By Gary Kriss
It’s what some might call an “improbable pairing.”
She’s a self-described “hopeless nerd, science geek, history buff, major foodie” who “writes things” and is also able to balance a spoon on her nose while cross-eyed.
He’s a recovering drug addict, a telepath of the highest order, disgraced among his own kind and racked with guilt, who has been using his abilities to help cops solve homicides, a job he’s on the verge of losing.
She was the one who initiated the relationship and she’s the one determined to keep it going, a resolve in keeping with the Winston Churchill quote she favors as her motto: “Never give up. Never, never, never, never, never give up.”
And she hasn’t. Last month the world discovered that the two are still a hot item when Penguin/Putnam released SHARP, Alex Hughes’s second book in her Mindspace Investigations series featuring flawed, yet fascinating telepath Adam Ward. The first book, CLEAN, was published last year to critical acclaim for the author who’s about to turn thirty.
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To say EXTINCTION MACHINE is a pulse-pounding page-turner would be to call World War Two a minor dust up. Jonathan Maberry proves himself the master storyteller in a tale that expertly weaves a hard-boiled body-slam narrative with deft artful prose. For those who love high-concept drama the story holds little back: honor; romance; vengeance; UFOs; alien technology; weird science; weapons that can wreck tectonic plates and swamp continents; spectral government assassins; black-hearted genius villains; and an ensemble of the most valiant and macho good guys since Achilles and his Myrmidons. Maberry confidentially demonstrates the writer chops that hook you in, hold you in place, and make you howl for more.
EXTINCTION MACHINE is a sprawling, complicated story with a plethora of big characters, yet you keep the plot tight and focused. How do you organize the plot? What’s your writing strategy than can encompass and streamline such an expansive story with so many moving parts?
I’m a structure guy when it comes to writing. I write an outline and then use Post-its on presentation boards to storyboard the novel. That story often changes as I’m writing, of course, because you can’t expect to have all of your best ideas on the day you cook up your plot. But the outline allows me to stay focused on the story and its component parts. I build it on three acts and then look for the best balance of action, exposition, character development and so on to tell the story.
I also love complex and layered stories, and I tend to favor ensemble casts even in a tale largely driven by a first-person narrative. With thrillers you don’t want to have the story cover too long a time-period, so I intercut the hero’s storyline with brief flashbacks and third-person side-scenes that allow readers to have insight into how these events play out across a broad canvas. Also, this allows me to dig into the motivations and machinations of the villains. We want the bad guys to be as three-dimensional as the heroes.
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By J. H. Bográn
Author Mark de Castrique takes us to a not-so-distant future for a roller coaster ride that is unbelievably plausible in DOUBLE CROSS OF TIME.
The year is 2030. Scientist Jonathan Singer stands on the verge of achieving his two greatest dreams: marriage to his soul mate and the launch of his life’s work, The American Super Collider. But when an old man shows up at his apartment claiming to be Dr. Jonathan Singer from 40 years in the future, Jonathan’s world spins out of control. Is he his own worst enemy or will he heed the old man’s plea – “To Thine Own Self Be True.”
One thing is certain, while Jonathan races time to save the Future, someone is trying to kill him in the Present.
What inspired the premise for DOUBLE CROSS OF TIME?
The premise for DOUBLE CROSS OF TIME is quite different from my previous eleven novels, and is actually two-fold. I was interested in the scientific frontier of particle physics, not because I comprehend it, but because it explores the very nature of our existence and might unleash forces more strange, powerful, and unforeseen than Einstein’s E=MC2. The second part of the premise came from the inherent conflict of two well-known sayings: Polonius’s advice to Laertes – “This above all: to thine own self be true,” and the statement, “He’s his own worst enemy.” How would a character react if confronted by himself from the future, especially if that future self told him to destroy everything he was working on?
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Extremes of Place and Race
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for their crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
In other words, eugenics—improving a species by eliminating “undesirable” individuals. Most people, asked who wrote those words, would cite Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin. Actually, it was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. writing for the 8-1 majority in the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision enthusiastically legitimizing eugenics in America. That was part of eugenics’ first great wave. The Nazis, of course, carried out the second. There has not been a third—yet.
So what on earth is eugenics doing in a thriller? Three things distinguish my novels: real threats to the planet, plausible science, and extreme environments. Thus the planetary threat in FROZEN SOLID is overpopulation and eugenics, writ very large, is the plausible science that rogue scientists will use to eliminate earth’s human overload.
