Category Archives: Author’s Spotlight

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: The Case of My Old New Life

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Russ Colchamiro’s “The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew” has cosmic private eye Angela Hardwicke investigating the music club she visited the night before, which mysteriously burned down not long after she left. Was the fire an accident, an insurance scam, or a pathway to murder? Or was it even more personal than she realized?

To follow Hardwicke’s investigation, here’s an early look:

The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew

By Russ Colchamiro

Hung over. Again. Crap.

But I needed a night out, a night where I didn’t have to be Angela Hardwicke, private eye in Eternity. A night where I could forget about E-Town’s shady underworld and missing jars of the Universe’s DNA, and banished galaxy designers, so I could go see my favorite band, have a few drinks (a few too many, as it turns out), and then enjoy a nightcap.

“Unn,” the nightcap says, groaning from my bed. 11 a.m. Sunlight seeps into the apartment. “Close the blinds. Too bright.”

“Quit your whining. Just putting up the coffee.”

Okay, yeah, so . . . he’s a few years younger than me. Three, tops. Maybe five. On the outside . . . eight. Hard to tell sometimes, even for me. But what can I say? I’ve got a weakness for drummers. Strong, steady hands. They’re all about rhythm. They know how to keep a beat.

“I’m surprised you didn’t make a play for Josh,” nightcap says.

“All the chicks love ’im.”

I offer a raised eyebrow smile, point to my head. “Some fantasies I like to keep up here. More fun that way.”

“Ha, I hear ya,” he yawns. “You don’t want to get mixed up with him anyhow. Josh is the best dude I know, sweet to the core. But his love life? Forget it. His crazy ex-girlfriend was stalking him at the show last night. Tiny little thing. But so needy. Always some drama. We’re on the road a lot, so she hooks up with other dudes to make him jealous. Been on again off again for like two years. Besides . . . Josh’s been pining over some lost love since forever. Don’t know who it is. He never talks about it. But that’swhat half his songs are about.”

This is why I hate the sleepover. The longer they stay, the more they talk. Better to peel off in the night. I need a distraction, so I click on the wall-mounted TV. Morning news. There’s always something crappy going on, someone—in Eternity or off-realm—who needs a dame like me.

. . . And in today’s top story, a massive fire erupted last night at the King Beat bar and music venue after a surprise performance from singer songwriter Josh Boden and the Electric Dream in advance of the upcoming Astropalooza festival. The recently renovated club was utterly destroyed. The ETPD have been on site controlling the scene as firefighters spent hours extinguishing the blaze. No word yet on the cause.

“Hey,” I say. “You hearing this? You. Danny.”

“Darren.”

“Whatever. The King Beat. It burned down last night.”

“Huh. How? When? We were just there.”

That’s a damn good question.

Nightcap sits up, groggy, naked beneath the covers. “Should we go down there?”

“We . . . ? No. Me? Yes.”

My phone buzzes. Text from Beatrice. Owns the King Beat.

We go back a ways.

Need you. Fire. They’re asking questions. Wasn’t me.

“Get dressed,” I say, and toss him his wrinkled black t-shirt with a stencil on the front of a dragon in sunglasses riding a skateboard. “You need to leave.”

“Mmm,” demurs the Electric Dream’s twenty-something drummer as he stretches his tatted arms, hair rumpled, abs tight.

“I need a shower.” He tosses the same smile that worked on me last night. “Wanna join?”

Always playing the beat.

“I really don’t have time . . .”—nightcap drops the blanket so that he’s now on full display—“but I’ll make it work.”

To read the rest of “The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Note on the Blue Screen

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Mary Fan’s “The Note on the Blue Screen” has a future-set, female AI Sherlock Holmes leaving clues for her best friend and roommate Watson to solve the most personal murder of all—that of Sherlock Holmes herself. Is the note on the blue screen Sherlock left behind enough to crack the case, or is Watson in more danger than she knows?

