Here is a sneak look at the cover for the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, The Ceres Plague. Perry discovers that a former Air Force Base in the Bering Sea, supposedly contaminated with toxic waste, isn’t what it seems. You can see all of Ceres in September!
In addition to my role as reputed kingpin of the Perry Helion thriller series (the next book of which, The Ceres Plague, will be out in September), I am also the editor of Ocean Navigator magazine. Ocean Navigator is for folks who like to go on voyages, either along a coast or across an ocean. As ON editor, I get some interesting requests — like a recent appeal for help in choosing a weapon for protection against polar bears.
One of ON‘s regular writers is Ellen Massey Leonard, who, with her husband Seth, has sailed around the world in a wooden sailboat. The Leonard’s next adventure is a sail through the Northwest Passage aboard their newest boat, Celeste, a 40-foot cold-molded cutter built in British Columbia in 1986.
Turns out the Canadian government — and common sense — requires that voyagers making the Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada carry some sort of firearm for protection against polar bear attack. Should that firearm be a shotgun or a rifle? In Ellen and Seth’s case, the issue was further complicated by the fact that neither of them had ever touched a gun before.
Since Ellen had read my Perry Helion thriller The Atlas Fracture, she asked me if I could help by providing them with some gun training. This seemed like an intriguing task, so I said yes and then brought in my friend Steve Konkoly, a former naval officer and a fellow thriller novelist. With more formal training in firearms, Steve was a natural lead instructor (my role was to assist Steve and toss in an occasional brilliant observation about ballistics or bullet grain or announcing lunch time). We set up a session at the Scarborough Fish and Game Association’s firing range in Scarborough, Maine.
Unfortunately, Seth was not able to attend, so the training and decision process was on Ellen alone. Steve showed her the basic operation of a pump action 12 gauge shotgun and a bolt action, .308 caliber rifle. Then it was time to shoot. Steve fired a few shotgun blasts into the firing range’s sand berm. Following that, Ellen stepped up to take a turn at the trigger. Her first attempt at a shooting stance involved feet close together and her body leaning away from the gun (!). We got this corrected and Ellen was soon blasting sand grains with the best of them.
Next up was the Ruger Scout .308 rifle. Ellen dutifully listened to loading procedure for the three-round magazine, how to work the bolt and line up the target with the ‘scope. Then it was back to Steve to take the first few shots. The explosive report of a .308 is damn impressive.
Ellen was impressed. She only needed to experience the fury of one shot sent down range before she announced, “I’ve made my decision.” It would be a shotgun for her and Seth on their journey. Let’s just hope they never have to use it.
Of course, after lead instructor Steve, I took full advantage of the opportunity and blasted off a few rounds with both the shotgun and the rifle. I managed to pound some sand with the shotgun and put three rounds on target at 100 yards with the rifle.
Perry would be pleased.
Here is a look at a new cover idea for my Perry Helion thriller, The Atlas Fracture. This re-design is still in the works, could go in just about any direction.
Let me know what you think.
In the final scenes of my upcoming thriller, The Ceres Plague, Perry Helion has to crash a private party driving a Belaz 7555 mining dump truck (also called a “haul truck”). Not your usual James Bond-type Aston Martin spy sports car. These Belarussian-built trucks are made to work in tough industrial conditions. Though their designers probably never imagined quite what Perry asks one Belaz monster to do.
The Belaz 7555 has a payload capacity of 55 metric tons, or about 3 and a half city buses (if they’d stay in the cargo hopper). And that’s just the cargo, adding in the weight of the truck itself, and we’re tipping the scales at 95 metric tons.
Bond can keep his BMWs and Benz’s. Perry favors the downhill kinetic “oomph” of a fully-loaded Belaz making tracks toward the bad guys.
The final scenes of the next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague, take place in the struggling Russian Bering Sea settlement, Provideniya. Like some other cities in Russia — and America — Provideniya has seen better days. The end of the Cold War resulted in Provideniya losing a sizeable chunk of its population. Vistas of Providenyia are dominated by the herd of outsized apartment buildings that graze across the city’s hillside. Many of the drab apartment blocks, built during the Soviet era, stand empty and crumbling, giving the town an air of dissolution and fall. Sad for the people who still live there and have to suffer through the brutal winters, but a great locale for the final action sequence of The Ceres Plague.
By the way, the first draft of Ceres is now complete. A few weeks of re-writing, beta reading and editing and The Ceres Plague will be winging its way to readers.