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By George Ebey
A malevolent life form created by military scientists threatens to destroy humanity in this provocative novel by Mark Alpert, master of the high-concept techno-thriller. Following up on the international success of his first two novels, FINAL THEORY and THE OMEGA THEORY, Alpert now delivers EXTINCTION, a science thriller about the emergence of a deadly new species, a hybrid organism that combines man and machine. Based on real technologies being developed right now to connect human brains to motors, sensors and microchips, EXTINCTION is a fast-paced, high-stakes adventure in the spirit of Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton.
I recently caught up with Mark who had much to say about this exciting new story as well as the fact-based science that inspired it.
EXTINCTION deals with the existence of emerging technologies such as the linking of the human mind to microchips, among others. Can you tell us more about the science behind EXTINCTION and why you chose to write about these specific technological advances?
Before I started writing science thrillers I was an editor at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for ten years. I was always on the lookout for interesting technology stories, and one day I came across a news item about researchers who’d created “cyborg insects” by implanting electrodes into the brains and flight muscles of flying beetles and moths. The researchers could control the bugs by sending radio signals to the implanted electronics; one signal would command the bugs to start flying, another would steer them to the right, another to the left, and so on. DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm, was funding this research because it had obvious military applications — remote-controlled insects carrying miniaturized cameras could serve as micro drones that would conduct up-close surveillance of battlefields and terrorist hideouts. The idea seemed incredibly creepy and terrifying. In other words, it was a perfect subject for a science thriller.
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Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter has just been drafted into the Nightstalkers—an elite group of soldiers that…
Actually, he’s not quite sure what they do.
Born from the Area 51 initiative, the Nightstalkers defy sanity and decorum and include among their ranks Moms, a Black Ops trainee too extreme for Special Forces; Doc, a scientific crackpot; Roland, the weapons enthusiast; and Mac, a contemporary MacGyver. All of them take their orders from the elusive Ms. Jones, who everyone claims is just a hologram.
Those orders include tracking down and sealing tears in our reality that are releasing interdimensional beings known only as Fireflies— creatures that take control of both living and inanimate matter in order to unleash wanton destruction.
Just as Carter is settling in, a rogue scientist triggers a fresh invasion of Fireflies that swarm a swanky gated community. Now it’s up to Carter and his new teammates to neutralize the threat while figuring out who’s behind the breach.
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By Rick Reed
A.J. Colucci grew up in a suburb outside of New York City. She spent fifteen years as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor and writer for corporate America. Today she is a full-time author and self-proclaimed science geek who lives in New Jersey with her husband, two daughters and a couple of cats.
THE COLONY is her first published novel, but I have a good feeling we will be seeing more from this New York native.
THE COLONY begins with a series of gruesome attacks that have been sweeping New York City where three men are found dead, their bodies nearly dissolved from the inside out. The culprit is a supercolony of ants: An army of one trillion soldiers with razor sharp claws and flesh-eating venom.
The desperate mayor turns to the greatest ant expert in the world, Paul O’Keefe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist in an Armani suit. Paul is baffled by the insects. Their morphology isn’t linked to any other genus and they have no recognizable DNA. Paul sends the FBI into the desert to bring back the one person he thinks can help save the city—his ex-wife. Kendra Hart.
When the ants launch an all-out attack, Paul and Kendra hit the dangerous, panic-stricken streets of New York, searching for a coveted queen. It’s a race to unlock the secrets of this indestructible new species, before the President nukes Manhattan.
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The secret of humanity’s origin has lain buried for millennia. And now it threatens to destroy us all.
That’s the premise behind J.T. Brannan’s debut novel, ORIGIN, which starts when a scientific team in the Antarctic uncovers a body buried 40,000 years ago.
But the body isn’t some kind of primitive man. It’s something else entirely. This sets off a struggle taking the scientist heroine and her ex-husband, a former government operative, all over the world, from Area 51 to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
J.T. knows a bit about the whole action hero business, as he trained at Sandhurst as an officer in the British Army and is a former national karate champion.
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It’s hot outside. The lawn is scorched. We’re under a water ban. Veggies at the farmer’s market pale, vendors dwindle, and the early thaw ruined 80% of the fruit crop. This May was the warmest on record. Forest fires rage in Colorado while rains pour in the most unlikely of locales. CARRY THE FLAME is James Jaros’ stunning sequel to BURN DOWN THE SKY a post-apocalyptic thriller published last year by HarperCollins. When read in the context of the current drought, James Jaros is beginning to sound downright prophetic.