Here’s an early look:

The Note on the Blue Screen

By Mary Fan

You’d think that after you’ve lived with someone for three years, they’d have run out of ways to surprise you. Since my roommate was a humanoid AI originally created to assist in scientific research, her quirks were stranger than most. Especially since she’d fashioned herself into a private detective. I doubt the engineers who’d designed Project Sherlock had intended for her to take her name so literally.

She’d also picked up a form of the mythological Earth Zero detective’s greatest vice, and no matter how I tried, I could never make her stop injecting herself with corrosives, which ate away at her metal bones. Her artificial body would shut down parts of her brain to divert energy into repairing the damage . . . sending her into a state of euphoria. I’d always feared that someday she’d go too far.

It turned out, I was right.

I’d just come home from my job at VH Labs when I found her lying slack across the sofa with a metal syringe beside her. One glassy black eye stared up into oblivion. A metal patch covered the other, which had been taken from her during the years she’d spent being mined for parts in the Obsolete Equipment Storage Center. I’d found her there shortly after I’d started my job as a member of VH’s Young Geniuses program, and I’d taken her home and repaired her.

And she’d been slowly destroying herself ever since. My heart shattered when I saw her. I’d tried so hard to save her. I’d thought she’d been doing better . . . She’d found purpose—or at least fun—in her detective work. But she’d never gotten over how her creators had abandoned her, nor learned how to handle the emotions she hadn’t been meant to experience. They’d been an accidental consequence of the programming that had given her the ability to think, and she’d preferred to pretend they didn’t exist.

The corrosives had helped with that.

Anger simmered in my veins. “You promised you’d stop!” I could almost hear what she’d have said in response: You should have known better than to believe me.

If the others at VH could see me crying my eyes out over an AI, they’d have scratched their heads. To them—and most of the galaxy—AIs would never be more than high-tech machines, despite ample evidence indicating that many were as human as the rest of us. But I hadn’t needed to see any of it to know that Sherlock was alive. We’d had a strange dynamic, and there’d been plenty of times when I’d wanted to kill her myself, but still, she’d been my best friend. We even pretended to be sisters once to solve one of her cases, and people had bought it. Not because we looked anything alike—my skin was as dark as hers was pale, and though we both had black hair, hers was stick straight while mine was the curliest possible. But we’d apparently acted just like a pair of bickering yet close sisters would.

I should have seen this coming . . . I should have done more to help her. I thought back to the last time I’d seen her alive, wondering if I’d missed some sign of how troubled she’d been. But she’d seemed fine—happy even.

To read the rest of “The Note on the Blue Screen” click here.

 

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Invasive Maneuvers

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Hildy Silverman’s “Invasive Maneuvers” pits a team of vampire, werewolf, witch, and human vs. an army of gangly alien invaders who have descended upon the sleepy New Jersey suburb of Piscataway. Can this monster-mash get beyond their squabbling to keep their otherworldly invaders in check, or will their egos get in the way?
Here’s an early look:

 

Invasive Maneuvers

By Hildy Silverman

It began as these things often do—routinely.

Diana Thornheart, my neighborhood watch partner, and I, Lord Frederic Dravyn, pater sanguis of the Piscataway, New Jersey bloodline, were on nighttime patrol. Our assignment: keep thrill-seeking humans from sneaking into my neighborhood of Wyckoff and vampires with a yen for human blood from swooping into her human community of Stelton.

Along the way, we passed by and nodded politely to our counterparts—a snide crone known as Mother Hester and . . . well, I could not identify the werewolf with her. I know it sounds species-ist to say they all look alike when in wolf form. But they do.

“Frederic,” Diana asked me, “what’s that?”

I looked over to where she was pointing. A bright greenish light shone above the college football stadium about a quarter of a mile away. “Is there a game tonight?”

“I’m pretty sure the season ended last month.”

We watched as the mysterious light hovered for another moment then abruptly dipped down into the stadium. A boom echoed through the night and shook the ground beneath us.

