Valley of Seven Castles

Giant global corporations in the near future tyrannize the world, while avoiding any damage or consequences to their bottom line. Instead, they feed their accomplices and stooges to the wolves. In this way, freedom and democracy are threatened around the world. That scenario plays out as a warning in the novel Valley of Seven Castles. Young Californians Rich Buchan and Hannah Smith are not only on the run—they are in fact on a mission—to bring the 'McGuffin' (so-called radically new Intelligent Fuselage Skin (IFS) technology) to Professor Sander of the Progressive Alliance for Peace (PAX) in the Valley of Seven Castles. Rick and Hannah's flight through terror begins far-away (his in a West Asian war as a U.S. soldier; hers as a personal slave to a Chinese billionaire in Shanghai). They meet in Paris, at the scene of a murder in a Bagnolet bar called Les 39 Etages. Hannah has stolen the IFS technology from her owner, Wan, and has freed herself from her cruel situation. Rick is on the run for a combat-related crime he did not commit. Together, they outrun assassins sent to kill them, to reach Prof. Sander at a global meeting of PAX at a Luxembourg castle. We know they'll find HEA, but you'll be breathlessly turning the pages to figure out how they can overcome so much dark suspense.

There we have it. Please read the Thrillerology if you haven't =already, to learn some amazing secrets and ingredients from dramatic and literary history that went into shaping this thought-provoking thriller. Please note also that, among my fifty or so published books, you'll find at least three other political thrillers, and you can read half of each for free at Galley City:

Orbital Sniper. My James Bond homage, set in a near future not unlike that of my Luxembourg thriller, only special agent James Gray ("anything goes with gray") is already dealing with a corporate-run world resembling the feudal tyrannies begin to dawn in Valley of Seven Castles.

CON2: The Generals of October. With Seven Days in May in mind as I wrote in the 1990s, this is my warning that we must *never* have a Second Constitutional Convention or CON2. If we do, someone (using the corrupt Generals of October) will indeed seize power and forever finish off whatever democracy we may believe we've had.

Orwell in Orbit 2084. This is pure SF in my Empire of Time (High Sci Fi) series. A detective from modern San Diego is kidnapped by agents from the far future, brainwashed into thinking he is someone else, and sent back to 2084 to save a dissident family from the tyranny of the Great Shepherd, who (how prophetic was this 2003 novel?) has build a Great Wall around *Amerika* to shield us from subversive ideas (like democracy, freedom, equality, real Christianity, and so forth, all that Communist fake news that village mooflans are taught to loathe with foam coming from their mouths and dripping on their AR-15s. More amazingly, there is a mysterious, evil, spooky cat named Donald roaming around the library in 1,000,000 A.D. (I wrote this around 2003).