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Not far off the coast, connected by a thread of causeway, lays Brigands Key. It’s the sort of place you may have visited once on a Florida vacation. Maybe you want to retire near here. But this July, Brigands Key becomes a kill zone. The bridge is up and a storm rages on the horizon; you won’t want to put this book down until you’ve read the very last page.
Hold on tight as I interview thriller author Ken Pelham. Welcome, Ken!
The blurb for BRIGANDS KEY reads:
An ageless body at the bottom of the sea. A lethal plague. A ruthless murderer. A monster hurricane. Archaeologist Carson Grant came to Brigands Key to repair his shattered reputation, and finds himself instead staring down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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By Paula Tutman
Judas exists! He’s been wandering through millennia, hiding himself in plain sight and cloaking himself in history, putting the pieces in place for the second coming and the end of the world. The thin skinned, righteous wrong and anyone who believes they have the one and sole map to the path of God, need not apply.
What if everyone was wrong about Armageddon and the Rapture? That’s the simple question posed by Bob Mayer in his latest release, I, JUDAS THE 5th GOSPEL, offered by his publishing house, Who Dares Wins Publishing. If you think you have a pretty good idea of what took place at The Last Supper and what followed, open your mind to Bob Mayer’s take.
Part science, part thriller, part history and part whodunit, when, where and how, Bob Mayer opens an Eighth Seal in our imaginations and Armageddon is upon us.
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A sculpture emblazoned with a coded message central to mankind’s survival stands in the Central Intelligence Agency’s courtyard. One man knows the cipher. Dr. Jonathan Chalmers heads a CIA unit that safeguards the greatest secret our government has ever kept—and he plans for its consequences. He knows the truth about the Roswell UFO crash…and the convergence of alien forces ordained to wage galactic battle on Earth, fighting to possess whatever remains of the Earth.
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A PERSONALLY-INTERACTIVE THRILLER THAT CAN READ YOUR MIND
“Unconventional and innovative, this is the future of e-publishing here and now—a thriller you not only read, but interact with. Pretty cool and completely fascinating. Attention everyone with an ebook, don’t miss W. Craig Reed’s THE EAGLE AND THE SNAKE.”–Steve Berry, bestselling author of THE COLUMBUS AFFAIR
When was the last time you read a novel where you changed the story direction, decided whether characters lived or died, chose how the book ended and read prose customized to your personality and preferences? What about a book with a multimedia-enhanced Afterword that explores non-fiction topics introduced in the novel? W. Craig Reed has broken new ground with the first personally-interactive multimedia-enhanced thriller, THE EAGLE AND THE SNAKE, where SEAL Team Six and NCIS operators team up with Russian bio-scientists to stop an ancient society from creating a genetic weapon. But what really makes THE EAGLE AND THE SNAKE special is a new technology and ebook reader application, called PIERbook™, that can customize the story for readers based on selections, personalities and preferences. PIERbook stands for Personally Interactive Enhanced Reading book. Readers can now interact with the story to determine the fate of the novel’s characters, the selection of chapters and plot paths, story endings, and even the prose. What’s more, the book’s afterword is multimedia enhanced, accessed by links in the novel to allow readers to further explore various non-fiction topics.
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By Don Helin
In his debut novel, THE DEEP ZONE, James M. Tabor unleashes a story so thrilling that New York Times #1 Best Selling Author Brad Thor says, “The ANDROMEDA STRAIN for the 21st Century. Ladies and gentlemen, meet James M. Tabor – The new Michael Crichton.”
In the story, a brilliant and beautiful scientist and a mysterious special ops soldier must lead a team deep into the Earth on a desperate hunt for the cure to a deadly pandemic.
Biography: James M. Tabor is the award-winning and bestselling author of two nonfiction books about adventure and exploration. An O. Henry Award winner, he was the writer and host of the PBS series, THE GREAT OUTDOORS, and the executive producer of the History Channel special, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE WORLD A mountaineer, caver, and master diver, Tabor served as a Washington D.C. cop.
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This interview is with … uh.
…
Damn.
Oh, yeah, Robert J. Sawyer! His latest novel TRIGGERS explores the nature of memory in all its imperfection.
Robert J. Sawyer is best known for his science-fiction, being the winner of all three top science-fiction awards: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel FLASHFORWARD was adapted into the ABC television series of the same name. He is one of the most lauded SciFi author in history and has written twenty-one novels. But this novel TRIGGERS … this is his very first thriller.
