Tucson, Twenty Second Century

I decided to set my most recent novel, That Which Endures, in Tucson in the twenty-second century. I've lived in Tucson for over four years, and find it and its high-desert surroundings most interesting. Instead of the dismal state of the future in many sci-fi novels, That Which Endures takes a positive spin, and "New" Tucson is the prime city of the state. Action occurs around the University, both the paleontological lab and the time-physics lab. Having a scientist and a highly professional 'escort' as the protagonists provided an enjoyable study in contrasts. The scientist and escort are actually platonic friends, but things change when the 'escort' finds herself coming alive emotionally, feeling actual love for the first time, and making a horrifying discovery of what she really is. The scientist, a paleontologist, finds a contemporary bullet in the fossil of a giant ground sloth from fourteen thousand years past, and has a unique chance to use a secret time-travel device to travel to the past to find how that happened. The escort is pursued by those who wish to kill her when they find what she has discovered, and escapes with the scientist by time travel, into a long-gone world, where they find themselves trapped with no way to reutrn.
I've had fun writing adventure stories before, but this one was particularly satisfying. The 'escort', named Sangrawee Pattanasai, (pure Thai) develops into a noble character that I'd like to use in future books. The more I worked with her, the more attractive a person she became: beautiful, resourceful and highly intelligent. The future world has its share of evil, but there are bright lights of experience that I bring to the Tucson of the future.

Stonehenge in the action adventure world

I've recently been in touch with my "skiing expert", a wonderful and talented woman by the name of Cristina Montana of Boca Raton, Florida. She was my advisor for the skiing sequences in my most recent novel, The Jewels of Stonehenge. Naturally, there's no skiing around Stonehenge itself(!), but the novel is located in the mountains of Norway, where a replica of Stonehenge has been created for nefarious purposes. When you place such a venerated archaic monument as Stonehenge in a story, there has to be a good reason. In my novel, Stonehenge is the key to the mystery, but without the shift of venue to Norway, the entire premiss of the story would be irrelevant. It deals with precession of the Earth's axis, a vital clue about Stonehenge and summer solstice sunrise. It's great to know that I got the skiing sequences "right". They are part of the action-adventure scenario. It's also a delight to know that it 'worked' for people who are savvy with adventure, science, and fiction.

Orchard House Press has Another Edgy Expedition

It's great that the second novel in my adventure series, The PlanetCare Discoveries, was released in January 2009. The title is "The Jewels of Stonehenge". Though the setting of the expedition is Norway, unearthing a buried Viking ship, a set of bizarre jewels is discovered in one of the burial chests. It turns out they are part of a larger set of gems, 31 in total, that originated in the Stonehenge Monument when it was first completed. However, the jewels possess such a diabolical power when linked in sequence, that the original builders (whoever they were...we'll probably never know)scattered them across Europe. Now, a malevolent group of jewel thieves is reassembling them, killing any who gets in their way, and members of the PlanetCare research team are drawn into the intrigue. A perfect replica of the original Stonehenge has been constructed at a hidden location atop a fjord mountain, and as summer solstice approaches the protagonists must stop the killers from creating a death ray with the jewels of Stonehenge.
It'a a lot of fantasy sci-fi I know, but a fun action-adventure yarn, and it gave me a chance to do some research on Norway, Stonehenge and the tourmaline gems. My geology major really helped with that.
I'm truly fortunate that Orchard House Press, my publisher, has confidence in the series. The first book, "Season of the Plant", came out in September 2007 and enjoyed some success. But with two published and a third under composition, OHP will have a good action series for their many publications.