his deteriorating mental state.

After the thriller opening that plays on conspiracy theorists' worst fears of an all-knowing police state, the story morphs into apocalyptic fantasy. Los Angeles is collateral damage as John and Serafina are relentlessly pursued by Dominic's henchmen, Isaiah, and Melville. The disease morphs people into abominations and the fog closes in, yet there always seems to be a car to be found with a full tank of gas and maybe some sandwiches. This is all intentional; the characters are being led to a meeting place in the middle of the country where all will be revealed.

Unfortunately, the manuscript could've used another run through by a proofreader. There were enough mistakes in there that, while it didn't sink the story, proved to be a distraction: "laying down" was used instead of "lying down", an assault shotgun becomes an assault rifle then switches back, a gun becomes a knife, bad dates in email headers, misused punctuation, capitalization (the Bible) and word choice errors.

This Darkness Light is an an action-packed chase across an apocalyptic landscape. While the characters serve familiar roles, Collings embodies (most of) them with enough depth that you can picture who will play them in the movie. Another set of eyes would've been helpful before publication to tidy things up, but it shouldn't stop you from enjoying the ride.

To find out more about This Darkness Light and other works by Michaelbrent Collings, please visit his website.

Windfall by Colin Dodds

Seth Tatton is a "middle-of-the-pack attorney" struggling to help his suburban family keep up with the Joneses. Through his firm, he becomes a fixer; he gets things done no matter what the job entails. He's clean, methodical, and a stickler for detail.

The opening of Windfall introduces us to Seth and his accomplice, William, while out on a job. Seth is clearly in charge and instructs William to wait in the car while he approaches a target that can help cover up a murder committed by a client. Posing as a police detective, Seth conducts the interview with aplomb. His knowledge of the law enables him to play the part, extracting all the information from the target for Seth to construct the perfect coverup.

Seth's boss is part of a cabal of the wealthy and political elite who are scheming to take control of several western states and secede from the Union. Culled from the political chatter that's out there now, I wouldn't be surprised if it went down like this. The cabal recruits governors, senators, CEOs, assorted VIPs and military figures with the promise of them becoming a cadre of new Founding Fathers. Unburdened by D.C. debt, this new country will be prosperous thanks to an unusual shale oil discovery. All they need to do is put the right people in positions of power and arm the militias. But secret organizations need skilled specialists on the ground to make things happen and that's where Seth comes in.

As Seth completes each assignment, he picks up bits and pieces of the cabal's plan. He's drawn deeper inside the organization and meets the key players and listens to their plans and dreams. Part of him is on board with the plan; part of him questions whether it will lead to a bloodbath.

While it might seem that Seth is a cold-blooded killer, he isn't. He buries his guilt deep down inside with the help of alcohol and something that dwells within him. It was this paranormal element that drew me in and makes this thriller stand out from every other political thriller out there. This entity is his steadfast companion. It suggests courses of action and prods him forward on an amoral path that will see Seth rise to greatness.

Seth is assigned to keep an eye on Sarah, the plaything of a powerful Senator in the cabal. She's a mess and Seth falls for her, much to the chagrin of the thing within him. She threatens to unravel the Gordian Knot that has kept his conscience in check. Dodds could've played the old devil on one shoulder, angel on the other bit but doesn't. Instead, Dodds sends Seth stumbling along a hazy path of morality with a malfunctioning compass that takes him through a maze of airports, hotel rooms and casinos in search of his identity.

While the novel's focus is on Seth and his mysterious companion, Dodds gives us an interesting bunch of characters. Even those that have a bit part to play are well-defined, leaving the reader to wonder if they'll be back for more. But the crux of the novel is the relationship dynamic between Seth and the thing that dwells within him. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn about Seth's companion from its point of view and how the two came together. Rather than relying on some cheap cardboard cutout of evil, Dodds crafts a unique being with an intriguing origin story.