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Survivors of the Cull, a Plague that wiped out people without the blood type O-neg, struggle in the floating Sargasso City jigsawed together with ships, submarines, barges and oil tankers off the coast of what was once known as California.
Separated by demarcations of turf, ethnicity and fear, it’s not so much living as existing. High above it all swing the Pali Boys: descendants of Hawaiian warriors, they desire to lift themselves and the spirits of the residents below by performing an increasingly impossible series of extreme stunts, designed to test their manhood, and demonstrate the vibrancy humanity once had. But as a conspiracy of murder unfolds and blood attacks increase, Kavika a single under-sized Pali Boy must strive to overcome his lowly status and the condemnation of his peers in order to save them all from an enemy living within.
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Science and thrillers have been companionable bedfellows at least since Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN was published almost two centuries ago, and maybe longer than that. When science takes a central role in a thriller, how accurate must the science be? I put that question to Debut Author Kira Peikoff, whose novel LIVING PROOF is due for release this month from Tor.
“I don’t have a background in hard science,” Peikoff said, “but my background and training as a journalist gave me the confidence to interview professionals to get the information I needed for the book. You need to know how to ask the right questions.”
Having asked the “right questions,” the NYU journalism graduate added, the next step is deciding how much to bend the rules without destroying the author’s credibility.
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Nate Kenyon is a three-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist and award-winning author of Bloodstone, The Reach, The Bone Factory, Sparrow Rock, and Prime. Last month Kenyon released StarCraft Ghost: Spectres, a novelized version based on the StarCraft Ghost video game series through Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books.
It is the story of a world where dominion ghosts epitomize the height of terran evolution and physical conditioning. Augmented by technologies that harness their innate psionic potential, these lethal operatives use telepathy and other superhuman powers to isolate and destroy the enemies of the Dominion. But when the hunters become the hunted and ghosts start disappearing without a trace, even the most dangerous human soldiers in the Koprulu sector have something to fear…
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By Ethan Cross
Publisher’s Weekly stated that author John C. Boland “excels in rendering epiphanies.” And his new novel, Hominid, is no exception as it explores evolution, genetics, archaeology, and a centuries-old mystery.
Evolution is Deadly. Archaeologist David Isaac joins a team excavating a crypt on a remote island where a colonial-era family lies buried. By local lore, the family were “devils.” The expedition’s leader hopes to revive his career by proving they were murdered by neighbors in a burst of religious hysteria. But these cadavers harbor an older and deadlier secret–evidence that a new humanoid species has emerged.
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If you think CSI started the forensics craze, here’s the most enjoyable way to correct that misunderstanding. The original forensic super-sleuth, Temperance “Tempe” Brennan, is back in Kathy Reich’s latest bone chilling brain teaser Flash and Bones.
The story kicks off with a body discovered in a barrel of asphalt in a landfill. A stock car driver reads about the discovery in the news and contacts Tempe, fearing that the body is his sister who disappeared years earlier at age seventeen.Of course, since it’s Kathy Reichs, there are multiple storylines all spinning around the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Kathy Reichs is a real-life scientific investigator the police turn to for help with the tough cases. But even though her novels all center on the forensic sciences, no two are ever alike.
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“One of the Top Thriller Writers Working Today” –Steve Berry, New York Times Bestselling author of The Jefferson Key.”
Emma stumbles across human traffickers and is caught and brought to the marijuana fields of Ciudad Juarez. Here the plants are dying from a disease that is eating away not only at them, but it is also being transmitted to humans, though no one can determine how or why. The cartel leader believes that the disease is caused by the massive amounts of herbicide that the US dusting planes dump on the marijuana fields almost daily in an attempt to kill the plants. The leader decides to send the tainted plants into the States along the drug route. Once transmitted to humans the disease kills in nine days. Emma needs to solve the puzzle and stop the shipment or she, and everyone else who comes in contact with it, will die on The Ninth Day.
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By J.N. Duncan
I’d like to welcome J.E. Fishman to ITW this month, to talk about the upcoming release of his exciting new thriller, Primacy. J.E. Fishman is a former Doubleday editor, literary agent and ghostwriter. Primacy, his first novel in national distribution, will be published by Verbitrage in September 2011. When he isn’t writing fiction or blogging, J.E. Fishman works as an entrepreneur. He divides his time between Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and New York City. So, let’s get started.
What is the quick line on what Primacy is about in 25 words or less?
I like the first sentence of the Kirkus review on this: “A voluble primate threatens to bring down the animal-testing industry.” Eleven words.