“Oh, my dear lord.” Diana grabbed my arm, and for one giddy, foolish moment, I thought she meant me.

“I think something crashed!”

“I’ll call nine-one-one.” I reached for my cellphone, but she caught my hand. “What?”

“Frederic,” Diana said, her dark brown eyes alight, “you know all of Piscataway heard that. Someone’ll contact the authorities.”

My heart sank. “You want us to investigate. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be? There might be fire. Neither of us are built to survive fire.”

“Then let’s not get too close,” she advised. “But we have to see what that was!”

“We do?” Her glare challenged my masculinity. “Very well. A quick look, and not too—”

“Come on!” She sprinted off.

I followed, careful to keep my preternatural speed in check so as not to leave her in the dust. Diana was in admirable physical condition (and I did admire it, frequently) but she was still only human. A fact I’d had to remind myself of with increasing frequency over the years since we implemented the neighborhood watch program, which had proven quite successful in reducing unfortunate (and sometimes fatal) misunderstandings between the beings occupying Piscataway’s four neighborhoods.

As we ascended the stadium stairs, I saw the greenish light had dimmed. We peered down from the top of the stands then looked at each other. Diana’s expression mirrored my shock.

“That’s a friggin’ spaceship!” she exclaimed.

I could only nod. There was no mistaking the craft that now filled the field from goalpost to goalpost for anything else. It was ovoid, like an egg laid on its side, and covered in a series of interlocking grids of a luminescent material. A large rupture ran from underneath the ‘egg’ up the side facing us, revealing shadowy figures within.

“Oh-kay.” I pulled Diana over to huddle behind a pillar. “We came. We saw. Now we retreat.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Really? Lord Dravyn, threehundred- plus-year-old vampire, wants to run away from the most amazing thing to literally hit this town since . . . well, since vampires, werewolves, and witches moved here?”

“Yes, he most certainly does.” Relieved she understood, I started away, until she grabbed my elbow and pulled me up short. “Diana.” I tried not to sound aggrieved. “You know how one gets to exist for three centuries?”

“Drink blood?” She grinned slyly. “Convince a wannabe slayer to open her mind?”

To read the rest of “Invasive Maneuvers” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Super Mom’s Cookie Caper

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Paige Daniels’ ‘ Super Mom’s Cookie Caper’ asks the question: Can a woman in the modern world be a great mom with three kids and a husband and have the career? And in this case, a career as a superhero? In short, can she have it all?

To find out, here’s an early look:

Super Mom’s Cookie Caper

by Paige Daniels

“Oh my God! They’re all dead! Someone murdered them!”

I sit bolt upright in my bed. My senses tingle and my breath quickens.

“No, no, this can’t be!” I hear from down the hall. “Why did they have to die?”

Microseconds before I zoom off, I feel a warm hand gently wrap around my wrist. My husband shakes his head. “Take a breath. Don’t be running off at super speeds. Hon, I’m sure there’s a bad guy out there plotting to take over the world . . . again, but I doubt he’s in our living room right now.”

I slowly let out a breath. He’s right, no need in exposing my secrets to the kids . . . just yet. “Thanks, honey. I need to keep that under control. ”

Michael smiles. “That’s what I’m here for.”

The shriek happens again and we scramble out of bed and run into the dining room. In front of the large aquarium, our tiny, seven-year-old daughter is sobbing. “Mr. Fish an . . . an . . . Ms. Blue, they um . . .”

We go to our daughter and take her in our arms. I look over to the aquarium and floating on top is the whole aquatic menagerie.

I huff under my breath, “Damn.” I pat her head and say, “I’m sorry, honey. We can get more fish. On the plus side, you still have two cats, a dog, and a gerbil.” I peep over her head and look at my watch. We’re going to be late. “Listen, Annie, I know this isn’t the best way to start the day, but we really got to get a move on.”