I wonder if any of The Ceres Plague’s future readers will live in Provideniya?
Writers often do research for their books. And while most of that digging is routine — street names, bullet calibers and wine chateaus — it can delve into some wonky, specialized corners. Sometimes this stuff is so arcane that the NY Times hails the science as an exciting new development.
In my upcoming book The Ceres Plague, the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, the brilliant and twisted microbiologist Dr. Taylor Crandee has fashioned a deadly yet highly targetable superbug called Crandium Donatellus (yes, he named it after himself!). Part of the genius of Crandium stems from Crandee’s ability to manipulate a bacteriological process called CRISPR. The CRISPR defense mechanism allows bacteria to fight off attacking viruses by cutting into and even editing viral DNA. Crandee discovers how to use this technique to target Crandium to attack human DNA in a fiendish variety of ways.
Naturally, CRISPR sounds like a writer’s fantasy. Bacteria would never have so sophisticated a defense, right? In fact, this devious microbial technique actually exists. The NY Times writes about CRISPR in a recent Science News section (“A Powerful New Way toEdit DNA”), hailing it as a possible major tool in microbiology research.
The Times makes no mention of Dr. Crandee or Crandium Donatellus. But I’m sure they’ll catch up soon enough.
Image courtesy National Institutes of Health
We relax, unwind and have fun on summer vacation. Here in Maine we have islands close to the coast that are tailor-made for enjoying the lazy days of summer — whether you are lucky enough to own a home there or just enjoying it for the day. So Joe Souza setting his devilishly deadly thriller, The Liger Plague, on a fictional Maine island is a devastating punch in the gut. The poor folks on Cooke’s Island just want to have fun and Souza makes their time in the sun a nightmare.
The lead character is Dr. Taggert Winters, a colonel in the U.S. Army and a microbial expert. A man like Winters makes enemies. As Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something in your life.” And Winters, who has devoted his career to preventing heinous pathogens from being used against the American people, is opposed by enemies who are as clever and ruthless as he is dedicated. They transform Winters’ summer idyll on Cooke’s Island into a hellish struggle to save his wife and daughter and ultimately just to survive biological meltdown.
The liger of the title refers to a crossbred animal – a half lion, half tiger. Souza makes this enigmatic beast the perfect symbol for the double whammy pathogen the bad guys release on Cooke’s Island. It’s a freak, an unnatural commingling of deadly talents that no one is ready for, least of all Winters.
Aiding Winters in his struggle is a savvy young man named Fez, who grew up on the island and knows both its people and byways. Fez provides just the right local knowledge at key times. And the young man and Winters develop a touching father/son relationship. Winters runs across other folks in the course of the story. Some are trustworthy and some are not — but neither Winters, nor the reader, can take things at face value.
Like its namesake, The Liger Plague is a clever combination. It’s a twisty thriller story with worldwide implications and a bloody survival epic. To Souza’s great credit, it isn’t clear that Winters and his family will succeed in the daunting task his enemies have set him by releasing the liger plague on the unsuspecting vacationers of Cooke’s Island. Here are two results you might have after reading the beastly events detailed in The Liger Plague: 1) you’ll be entertained and look forward to the next installment in Souza’s Liger series and 2) you may want to spend the rest of your vacations on the mainland.
Check out this video shot by Enrico Sacchetti at Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica, at the Italian Mario Zucchelli Research Station. Gorgeous views of Antarctica and possibly a view of the deadly Atlas Fracture?
A few days ago, it was my birthday and I got a little freaked out. The day was no big deal, of course, everyone has one (except maybe for mythical beats like titans, dragons and the things in those chupacabra videos).
Wiretaps and satellite traps, radio transmissions and Internet permissions – the NSA has always excelled at the soft arts of code cracking and message parsing. Everything about the agency, from its Darthian headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland to its massive server complex in the wilds of Utah, suggests quiet and studious types pouring over reams of telephone intercepts looking for patterns. But now the NY Times reports that the NSA is also a little bit like a utility-belted cable guy rummaging around in your basement. Seems the Puzzle Palace likes to mess with hardware, too.
“The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.”
So, not only are the digital bits of your computer unreliable, subject to scooping up by black box routers and compromised network access points, but now you can’t even trust the silicon and copper you bought with your own money – not only is the NSA listening to your computer’s babbling, it has also reached in and attached a “tiny circuit board” or two to your beloved machine – like a secret vasectomy you knew nothing about. Computer virility is wilting all over the world.