Tunnelling to the Truth

The World Beneath (A Joe Tesla Novel) by Rebecca Cantrell (Self-published e-book, 5 December 2013).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

On his way to ring the bell on Wall Street the day his software company goes public, Joe Tesla is overcome by an attack of agoraphobia so strong that he is unable to leave his hotel at Grand Central Terminal.  He ends up living in a house built in the midst of the tunnels by the lead engineer on the construction of the original Grand Central Terminal, which is now owned by Tesla's college roommate Leandro Gallo and his twin sister Celeste.

Joe manages to keep himself occupied.  He has an office set up so that he can work in his underground home if necessary, and he's become incredibly well-read.  At night, when the trains aren't running, he and his psychiatric service dog Edison walk around the tunnels using night-vision goggles.  (Yes, Edison has his own goggles.)

On their travels, they occasionally run into homeless people or maintenance workers, but few people go as deep into the tunnels as Joe and his dog.  One night, he and Edison come across a strange set of footprints, which become more troubling as they appear more often.  He eventually follows them to find a man pounding on a brick wall with a sledgehammer.

What they discover behind the wall sounds completely implausible, but is based on historical events.

Rebecca Cantrell has created a gripping, thrilling story that is at once historical and contemporary.  Historical mystery and political thriller fans (and probably cozy readers, too) will be hooked after the first page.  This was an unputdownable book for me, and (from comments I've read) for many others, too.

Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel mystery/thriller novels have won the Bruce Alexander and Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry and RT Reviewers Choice awards; her critically-acclaimed cell phone novel, iDrakula was nominated for the APPY award and listed on Booklist’s Top 10 Horror Fiction for Youth. She and her family recently left Hawaii’s sunny shores for adventures in Berlin. Find Rebecca Cantrell on Facebook, Twitter, and at www.rebeccacantrell.com.




FTC Full Disclosure: Many thanks to the author for the advance copy of the e-book.

Going Low-Tech

A guest blog post by J. H. Bográn 

Last week I finished reading Intensity by Dean Koontz. The novel was written, and set, in the mid-90s. The premise of the novel depends heavily on the fact that the heroine is not able to call for help. Back then, cellular phones were not an everyday commodity and were only found clipped to a businessman’s leather belt or attached to a huge battery inside a briefcase. In our modern day of instant communication and gratification, it becomes very difficult for certain type of stories to work. Going low-tech is difficult nowadays, but not impossible. 

But what if you really want to have a low-tech environment for your novel setting? Of course I don’t have the absolute answer for this, because it would depend on the creativity of the author. However, here are some ideas to bounce around. 

~ Set your story in the past. If you set the novel in, say, the mid-90s, you can forget about annoying personalized ringtones, everybody taking a picture of you with their phone camera, and, most importantly, prevent premature calls to the cavalry. In The Assassins Gallery, David L. Robbins sets the action in the days around the end of World War II. He deals with fuel rations, curfews, racism, and plenty of other elements of the period that make this novel very rich.  

~ Stranded away from technology. Oh, how we depend on finding those signal bars in our little devices! Finding an unmapped island would be tricky, but you can play a little there. Similar to the island is setting your story in the mountains, with no cellular coverage. And while we’re on the subject of islands, when asked about the contents of the unopened Fedex package in Cast Away, director Robert Zemeckis has said the box contained a solar-powered satellite phone. Opening the parcel would have cut short the movie by at least 1.5 hours! 

~ Diagnose with OCD. A character with a fixation that technology can bring the apocalypse faster than you can say “twelve-twenty one-twelve” can go a long way. Oh, come on, don’t give me that look! We’ve had OCD characters even before the term was coined or people diagnosed with it—think Sherlock Holmes, for one. On the other hand, the BBC’s latest incarnation of the character goes the opposite way, with Sherlock’s use of technology. 

~ Time and Space travel. If you read a description of how to cook a thriller, you will seldom hear “add a dash of fantasy,” but sometimes working out of the box can take you to such unexpected places. For my short story, Deeds of a Master Archer, I have two modern-day guys falling through a portal and landing in a world where they become a village’s last line of defense against—you guessed it—dragons. I usually refer to this story as a standard thriller with a fantasy location. 

So, how would you make a character to boldly go where no character has gone before? 

 

J. H. Bográn, born and raised in Honduras, is the son of a journalist. He ironically prefers to write fiction rather than fact. José’s genre of choice is thrillers, but he likes to throw in a twist of romance into the mix. His works include novels and short stories in both English and Spanish. He’s a member of the International Thriller Writers where he also serves as the Thriller Roundtable Coordinator. 

Website: www.jhbogran.com; Twitter: @JHBogran; Facebook: www.facebook.com/jhbogran 

Research and Realism

I'm busy traveling today, so my two-time client and all-round great guy, thriller and horror writer Allan Leverone, is filling in here at CFC for me today. Take it away, Al!
- Jodie Renner, freelance editor and craft-of-fiction writer

RESEARCH & REALISM, by Allan Leverone

As a genre author, my goal is to immerse the reader in the story. I want you turning the pages late into the night, knowing you should put the book down and go to bed but unable to force yourself to do so. I want you so involved in my fictional world that if the phone rings, you don’t even want to take your nose out of the book for three seconds to check the caller ID.

That’s my goal. And without putting words in anyone else’s mouth (or on anyone else’s keyboard), I think it’s probably a pretty safe bet that’s the goal of everyone who writes fiction.

In other words, I want to achieve a measure of realism you will accept as a reader. Since I’m only expert in a small number of subjects (people who know me might suggest that number is zero), a certain percentage of my time as an author must be spent in research.