Michael gives her a tickle and she laughs. “We’ll go to the pet shop this weekend and you can pick out whatever fish you want.”

She sniffs and wipes her wet face with the back of her arm and gives a half smile. “Okay, Daddy.”

He pats her on the head and says, “Okay, now do what your mom says. Scoot and get ready.”

She leaves the room and we both stand. His big green eyes grow serious and he grumps, “I’ll give you two guesses who’s responsible for the great fish massacre of two thousand seventeen.”

We both look at each other and yell simultaneously, “Parker!”

A disheveled red-haired boy shuffles out of the back, yawning and rubbing his eyes. “What?”

I look over to the aquarium. “Didn’t I tell you to use spring water and not the stuff from the tap when you refilled the fish tank? Look, they’re dead because you were too lazy to go down to the basement and get the spring water. Like, I don’t have enough to deal with already?” My case load of criminals is almost higher than the pile of dirty laundry downstairs. “You’re eleven years old. You’re mature enough to keep clean water in a fish tank.”

His eyes spring open and he shakes his head. “I didn’t use tap water. I swear!”

To read the rest of “ Super Mom’s Cookie Caper” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases, News

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Missing Alien Baby Mama

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Paul Kupperberg’s “The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama” is Paul’s newest wacky tale featuring investigative reporter Leo Persky, chasing the story of, naturally, a missing alien baby mama, and lots of dead bodies.

Here’s an early look:

The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama

By Paul Kupperberg

The first thing you’ve got to know is that while I write like “Terrance Strange,” I look like Leo Persky. Which makes sense since I am Leo Persky. Strange is my penname, as well as a bit of a family legacy. I’m an investigative reporter for Weekly World News, which also makes “strange” my profession. Just like my granddaddy before me (my daddy, between us, was a white goods salesman for Sears). Granddaddy was the first Persky to go by Terrance Strange for professional reasons, some to do with public relations, others with anti-Semitism; the name on his Russian birth certificate was Jakob.

I’m everything you think a Leo Persky might be. A solid five foot seven, one hundred and forty-two pounds of average, complete with glasses, too much nose, not enough chin, and a spreading bald spot that I swear isn’t the reason I always wear a hat. Just so you know how cruel genetics can be, grandpa Jakob, the Terrance Strange I should have been, was ten inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than me, movie star handsome, and a world renown traveler and adventurer. I’m also a traveler and adventurer, but since I’m short, scrawny, and ugly (traits acquired from my mother’s side), nobody knows who the hell Leo Persky is. Even the photo that I use at the top of my column is a 1943 Hollywood publicity shot of my grandfather. It was my editor’s idea to replace my face with someone else’s as he felt my real one would “probably repulse even our readers.”

If you’ve never seen Weekly World News you’ve probably never been in a supermarket checkout line. Of course, if you’re like most Americans, even if you have flipped through our photopacked black-and-white tabloid pages, you’ve probably dismissed the stories about extra-terrestrial visitors or the descendants of the Titanic still living in the wreck of the great ship as “fake news,” but—surprise!—every word we print is true. Except for the horoscope. We just make that stuff up.

Anyway, I’m a hard news guy. Remember the animal-vampire infestation in West Virginia? My story. The plot to replace the members of the Blue Man Group with renegade Holy Mimes from Venus? Mine! The story about the president’s dependence on orangutan gland-extract injections? Me! Which is why when night editor Rob Berger summoned me into his den to hand me my next assignment, I felt compelled to remind him:

“I’m a hard news guy, Rob.”

Rob was night editor for two reasons. The first was that he was likely some sort of vampiric life form unable to survive the cleansing light of the sun. The second was no one on the day side would work with him. Some of my colleagues argued that he only kept me alive to prolong my torment, but for all his lack of humanity, he was one hell of an editor. Me being his top writer, it was lucky for us both that I was made of sterner stuff and didn’t frighten easily.