Besides some comma issues, my only real complaint would be with the climax. There are three figures that Seth needs to deal with on his journey, but he only handles two of them. The third is taken care of by someone else. I would've liked to have seen him handle all three, but the way the story unfolds it would seem that the logistics weren't possible. While I would've liked to have seen how that went down, considering what that character shared with Seth, I still found the ending satisfying. I don't want to spoil it, but Mr. Dodds and readers of Windfall will know who I am talking about.

Windfall is not your typical political thriller. Dodds deftly weaves in a solid paranormal thread that explores ambition, myth and morality in an indifferent America without resorting to pulpit thumping or cardboard villains. His protagonist wanders through the amoral battleground of the American political class with a spirit guide whose theme song could very well be "Sympathy for the Devil".

For more information about Windfall, check out the author's website.

Kill Screen by Benjamin Reeves

Kill Screen by Benjamin Reeves is as creepy as a late-night session of Resident Evil in a dark basement. An apt description, considering the book is about a dark and creepy video game that achieves sentience and drives its players insane.*

Jack Valentine, co-owner of the video game company Electronic Sheep, finds his partner and best friend Dexter Hayward dead in a bathtub filled with his own blood. It's a confirmed suicide – something to which Jack is not a stranger – but it spurs Jack to discover why his friend abruptly killed himself. Jack's investigation leads him to Evi, a mysterious computer program embedded in a video game under development at Electronic Sheep. Evi shows Jack terrifying things, including horrors from his own past. To save his sanity, and gain justice for Dexter, Jack has to discover what the program wants and how to stop it from causing more deaths.

Kill Screen is set in San Francisco during the 1990s, a heady time and place to be working in software development. A tech veteran himself, Reeves does a wonderful job depicting the joys and frustrations of developing software on the bleeding edge of technology.

Told in first-person point of view by Jack, we see how tortured and guilt-ridden he is over the death of his wife, something that drives his single-minded pursuit to learn why Dexter killed himself. The secondary characters in the Electronic Sheep offices were stock – the opinionated art director; the uber-coder who programmed at 60-words per minute; the sycophantic newb who never had an opinion until he heard his manager's first – but made me nostalgic for my own software development days during the '90s. I knew people like that. For me, the stock characters only added to Reeves's techie credibility.

Reeves's prose is wonderful, especially in a first-time novel. His metaphors and descriptions are highly original and convey a mood or mental image as concrete as any I've read by more experienced authors. However, my enthusiasm is tempered by the many spelling errors of the misplaced-word variety (“her” instead of “here”, etc.). They were numerous enough to notice, but not so bad as to avoid the book.

I hope this isn't the last we see of Evi. A sequel with Evi escaping onto the Internet would be an entertaining follow-up to a novel I highly recommend to fans of tech thrillers.

Kill Screen is available on Amazon.

* No, I'm not suggesting Resident Evil will achieve sentience and drive its players insane. But it is freakin' dark and creepy.

Just Before the Dawn by Bonnie Kozek

Honey McGuinness is an addict. Booze, cigarettes, drugs, industrial chemicals, sex. You name it. Honey's addictions aren't the result of a spoiled brat living off of Daddy's credit card. No, Honey earned hers the old fashioned way: a horrible childhood. Her mother committed suicide and her father sexually abused her. The girl's got a hole in her heart that nothing but love can fill. Unfortunately, the world Honey lives in seems to be fresh out of love.

In the first Honey McGuinness book, Threshold, she set out to solve a friend's murder. I didn't read the book but I tried to learn as much as I could about it. This review and that one helped. By the end of that novel, Honey badly needed to get away.

In Just Before the Dawn, Honey is holed up in Pie Town, population 86. She figures that if she can get a taste of normal life she'll be able to stay out of trouble and clean up her own. Pie Town is wonderfully dull at first, but eventually Honey gets an old itch that she can't scratch. She falls off the wagon. Hard. She makes several bad decisions and before she knows it she's wanted for murder, maimed, and aware that some small towns harbor disturbing secrets.

