Chasing Naomi, by Mark Bossingham, is pure, unadulterated pop culture space adventure fun. The story features Allie, a teenage girl in the sixties, who suddenly discovers a spaceship buried for thousands of years, ready to take her on an adventure. The ship turns out to be a sentient being, the only other crew is a hologram, and Allie is off to join the federation, go to the academy, and have adventures. If you’ve consumed any entertainment set in space since the 1960s, you will feel immediately at home. It borrows liberally from every fictional space universe out there to tell its own story.

Allie is a pure-hearted good guy, so is “Ship,” the intelligent spacecraft that keeps changing its name, and although they have some harder-core bad dudes (or dudettes, I should probably say, the cast is almost entirely female) with them, this is a tale of good guys doing good deeds and saving the day.

It slows down and develops structural flaws toward the end, but overall it’s just a fun, well-written romp through a universe in which you’re going to feel at home right away.

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Enjoy this free sample of my upcoming historical thriller The Deepest Cut

Prologue

It’s 1982.

The U. S. And the Soviet Union prosecute a silent struggle for ideological supremacy between Capitalism and Communism. To keep the horror of all out thermonuclear war at bay, the combatants do their dirtiest deeds under cover of darkness, with full deniability. Rather than soldiers and armies, the battles are fought by spies and special forces in clashes than never see the light of a newspaper article.

They call it the Cold War, but in trouble spots around the world it flares dangerously hot.

Chapter One

Marco Villarta was dead. Murdered. And Clara’s pistol had been used to kill him.

She stood wrapped in darkness on a street in Panama City’s Terraplén district. Every passing second upped the danger of being caught. At three-thirty in the morning, revelers coming home late from the clubs or workers whose shift started early could pass her at any moment, and the longer she stood there looking at Marco’s body, the greater the risk.

Even so, Clara Verona wasted precious seconds staring. Marco was dead. Her mission had probably died with him.

Night wrapped her in anonymity for now, but not for long. When the sun rose, it would reveal a woman with blonde hair in a ponytail, brown eyes, skin that tanned easily here in the tropics, and the lean physical fitness of someone who used her muscles for a living. Long ago, the Verona family earned their money on a fishing boat, and Clara had grown up helping her father with it.

Around her, the rain tapered off, leaving only sprinkles. The streets mumbled and groaned as they woke up. Her jeans and loose blouse felt damp against her skin; her hair clung to her scalp.

The warbling tone of sirens sounded in the distance, a sign that the time for staring was over. Clara scooped up the 9mm Makarov pistol lying beside her dead contact. It was the standard-issue sidearm of the Soviet military. She’d been issued it when she’d been given this assignment. Discovering it missing from her room was what had brought her out here tonight. She’d found her pistol, and found far worse besides.

The gun was obviously intended to be discovered with the dead body. No sense letting her enemies’ scheme go as planned, whoever the enemies were, so she recovered it. Clara flicked the safety on, then shoved the weapon mostly inside the pocket of her jeans.

Something had gone wrong—badly wrong. A simple assignment to infiltrate the Communist Revolutionary Front had just turned deadly, and Clara suspected she was going to need that pistol. Whoever had killed Marco couldn’t possibly have any good intentions toward her, or toward her mission.

In Terraplén the buzz of people grew as dawn drew inexorably nearer. Poverty was the norm here, and the foot traffic consisted largely of service industry workers coming home after the bars closed. Dock workers and laborers made up the rest. Ramshackle two-story buildings bordered tiny, cramped streets. Only a short distance from her location, unfortunately, sat the headquarters of the Guardia Nacionale, or National Guard, Panama’s combined military and police.

Which, of course, meant they were quick to respond to the scene of the murders. A police car pulled into the narrow street behind her, visible only because of its flashing sirens, cutting off one of the two choices of escape routes. A voice shouted “Usted queda detenida!” at her.

That was the Spanish version of “You’re under arrest,” but Clara paid it no mind. She took off sprinting like a bolt of lightning.

She rounded the corner in front of her just before a second police car could cut it off. She immediately took another turn and cornered again, but the sound of racing footsteps behind her would not go away. Sirens wailed all around her. Shouts of “Detenida!” echoed off the buildings.

Clara had been very well trained in police procedure, and she knew that the police would swamp the streets with officers until they caught the suspect. It was a standard practice worldwide.

Her training also included the fact that the National Guard of Panama, awash in a culture of corruption that sank down from the top, had far different ideas of due process than cops in America. Getting caught was not an option, so she ran faster. But the footfalls behind her got louder, accompanied by more shouts of “Usted queda detenida!”

She whipped around a corner. In the fraction of a second she was out of view of the cops, instead of sprinting on, she pressed her back to the wall of the building and waited. She drew her pistol back out of her pocket. Seconds later a green-uniformed officer rounded the edge of the structure looking for her, gun in hand.