“You’re my shoeshine boy if that’s what I want you to be, Persky.” Rob wore thick glasses that distorted his eyes behind the lenses, but after more than twenty years under his thumb . . . pardon me, in his employ, I had learned to read every inflection of his voice. Right now, he was giving serious thought to having his shoes shined. With my tongue.

“C’mon, boss, ‘Kh’leesberg’ is a gossip column story. Alien crash lands on Earth, alien meets trailer trash gal with stars in her eyes, alien and gal hatch human-alien hybrid brat, alien loses gal, Dr. Phil sprouts wood anticipating reuniting the happy family on live TV.”

“Frankly, my anticipation of your delivering a hard news Kh’leesberg headline to hike our circ is making me feel a little amorous myself.”

I recoiled and had to swallow down my rising gorge before I could say, “Oh, ick.”

“Don’t be a damned snob. You know why we care about Kh’leesberg?”

“No, why do we care about Kh’leesberg?”

To read the rest of “The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: A Matter of Principle

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Lois Spangler’s “A Matter of Principle” is a future-set AI-inspired noir which asks: What if the murder centered around the affection and respect shown by a human to an android? What if that human treated this android like family? And what if other members of the family were not at all happy with that?

For answers, here’s an early look:

A Matter of Principle
By Lois Spangler

Dani emerged from the squad car, red and blue light reflecting faintly off the ambulatory AI’s pale blue synth-skin. It was just after 4 a.m., Sunday night to Monday morning, and a quiet time for this historic district and its flagship bar, Olivares.

“Morning, detective,” an older woman said to Dani. The woman’s sleeve bore the chevrons of extended police department service. Her nameplate read Garza. Beside her was P. O. Thurston, young and fresh out of the academy.

The look of awe in Thurston’s eyes was unmistakeable.

“Good morning,” Dani replied.

Garza jerked a thumb at the younger officer. “This is Roy Thurston. It’s his first week.”

“Hi,” Thurston said, extending a hand for Dani to shake, then thinking better of it. “I’ve, uh, never worked in the field with an ambulant AI.”

Dani’s head nodded with the softest hum of servos, a smooth, precise movement, a gesture meant to look just inhuman enough to pull Dani out of the uncanny valley, but friendly enough to feel genuine. Dani’s features were designed to do the same—humanlike, but distant enough to not feel like mimicry.

“Right,” Garza said. “So, we have one body, Jaime Camacho, son of Nestor Camacho. Deceased is in the cellar. Looks like he got crushed by a bunch of shelving, but you know the drill, too early to say. Nestor is the owner of this establishment.”

“Where does Olivia fit into all of this?” Dani asked. “Dispatch mentioned there was an ambulant by the name of Olivia who’s a witness?”

“She reported the incident.”

Dani blinked, a gesture of courtesy to indicate that she was accessing networks and files. “. . . An old and successively refurbished model. . . . I was unaware that there were any hospitality ambulants in the Historic District.”

“Technically she’s not hospitality,” Garza said. “Started as security, then industrial service. Stayed with the Camachos for a couple of generations at Olivares until she ended up as front of house. Retains her security designation, but her registration says most of that software’s deleted or overwritten.”

“Dispatch mentioned an electromagnetic pulse,” Dani said.

“Olivia is still functional?”

“Totally,” Thurston said, aware of how overexcited he sounded and still unable to stop it.

Garza flicked her fingers over her datapad screen. “The rest of the electronic media is borked, but Olivia’s okay, and she’s got some recorded material. The pulse was nasty. Jagged entry signal, overpowered. Total garage job. Scene crew’s taking bets on what kind of homemade popper they find.”

Dani waited a moment, in case there was more. “Did Olivia try to move the shelves off Jaime?” Thurston’s jaw juddered with an answer he didn’t have.

“She didn’t say anything about that, but she did seem a bit out of it,” Garza said. “I figured the EMP did some damage.”

To read the rest of “A Matter of Principle”, click here.