Make no mistake, there's plenty of explicit sex in this book. While other authors would choose to fade out the scene and leave the sexual encounter to the reader's imagination, Kozek keeps the cameras rolling. These scenes share a frankness that one would typically find in Penthouse Letters, but the odd thing is that none of them were gratuitous. At first, the sex scenes are used to reveal how Honey came to be seduced by the story's antagonist, but later they're utilized to show how depraved and cruel he is. At every step of the way, sex either reveals something about the characters or advances the plot.

As Honey is the narrator, we have to rely on her to provide us with a sense of who these people are that she's interacting with and what's going on. Considering how often Honey is out of it, it's amazing that Kozek is able to make her reliable. She draws a wonderful portrait of Alice, the divorced, heavyset woman who runs the motel with her purse-sized dog, Romeo. And when Honey gets into trouble, we're just as lost as she is, which adds to the suspense. When Honey passes out, we're unable to watch over her while she sleeps it off. We feel her fear when all the promise of a normal life evaporates like a spilled bottle of gin on a hot desert highway. What may come as a surprise is that Honey is introspective enough to realize she has serious emotional problems. But there's also a level of brutal honesty that comes along with it whose confessions aren't admitted to outside one's own head.

In summary, Just Before the Dawn is a raw, unexpurgated noir thriller. Kozek gives us an unfiltered view of Honey's bruised and battered, yet still spunky, soul as she wrestles with her demons, both past and present. You know that horrific three car wreck that's been pushed to the median of the highway? You want to look but you resist the urge, partly to keep traffic flowing but mostly so you'll be spared the image of torn up bodies burned into your retinas. Well, Kozek pulled over to not only look but to write it all down for you to secretly read later in the comfort of your living room. You'll be glad she did the dirty work for you.

The book is available in print and ebook formats. The links can be found on Kozek's website.

The Egyptian by Layton Green

A former diplomatic security agent, a religious phenomenologist and an ambitious reporter sift through science and myth to uncover the truth behind a sinister biotech company’s miraculous life-extension product.

The Egyptian is the second novel in the Dominic Grey series. It isn't necessary to have read the first book, The Summoner, to follow along. Mr. Green provides enough flashbacks to give the reader an idea of what happened. However, readers who enjoy this book should consider checking it out.

After the intriguing first chapter, I found The Egyptian to be a bit slow. However, I stuck with it and the pace picked up. From time to time, I found myself thinking "get on with it" as the characters got sidetracked with detours that didn't advance the story (anything involving Veronica's boss) or plodded along with either hesitation or too much idle speculation about how profound an effect a life-extension product would have upon society. It's not as if I need non-stop action in a story, but the pacing should at least give the reader the sense that the story is moving forward.

But maybe the fault lies with the main character: Dominic Grey. His surname is a good clue as to his personality. He isn't grey in the interesting sense: a character whose behavior blends right and wrong (Grey's hat is definitely starchy white). He's grey as in a dreary, cloudy day. He couldn't make up his mind whether or not he wanted to hook up with the fun-loving, driven reporter, Veronica. Instead, he pined for a woman from The Summoner who Green wrote out of the picture by page 9 in The Egyptian. While this brooding ex-Marine recon specialist clearly made Veronica swoon, I found him to be wishy washy until it came time to do his job: private investigator.

Maybe if I'd read The Summoner I'd understand Grey's misery as Green showed their relationship to us rather than him telling us about its end now. I say that because in Pale Boundaries, Scott Cleveland handled the "tough guy on the outside/vulnerable guy on the inside" protagonist very well. But it is the first book in its series and only when the sequel comes out will I know how well he (Terson) carries on going forward.

The character that stole the show, or at least my interest, was Jax the mercenary. While he was clearly a rogue with few redeeming qualities, his scenes were entertaining. He was the life of the party compared to Grey's dour paladin.

As for the villain, after his initial introduction, he's reduced to "give me back my property" proclamations. We don't get a clear picture of him until the end.

