There’s a plague on the loose. It’s the next story in the Perry Helion saga, The Ceres Plague. Ceres is live on Amazon and you can catch it here.
This is one plague you want to catch — well, the book anyway! Perry will lead you on an adventure from the Bering Strait to Washington D.C. to Alaska and Siberia, chasing down Dr. Taylor Crandee and his crew from the deep state and the mysterious Paracelsus as they concoct an airborne bio weapon that can be targeted to kill even the President.
Their odd, parabolic shapes loom strange in the treeless tundra of the Arctic. Like alien eyes or movie screens where there are people. Even the name is enigmatic: White Alice. A name that suggests Lewis Carroll and fantastical realms. In the 1950s and 1960s before communications satellites became plentiful, the U.S. military needed a method for keeping the far flung bases in Alaska in touch with the command center at NORAD headquarters and with the Pentagon.
White Alice was the answer. It was a system for scattering radio over the horizon using bizarre curved antennas. The White Alice parabolic antennas rising up from the empty tundra testified to Alaska’s importance as one of the front lines in the Cold War struggle with the Soviets.
The enigmatic White Alice shapes make an appearance in my next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague. They’re just one of the mysterious remnants of the Cold War that crazed humanity-transforming Dr. Taylor Crandee gets his mitts on in The Ceres Plague.
top photo by TVJ
On Friday, September 13 at noon, as part of the Portland Public Library’s Local Author Series, I will read and discuss my latest adventure thriller, The Atlas Fracture. Set in Antarctica, Atlas tells the story of DARPA agent Perry Helion’s attempts to prevent terrorists from unleashing a worldwide disaster. USM biology professor Dr. David Champlin <http://www.usm.maine.edu/
For those who want to pick up up the book beforehand, here is a link to The Atlas Fracture’s Amazon page.
http://www.amazon.com/
After reading an excerpt from my upcoming Perry Helion novel The Ceres Plague, Steve Konkoly, a writer friend who also pens thrillers, had a question. “What kind of guns were they?” In the excerpt, the bad guys confronted Perry with just “guns.” No further details given.
For Steve, however, this wasn’t enough. The firearms in Steve’s books almost always carry detailed descriptions: make, model, rate of fire, operational quirks, etc. For example, in a passage from his upcoming novel, Black Flagged Vektor, Steve might have just called a particular weapon a “submachine gun.” But for Steve’s type of thriller, gun specs matter — his readers want to know the details. So Steve made it a Skorpion vz 61, a 7.65 mm, 850-round-per-minute Czech-made submachine gun (video of full auto operation here). The high rate of fire of this compact gun actually becomes a plot point in the passage from Vektor.
I liked Steve’s interest in the details and thought he had the right idea. After all, Perry Helion has been around weapons and military technology for years. Why wouldn’t he know a thing or two about the guns the bad guys had trained on him? So, as a tribute to Steve, I equipped them with Skorpions. Here’s the excerpt:
“Lying astride their path was a submarine. The same sub that had skulked around during the salvage effort. Standing on its glistening hull were three men with Skorpion vz 61 submachine guns trained on the inflatable. A fourth man looked down on them from the conning tower, a semi-automatic pistol clearly visible.
“Perry released the inflatable’s throttles and raised his hands. He looked back and saw Lucy had already followed his lead.”
Humorous Historical:
George Washington made a brief visit to Barbados as a young man and never again left America. Well, that’s what the history books say. But an eighteenth-century manuscript discovered in the foundation of Mount Vernon changes everything. The manuscript tells of 19-year-old George Washington’s comic, picaresque 1751 trip to London seeking his fortune.
This isn’t George Washington the stuffy old founding father with the wooden teeth. He’s a young man still finding his voice. A younger son with no inheritance, George must make his own way in the world.
The newly discovered manuscript was written by George’s traveling companion, Darius Attucks, an African-American master mariner. Though an experienced sailor, Darius is barely older than George and not quite the man of the world he imagines himself. After saving George’s life in a shipwreck, Darius is convinced he has been tasked by Heaven to be George’s guide.
Darius and George join their patron, a German baron, and sell American land to wealthy Londoners. The well-connected baron promises George cash, a title and even a country estate for his efforts. Best of all, George wins the love of Sophie, a beautiful French countess. George’s expedition to London seems an utter success. What could possibly go wrong?