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By Andrew Zack
It’s an exciting new time in the publishing world. Authors without publishers are selling a million copies or more of eBooks on Amazon. Authors are direct publishing more and more and agents are often now falling into the role of publisher, helping clients exploit rights to their works when tradition markets don’t see the potential. Which leads us to PETROPLAGUE, a new thriller by Amy Rogers.
UCLA graduate student Christina Gonzalez wanted to use biotechnology to free America from its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Her genetically-altered bacteria will extract energy from the vast, inaccessible tar sands of the western hemisphere. But an environmental extremist sabotages her work by blowing up a field test. Soon after, an eruption at the La Brea Tar Pits makes Christina wonder if there’s a connection. When burning cars choke the freeways and jets departing LAX fall from the sky, Christina realizes her oil-degrading bacteria have escaped–and they’re eating LA’s gas.
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At a prison in Nebraska, the government is experimenting with time travel, but their supercomputers are accidentally cross-wired with a new electric chair. Curtis Beckett, a condemned, yet innocent man, is sent to 1957. In the past, he solves the murders and meets the love of his life.
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Just last month, the United States flew its last shuttle mission. The event, besides finding its place in the history books, raised questions about the future of space exploration. This sequence of events serves to highlight David L. Goleman’s sixth book in the Event Group Series, Legacy.
Legacy opens with NASA on a mission to discover water on the moon. A robotic probe goes over the edge of a crate to have its fall stopped by a buried object – a spacesuit complete with a humanoid skeleton. In short order an investigation determines the remains are millions of years old. Before the reality of that can sink in, a closer look at the crater reveals weaponry “the likes of which our world has never seen.”
And the race is on.
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Journalist Nat Idle is nearly gunned down in Golden Gate Park. He quickly learns it was no random attack. Suddenly, in pursuit of the truth, he’s running for his life through the shadows of Silicon Valley, a human lab animal caught in a deadly maze of neurotechnology and institutional paranoia. And his survival rests entirely in the hands of his eighty-five-year old grandmother, Lane, who’s suffering from dementia, and can’t remember the secret at the heart of the world-changing conspiracy.
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The world drawn by James Jaros is parched, the future bleak. Many describe his writing as dark; I prefer searing. As I finished the first chapters I had a deep unsettling sense of hopelessness. The comparison to the Mad Max series is both apt and undersells the emotional depth here. One of the great benefits of being an interviewer is that you often read works that you likely would not have otherwise discovered. I’m thirsty for more. And I’m not the only one…
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A category 5 hurricane has never hit the Georgia coast. Until now.
An outspoken TV weathercaster is the first to realize the threat, but is fired from his job before he can issue a warning.
Unaware of the hurricane’s sudden strengthening, a family vacationing on a barrier island in the storm’s path finds itself cut off from escape.
And an Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft, severely crippled after it penetrates the storm, is trapped in its eye.
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By Terry DiDomenico
The chess teams I knew played chess and were pretty boring – that is until I met up with Jeremy Robinson’s Chess Team. Boring is definitely not a word in their vocabulary.
This month marks the publication of the third novel in Jeremy’s Chess Team saga, Threshold. And if it meets the author’s own criteria of raising the thrill level in each subsequent novel, then we are in for a treat.
The Chess Team made its debut in Pulse. It’s a rip-roaring adventure that ties genetic engineering with the myth of the many-headed monster Hydra and the ancient hero Hercules. Pulse was followed by Instinct where the team is tasked to protect a scientist who needs to find the source (and the cure) for a weaponized strain of a genetic disease that strikes without warning. The solution is tied to an ancient secret found in the wilds of Viet Nam.
And now we have Threshold.
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By Nate Kenyon
I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Walter Greatshell to discuss his latest thriller, his writing process and more.
What is Xombies: Apocalypso about?
It’s the climactic book of my Xombies trilogy, after Xombies: Apocalypse Blues (originally released as Xombies) and Xombies: Apocalypticon. The first two books told the story of how human civilization was destroyed by a secret society of powerful tycoons—the Moguls. These men financed the invention of an artificial virus called Agent X, which was supposed to be their private Fountain of Youth, but instead it got loose and turned almost every woman on Earth into an unkillable blue killing machine—a Xombie. The women then spread the disease to the men they killed, and that would have been that, except for a teenage girl named Lulu Pangloss, who managed to escape the plague aboard a decommissioned nuclear submarine converted to a refugee ship. In the second book, Apocalypticon, there was a mutiny and the plague infected the sub, making all its passengers carriers of the disease.
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