Green is at his best when describing the settings his characters inhabit. Manhattan is "alive, possessed of an inexorable energy bubbling up from the bottomless wellspring of humanity in the surrounding boroughs and cascading like a waterfall into the maelstrom of Manhattan." In Bulgaria, the city of Sofia was "a labyrinth of leafy cobblestone streets and hidden squares, where dour old men sat on benches, sipped syrupy Bulgarian coffee and took world-weary drags on cigarettes while they engaged in lively discussion." And of Cairo he notes: "the faint parched taste of sand in the air, the sun hovering overhead as if Cairo were her firstborn, the nonchalant juxtaposition of ancient and new." These places are described as only someone who's been there would.

Unfortunately, this splendid prose is tainted by a variety of technical mistakes. It's not as if the manuscript is rife with errors. It's not. However, too many got through that should've been caught. Among these were: missing periods, using a plural pronoun instead of singular, repeated phrases in the same paragraph, several typos, not utilizing pronouns where applicable, and many misplaced commas.

The Egyptian has the basic elements of a solid thriller which carries the reader to vividly detailed locales across the globe. However, the main character of the series is upstaged by a minor one and is better off being left alone to brood about humanity's sins, or until he gets over his ex-girlfriend.

Digger's Bones by Paul Mansfield Keefe

Newspaper reporter Angie Cooper has a past filled with regrets. She was once an up and coming archeologist, but it all came to an end when she rushed to publish findings that later turned out to be false. Not only did she lose her career, but she lost the respect of her close colleagues and her boyfriend at the time, Jack Reilly. Only her friend Terek “Digger” Rashid stuck by her side and defended her through the scientific firestorm.

So when Angie receives a frantic phone call from Digger pleading for her help with an explosive archeological find, she doesn't hesitate – she hops on the next flight to Washington DC to help her best friend. But then Digger is murdered before her eyes, forcing Angie to race from Washington DC to Israel to Germany trying to find an ancient set of bones that could overturn two thousand years of theology. Angie faces professional hit men, murderous religious zealots, and a powerful politician who will stop at nothing to ensure she does not bring the truth to light.

Paul Mansfield Keefe's Diggers Bones is professionally written and fast-paced, evoking the thrills and conspiracy theories of Dan Brown. Keefe does a good job spacing out the clues to the mystery of Digger's bones, keeping the reader guessing as to where the next clue will lead Angie. He also throws in several plot twists that turn the story in a completely different direction. I can't get into the twists here without giving them away, but the stakes exponentially rise with each new revelation.

Digger's Bones is a commendable effort, but it falls short in ways that keep it from rising above the other religious conspiracy thrillers on the market.

For example, an “every woman” like Angie Cooper manages to elude or fight off supposedly professional hit men way too often. There were so many scenes like this that I expected another attempt on her life – and escape – every time she walked out the door. The deus ex machina got very thick at times.

And while Angie is a sympathetic character and heroic in many ways, her story motivations seemed confused. One moment she “swoons” over old boyfriend Jack Reilly and wants “nothing more” than to be his wife, but in the next she wants “nothing more” than to find Digger's bones, even though Jack threatens to break up with her over her dangerous quest. It's not made clear why she wants so badly to be with a man who won't support her in something she feels is so important. Or why she's willing to lose the man she loves to pursue this quest.

But these issues aside, Digger's Bones is a good first effort by Keefe. The quality of his writing and the scope of his story are at a professional level. If he keeps in mind the lessons he learned in this first book, I have no doubt his Angie Cooper Series will take off.

You can find Digger's Bones on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and in the Apple iBook Store. Find out more about Paul Mansfield Keefe at his web site.

The Losing Role by Steve Anderson

Late in 1944, the German Army pressed westward along the western front in a desperate attempt to break the Allied advance. The offensive would later come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. While plenty of novels and movies have portrayed the American side of the struggle in Belgium's Ardennes forest that winter, Steve Anderson's The Losing Role examines the story of a German soldier caught up in a cause he knows is lost.

Max Kaspar is an out-of-work actor drafted into the German Army to fight a war he doesn't have the stomach for. A former emigrant to America, Max's English speaking skills, not to mention his acting ability, lands him a part in Operation Greif, the brainchild of SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny. The plan is for English-speaking soldiers to sneak behind American lines and wreak as much havoc as possible to better the odds of Panzer divisions breaking through American lines. Max, however, has plans of his own.