He failed to check his six, and that was all the advantage Clara needed.  She put the Makarov to his temple.

He froze without her having to say anything, and the moonlight offered her a picture of her victim. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tall. Muscular. And men just looked good in uniforms, it was a fact of life. If she had met him in a bar back home, she might have let him buy her a drink.

But they were not in a bar, and they were not back home.

She said, “Call them off or die.”

Any American who heard her speak would have said the words came out in perfect Spanish. Of course, the cop was not American; Clara had no doubt that he could identify her Cuban accent. In a way that worked in her favor.

“There are a dozen of us chasing you,” he growled back. “You can’t kill us all, that gun doesn’t have enough bullets. Reinforcements will be here any second.”

“Not if you call them off. Your radio. Use it. Move slowly, so I don’t do anything to ruin this little moment we’re having here.”

Just because they weren’t in a bar back home didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little entertainment, after all.

In reality, though, Clara sincerely hoped she didn’t have to shoot this man. The situation was bad already. Killing a law enforcement officer would make it far worse.

Sadly, the cop seemed to know that too. “Go ahead. Shoot me. The gunshot will just draw the others faster.”

If you’ve got a gun, pull the trigger.

Her old instructor’s words whispered in her memory, but Clara decided not to follow his advice. Not this time.

Rendering a human being unconscious is far harder than most people think. Not long ago, a very good instructor taught her how to do this, but then advised her never to try it. To be done successfully, the key is to impart a sudden motion to the skull that causes the brain to jostle back and forth inside it.

She said, “If we meet again, try to remember that I didn’t kill you when I could have.”

Then Clara shifted her pistol to her left hand, whipped it out of the way and drove her right fist with maximum possible force into the man’s temple, just as they taught her at the Farm. The cop crumpled to the ground. She dashed away into the night.

The true power of The Sequence lies in the middle of the book. Between 20% and 65% I simply could not put it down. What has Kit discovered? Who is trying to acquire her discovery, and killing all these people to do it? I came to care about the characters — so much so that the author succeeded in creating powerful conflicting emotions in me about one of them. I can’t remember the last time a book gave me feelings this strongly. I cared about these people and this story.

I did not experience the ending in the same way I did the middle. Characters and tech crucial to the ending are only hinted at, or not introduced at all until the last act.

The Sequence presents a fascinating world, probably 100-ish years into the future. There are three protagonists/antagonists, who work both for and against each other in fascinating ways. One is a detective with the Hong Kong Police named Johnny Woo, a genuinely good character who I liked and wanted to see succeed. The second is a smuggler for the criminal underworld named Dallas, who does most of his smuggling at the helm of a stealth jet.

And then we have Kit McKee. Kit is a genetic engineer who has discovered something for which people are willing to kill, and kill in large numbers, and kill gruesomely. If you look in the dictionary under antihero, you will find Kit McKee.

Pros:

• A compelling mystery, made more compelling by the horrifying revelations about genetic engineering uncovered by the Hong Kong police in the course of trying to solve it. The mystery pulled me in like a tractor beam.
• A character who’s at the same time easy to relate to and easy to abhor. I rarely experience fascination and disgust in such equal measure for a fictional character.
• A likable detective, very relatable. Every other character in this book is either evil or morally gray, but Johnny Woo is the bright, shining hero. I kept hoping for another Woo section of the book, so I could feel clean again.
• A vividly imagined world, including a criminal underworld that feels terrifyingly real and a genetic engineering profession that I dearly wish was not as realistic as I think it probably is.

Cons:

• Significant characters were barely hinted at, or not introduced at all, until the last quarter of the book.
• Dallas’s connections make a lot of challenges fall too easily.
• Moves very slow at the start.

My opinion: Very very strong writing, characterization and world building made weaker by the ending.

Before you read The Sequence, you should know that the means by which Kit and the other genetic engineers in this book advance their work are gruesome and horrifying. Many people may not have a strong enough stomach for it. I almost didn’t. Take that into account before you buy. Check it out at this link.

Coventry 2091 was a really fun book with a prose style that moves you right along. It’s a well-thought out world. There’s always a little bit of “hand waving” in science fiction, but for the most part it’s clear the author thought about the details quite a bit. I recommend this highly.

I freely admit that I’m not as well-read in science fiction as I could be. Nevertheless, the “travel oaks” in this book were a fundamental sci fi mechanic I had never encountered before, and I credit the author with a lot of creativity for that. If I’m wrong and someone else invented it, that’s cool too, it was still a lot more unique than I’d seen anywhere else.

There are some similarities to Atlas Shrugged here, in a small group of people able to preserve technology in the face of a tyrannical regime.

Coventry 2091 is a very well thought out colonization novel with the most unique system of FTL travel I can ever remember having encountered. You should read it today!