Author, blogger, book reviewer. © 2015 Bruce M. Perrin
That was the first line of an email from Indie Missouri, saying that Mind in the Clouds is now available to "... patrons of participating libraries all across your state/region."
I'm honored. And if you happen to live in the area, check it out (with just your library card).
http://library.biblioboard.
Or buy a copy from Amazon - it's a lot cheaper than moving to Missouri: https://bit.ly/2Q1McXr
For one week only, find your next favorite read in this collection from StoryOrigin.
And they’re all just 99 cents!
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/CkMmakB
Killer in the Retroscape is being made into an audiobook, with expected release on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes in October or early November.
That means I’ve been listening to new chapters from my producer every couple of days. And since the first few chapters deal with a pandemic in 2035 (albeit one that comes from a parasite hosted in cats), it’s been a bit like listening to my life. Check out this five minute clip:
The pandemic in the book is only a precursor of things to come and hopefully, life stops following the plot soon, because … well, it is a dystopian tale, after all.
“You have to wake up from this ridiculous dream
world of yours. There’s no nosferatu, necromancers, or missions from God. It’s
just two crazed foreigners, a dead girl, and a pair of dim-witted detectives
involved in a set of bizarre circumstances.” So said Nathan Brannick,
protagonist of Consumed to one of those “crazed foreigners” about
three-fourths of the way through the book. And it highlights one of the main reasons
I really enjoyed the story. There are so many twists, so many paths I thought I
was on but wasn’t, that for much of the story I was no more confident of my
interpretation of events than Nathan was of his reality. I really enjoyed the
suspense.
Underlying this tension is an intricate web of crosses and double-crosses among the forces of evil. A master tasks a slave with retrieving a source of power, but the slave decides to use that power against the master. The slave, in turn, takes an apprentice, who then plots to use that same power toward his/her own ends. And so on. It’s a fabric of evil, slowly unraveling violently as the plot advances. And then, there is the question of whether Nathan’s observations can be believed at all or are they just the product of the opium he turned to after his wife died? Perhaps his partner is the better source of fact? Can we believe the foreign witch-hunters who are apparently driven by the vision of an obsessive father? And finally, the unease is supported by a skillful mixing of history (e.g., Vlad the Impaler), folklore (e.g., Spring-heeled Jack), and fiction (everything else). It’s difficult to tell in which world you’re standing.
There are, however, a few issues that may reduce the effect of the book for any particular reader. For one, there are a number of errors in word usage and grammar. Most are minor, such as the misuse of then/than, but others may produce a bit of confusion, “… maybe he’ll at least confirm who that nutter, Mr. Feld, was why we found sitting outside the pub door.” More significantly, the story is told from the perspective of at least four different people, but these shifts come without warning. I was sometimes a couple of pages into a chapter before I figured out whose thoughts I was reading. Perhaps the author did that intentionally, but for my taste, the technique is more confusing than suspenseful.
While the shifts in point-of-view are somewhat disruptive, overall, Consumed is an exceptional read, filled with well-told, often-violent scenes of the unmasking of evil in Victorian London.
See on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3jRKB2b
(I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.)
The techno-thrillers that I write are part SciFi and part thriller. So, after a couple of months of science fiction giveaways, it was time for some mysteries and thrillers.
This time, you can choose from twenty-eight works from short stories to complete novels. They are all free, although you will subscribing to the author’s newsletter. You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time.
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/UUhTxbQ