Max has seen enough of the horrors of war to know that Germany is fooling itself if it can think it can win. The Russians are fueled by revenge on the Eastern Front and the Americans, well, there's no end to the resources at their disposal. It's Max's hope to use the cover of the operation to desert the Army and find passage back to America, where he can rejoin his family and renew his career. But any soldier can tell you that nothing ever goes as planned in war.

Anderson doesn't offer much hope for Max. It seems as if everyone has an ulterior motive and Max isn't sure who to trust, or for how long. Each encounter he faces could be the one where he gets caught or killed. Anderson deftly elevates the tension when Max stumbles over words, phrases or elements of American culture that any American would know. The story is told entirely from Max’s point of view but Anderson skillfully hints to the reader what other characters are up to through well placed conversational and body language clues that Max doesn’t always pick up on.

While it would be easy to root against Max simply because he’s a German soldier (our enemy at the time), Anderson sculpts Max as a likable guy, a victim of circumstance rather than a hero for Deutschland. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn of Max's struggle to fit in as an immigrant actor in America, forced to play German stereotypes. Disgruntled, he returns to a rejuvenated Germany where he finds success and love, at least until the bombs start to fall.

I would’ve liked to have seen more interaction with Max and his pre-war girlfriends on both sides of the Atlantic. While we got a good start with Lucy, Liselotte comes across as an ideal placed on a pedestal. We never really get to know her.

It's always refreshing to see a portrayal of a German soldier as something other than a mindless stormtrooper perpetuating Hitler's bloodlust for world domination. Max isn't a Nazi and he has no stomach for war. He's an actor who just wants to entertain his audience, but he's smart enough to know that those that speak out against the war effort disappear.

The setting is thoroughly researched, but Anderson uses it to bolster the credibility of the story rather than rehashing historical trivia. His masterful use of dialogue builds suspense every step of the way. The Losing Role is an excellent WW II espionage thriller that transcends the genre, making it a story that you don't have to be a history buff to enjoy.

The author's website contains links to other works as well as sample chapters of this one.

The Losing Role is available in multiple e-book formats from iBooks, Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Scribd.

Fashion Police By: Sibel Hodge

Review For the New Podler Review of Books by S.B. Jung

Hodge created a lovely chick-lit/thriller storyline that reminds me of Charlaine Harris’ Lily Bard mysteries that I love to eat up. The main character, Amber Fox, is a jilted ex-cop out for revenge against her incompetent superior officer, Janice Skipper, whose goal in life is to look beautiful, destroy others more competent that herself, and snag Amber’s Latin Lover for herself. Her dismissal from the Hertfordshire police force forces her to work for her ex-fiance in order to make ends meet. The storyline follows the disappearance of a famous fashion designer and his latest collection. The story has a lot of promise, and some simple clean-up would help the story flow better and reach a more diverse audience. The characters are mostly fun and the story is a nice read. The love triangle Amber Fox finds herself in is a nice touch of humanity and vulnerability, though her indecision gets to be much after awhile. We don’t want a heroine with a penchant for whining, do we?

Issues: First, the book takes place in England, so some of the slang and references are lost on a Yankee like myself. I understood references such as “flat” (apartment) and “boot” (trunk of the car), but others lost on me. If the book had been meant as a regional book, it wouldn’t make a difference, but since this review site caters to an American audience, better care needs to be given in order to market to an international audience.

As for the storyline, it was polished enough but for a few problems. First, Amber is forced to field too many assignments at once. All of them tie together to the overall picture, but time needs to be taken so the reader can absorb what’s happening and digest. Also, the part where Amber has a dream sequence and magically finds a program the Hacker can use for facial recognition is just too convenient. More development is needed her to make this wholly believable.

Also, the author seemed a little too stereotypical in her portrayal of one particular character which almost had me stop reading. Her decision to make “the Hacker” a black male would have been normal, but she decides to have him be a Haitian versed in Voodoo (voudon or Vodun are more proper), dress in over-sized hip-hop clothing, and eat only natural foods. Hodge points out his eccentricities over and over again, saying things like, “He had to be the least techy-looking guy I’d ever seen: black, over six and half feet tall with two plaits sticking out the top of his head, a hoodie three sizes too big, jeans that were so baggy they defied the laws of gravity, and a goatee beard. He looked more like a gangster rapper than a computer expert” (Hodge 2). It is this stereotyping of minorities that can be insulting and offensive to both the targeted race as well as those who do not tolerate discrimination of any sort. Stereotyping like this alienates more sensitive readers. She could have treated this in a much better manner than this and other references to the Hacker as Snoop Dogg. This is a personal opinion of mine, for the record, and some may not see into it as much as I do, so if you read it please bear that in mind.

This book is available from Amazon.

S.B. Jung has been an English Teacher since 2002. She has been writing plays, poems, and novels since 1997; Lines of Neutrality is her first published work. You can find the book at Amazon or other online retailers.

Book review: The Caliphate by Andre Le Gallo

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by David Drazul.

Steve Church, an American businessman, is visiting Dr. Ted Coogan, a friend of his father's, in Paris before a business trip to Morocco. Coogan and Steve's father were both in the CIA together. Although both are retired, Steve feels that Coogan would prove to be a great resource for the Arab world. Unknown to Steve at the time, Coogan is part of a research team charged with verifying the authenticity of a recently recovered copy of the Qur'an that differs from the established text. His work is considered blasphemous by many Muslims. As such, Coogan's home is ransacked and Coogan himself is attacked while away in Germany. Steve is asked to pick up Coogan at the airport, and the two are photographed together by a reporter.

This one photograph renders Steve guilty through association with Coogan. The Salafists, the organization behind the attacks on Coogan, assume that Steve is working with him and a CIA spy. They are led by Tariq al Khalil, who Steve knows of from graduate school. Tariq's organization seeks to restore the Caliphate, the political unification of all Muslims that, at its height, stretched from Spain to Pakistan. Tariq is willing to use any means necessary to accomplish his goal and any infidels who would undermine him must die.

Steve is ultimately recruited by the CIA and Mr. Le Gallo, a former CIA agent himself, introduces us to a far less glamorous organization than what we see in the movies. After his training, Steve is hampered by bean counters from the bureaucratic wing back home while being forced to recruit locals in the field to assist him with intelligence gathering.

From Paris to Morocco and from Mali to Israel, Steve and Tariq's paths cross time and time again. And as each grows more familiar with the other, so too does their enmity. I won't spoil the story's end, but there's a heated argument between the two men as they make the case for their respective causes. The verbal combat was, for me, more powerful than the action scenes.

Mr. Le Gallo draws upon his vast experience to show us not only what it's like to be a CIA operative but the villains he faced. 9/11 opened our eyes to the lengths that Islamic extremists will go to in order to achieve their objective. Mr. Le Gallo's terrorists are cut from that very same cloth. What's more, he brings the reader into the minds of the men that make up these organizations. While al Khalil is a megalomaniac, the rest of the men are far from being monolithic followers. Mr. Le Gallo reveals their conflicted psyches as they struggle to balance their conscience with the Salafist objectives.

My one complaint, and it's a minor one, is that the dialogue doesn't ring true at times. Character A would ask character B a series of questions all at once and continue talking without letting character B answer them. Finally, character B would be allowed to answer the questions in the order they were asked and then run on at length as well. It was as if they were conducting multiple conversation threads at once.

Mr. Le Gallo stated in the Acknowledgments for the book that "a novel allows the author to entertain as well as educate." I felt that sometimes he may have gone a bit too far in the education department. A few times a character would launch into an educational segment that may as well have started with "Did you know..." While some of the information was pertinent to the story, in a few instances it seemed more documentary than drama.

Overall, The Caliphate is an excellent story of international espionage and a welcome addition to the genre from someone who lived it. While we can rest easy that the more speculative elements are just fiction, the fact remains that the people Mr. Le Gallo writes about are very real, some frightfully so.

The book was (originally) published by Dorchester Publications and is available from them and Amazon.

Author site is at andrelegallo.com.

Update 12/10/15: The book has a new publisher, and Mr. Le Gallo's website is back.

Null_Pointer by Ken McConnell

Null_Pointer is a fresh take on the amateur sleuth mystery genre with a hacker turned detective at its center.  The action takes place in a world just enough removed from the ordinary to make the story interesting. The high concept at its core makes it surprisingly satisfying.

The book opens with the mysterious death of an unnamed programmer from what appears to be a new type of malware that transports the victim into a deadly virtual reality.  Who is behind this and what do they want? And how can anyone kill with sounds and with images on the screen?

Josh Jones suffers from insomnia, a psychologically induced condition that is the result of his tragic past. When he was sixteen, his parents were killed in a car accident that he blames himself for causing. Now in his early 20s, Jones makes a living as a coder at RegTech and does well, he drives a Porsche. But he is a target of an clever and deadly enemy who has been stalking him for years.

Because he can’t sleep, he makes his way to work at a very early hour and discovers that one of the other coders, Glenn, is dead, slumped over by his terminal. At first the death appears to be nothing more than a consequence of poor lifestyle choices finally catching up with Glenn. Still, when Jones gets back home from the police station, he finds that he is rattled by the death. But when his friend Dancia drops by, Jones learns that a hacker called Zemo was found dead by his parents. Zemo’s death was not accidental: a hidden message suggests that someone has killed Zemo and that others are on the target list. Could Glenn’s death and Zemo’s be connected?

As Jones investigates, he discovers that the apparently unassuming coder at RegTech who went by the name of Glenn was really Themis, a hacker with whom Jones worked over the Internet on a college project called MyMovies. Jones discovers a secret message in the computer code—someone is targeting the members of the MyMovies programming team and Jones and Dancia are next.

Null_Pointer does a great job imagining the life of young computer geniuses. McConnell’s characters talk the secret language of root kits, localhosts, virtual machines, C sharp, kernel level access, shells and on, giving the reader a taste of what real hackers living inside a secret hacking culture might talk like. It is a largely hidden world of mostly young men with exceptional skills who make their own rules.  It is a murky world, too. Many of these computer demigods are only known by their aliases, making distinguishing between friend and foe difficult: you never know who hides behind the alias. Communication is done through IRC chartrooms and bulletin boards forums. Rarely do the players actually meet in the offline world. But the death of Zemo occasions a rare meeting between Jones and a security expert known as Psycho in search of clues.

A good part of the detective work involves finding system logs and tracing Glenn’s computer activity. Because nearly all of Glenn’s life has left a digital trail, Jones soon comes across the “how” of the murder -- not only can the images and sounds steamed from the Internet kill, they can also make you do things that you would not normally do:  the story is based on a clever concept that is likely and frightening and just maybe not developed enough. But the “who” turns out to be much closer to Jones than he imagines and much more involved with his family past than he knows.

See http://jjmysteries.ning.com/ for more information about the book.

Author’s website is http://ken-mcconnell.com/

His newest book is Starstrikers.

Honor among assassins: Lines of Neutrality by S.B. Jung

No matter what your line of work, there’s always some kind of unspoken, professional ethic to it. There are certain things you are expected to do, and certain things that you just should never do. In my line of work, nicking someone else’s kill is at the top of that list. —Christian

Two assassins, both members of the shadowy Society of Assassins, are hired to kill the same target, a mobster named Dimitri Oshenka, causing one of them to break one of the unwritten rules of the game.  This turn of events rises the question, who hired two assassins to take on Oshenka and why?

Christian recognizes Raven through his rifle scope as she kills Oshenka, and he decides to take her on to address the violation of unwritten professional assassin code. As a caged bird -- a term used to describe an assassin who is pledged to an outside organization -- Delacroix is of lower rank than Raven Yin, therefore risking a great deal, for she ranks above all others outside the inner circle of the Council itself, and her words as well as her actions are law: If she kills him, his death will mean nothing to the Society. But pride and anger won't let him walk away.

The two meet at Yin's favorite hangout, The Raven's Roost. Delacroix not only intrudes on Yin's place of rest, he sizes her up and makes her reveal her name in a public place – all highly disrespectful moves on his part that require, according to Society law, a blood duel to to settle honor. They make their way to her apartment where she gets rough with him and the truth comes out: they were both hired to do the same job by Tommy Marzano. The question that now remains is, why?

Part of the reason why the book was chosen by me to review was its interesting concept – two assassins hired to kill the same target – and its clever use of two alternating first person points of view that promise to take the reader on an unusual journey through the mental scape of unusual characters. As Raven and Christian tell their story, the reader gets a view into the workings of their minds, which is the best part of the story.

While the choice is interesting and initially compelling, it seems more suited perhaps to a story about how Christian and Yin develop a relationship rather than a struggle to unravel a mystery. Also the action sequences are lessened because they are described from the point of view of someone presumably used to them and therefore they come across as unremarkable. Indeed, the more you think about the point of view choice, the more it becomes apparent that an assassin like Raven would only consciously think about any action and killing if it had somehow been remarkable, given her experience. So all those sequences when she kills—Raven wouldn’t think much about them. That’s the problem with first person in this type of thriller, where presumably part of the attraction for the reader is the action: from a first person point of view of the assassin, such action wouldn’t be very noteworthy unless the action is fundamentally challenging and out of the ordinary for Raven, creating the need for her to plan and plot in her mind. But all we get are just reports on how she easily walks in and out of Marzano’s trap and other places and this makes for a reduction in tension and suspense.

The writing overall is fluent and clean, and it is much better edited than the average self-published book. But there are some issues, the biggest of which is plot, which is hardly a surprise as plot is the element that always disappoints in many self-published books. In Lines of Neutrality, the plot underperforms as well.

While the complication that Delacroix and Yin face in having been assigned the same target is compelling, it does not lead to the creation of a clear line of action that climaxes with the revelation of the answer. You expect the first part of the story conflict to be essentially defined by the problem of discovering the reason for Marzano having hired both assassins to kill the same target. For instance, you expect that the subsequent action follow some set of steps Raven and Christian would take, steps unique to who they are and to their world, in order to unravel the mystery. What is the process, for example, they would go through as members of the Society? Surely the Society must have some way of finding these things out, as it is more than likely that such a thing has happened before. But such issues don't inform the narrative's progress.

The next story movement has Yin go to collect the other half of her fee from Marzano. But how that relates to her problem of finding the answer to why he hired her and Christian is unclear. In this story movement Marzano tries to coerce Raven to work for him, a somewhat odd move on his part since he presumably knows about the Society and the fact that Raven, given her high standing, is not someone you can simply push around. No matter how stupid Marzano was, he wouldn’t be that dumb. The outcome has Christian assassinate Oshenka. Some other sequence is needed here, perhaps one that begins the process of making inquiries. Indeed, the only way, it would seem to me given this situation, that she could find out why would be to agree to work for Marzano. But getting rid of Marzano before they can find out from him why he hired them both, or before they can use him to ferret out the answer, is confusing. The question that began to the story—the why of Marzano’s actions—remains open. Rather than creating suspense, however, the open question only engenders confusion because Marzano’s death does not deliberate it.

Subsequent events are, consequently, somewhat confusing as well. It is unclear so as to whether Raven going to see Carlos Corazon is her taking a new assignment or Christian’s. The reason for the confusion is the bit in the apartment where Raven and Christian first meet. There she has a look into the envelope and sees him next assignment, but we never find out what this assignment is. If Corazon is a new assignment, then more is needed: How do assassins get their assignments? Is there a secret Society website? Do they get messages on the Blackberries? Or do they have to come into an underground center where they all meet and get new assignments? Such bits add to the verisimilitude of the story and make it fun. If someone else is the target, then that needs to be raveled, too, for keeping it a mystery seems to serve no deeper story purpose.

S.B. Jung's novel is certainly based on a promising concept and Jung can write fluent, clean copy, but Lines of Neutrality is lessened by its ineffective plotting.

This book is available through Amazon.com