I hate research.

Let me clarify: I like learning new things but don’t enjoy doing research for research’s sake. When I’m writing, I would much rather be writing than researching. I want to learn enough about a subject to ensure that you, as a reader, are not forced out of the story by a lack of realism in the writing.

My new thriller, Parallax View, is set late in the Cold War, in 1987, and action takes place inside the Kremlin, as well as in East and West Germany and the United States. The plot revolves around a secret communique, written by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, to be delivered to U.S. President Ronald Reagan by beautiful and clever CIA clandestine ops specialist Tracie Tanner. A shadowy cabal is determined to ensure that communique never reaches the White House, and the chase is on.

As I mentioned before, there aren’t many subjects on which I could be considered an expert. What few subjects there are do not include KGB operations. Or CIA operations, for that matter. I’ve never been to the Kremlin. Never met Mikhail Gorbachev, although most of a couple of chapters in PARALLAX VIEW is spent inside his head.

To prepare for writing the book, I could have immersed myself in research; the subjects were certainly fascinating enough. But doing so could have meant taking years to write this one novel, rather than months, with only a minimal net gain in realism, if that. The stark reality of being a genre author early in the 21st century is that taking years to write a single book is not economically feasible.

So what’s the solution?

God bless the Internet. Instead of studying scholarly tomes on the history and construction of the Kremlin, instead of spending thousands of dollars I can’t spare to fly to Moscow (although I would love to do so some day), I was able to go online and inside of an hour’s time spent on the right websites, gain sufficient knowledge to allow me to write scenes with (hopefully) enough realism to keep the reader immersed in Tracie Tanner’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s world, rather than our own.

The same thing goes for Soviet sniper gear. Soviet cigarettes, televisions, monitoring equipment. All these things required research, which I was able to do online in significantly less time than it would have taken twenty or thirty years ago. And my editor, Jodie Renner, collaborated by keeping an eye out for any possible discrepancies for the time period of the novel.

Another example: Ramstein Air Base in West Germany. Never been there. If you served in the United States military during the mid-1980s and your tour of duty took you through Ramstein, you may not recognize the base from its appearance in PARALLAX VIEW.

But here’s the point: you’re reading fiction. Ramstein Air Base is going to look like what I need it to look like to advance the story. My goal as a writer is to draw you into the fictional world through steadily increasing tension, and through characters who live and breathe and become real to you. If you’re looking for a detailed historical account of the Cold War, you should probably look elsewhere. If you’re interested in a detailed description of U.S. military bases in Europe during the Reagan years, you should probably look elsewhere.

But through the magic of the Internet, any writer can become well-enough versed in almost any subject to enable him or her to write compelling fiction. Because, after all, the cliché says authors should “write what you know.” With the web at your fingertips, you can now “know” almost anything.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? Is it cutting corners to do all of your research online? Copping out? Are only ex-Soviet Red Army snipers capable of writing about Russian sniper activity?

Allan Leverone is the author of the Amazon Top-25 bestselling thriller, THE LONELY MILE, as well as four other novels, including the brand-new PARALLAX VIEW. He's an air traffic controller in the real world and lives with his family in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Connect on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, and at http://www.allanleverone.com/.

Click on these titles to go to Allan's novels on Amazon: Parallax View, Revenant, Paskagankee, The Lonely Mile, and Final Vector.

Breaking Glass

A City of Broken Glass by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge hardcover, 17 July 2012).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

Since we met journalist Hannah Vogel in A Trace of Smoke, she's lost her beloved brother Ernst, adopted a boy named Anton, and messed up several relationships.

This time around,  writing fluff pieces for a Swiss newspaper called Neue Zürcher Zeitung, she's in Poland to write a feature about the town of Poznań's November 11th St. Martin's Day Festival.  Although her editor has given this assignment in order to keep her from harm after some anti-Nazi articles she wrote resulted in a spate of threatening letters, Hannah is unhappy.  


Thinking that her son might enjoy the Festival, she's brought Anton with her, and almost immediately she regrets it.  She learns that the Germans have arrested a thousands of Polish Jews and forced them back across the border.  Certain that she can get a story out of this, she instructs her driver to take them to the village where the refugees are being held.


And just like that, Hannah once again lands herself in the middle of trouble.  Questions raised by her talks with the refugees lead her back into Germany, where she's persona non grata, and where Anton has no identity.  Hannah is determined that news of the German's injustices be made public, and since she's ideally situated to do this, she does, regardless of what danger she lands in. 


Although the story is  fictional (it's based on the real Kristallnacht), Cantrell's prose is so vivid that the reader feels involved in incidents that could quite easily be real, especially since the narrative is written in the first person from Hannah's point of view.  


The next book in the series is in the works, and it can't come soon enough!






FTC Full Disclosure: Many thanks to the author, who sent me an advance copy of the book for review purposes.

Summer Must-Reads

I usually read several books a week in order to have enough reviews for the blogs and print publications I write for.  Here are a few of the books I will read this summer, whether I have to review them or not.


Some Like it Hawk (Meg Lanslow #13) by Donna Andrews  (Minotaur/Thomas Dunn hardcover,
17 July 2012).

I adore this series that often has me laughing out loud.  We've known Meg and her crazy family and friends for a long time now, and familiarity does not breed contempt.  Here's the publisher's blurb:

Meg Langslow is plying her blacksmith's trade at “Caerphilly Days,” a festival inspired by her town’s sudden notoriety as "The Town That Mortgaged Its Jail." The lender has foreclosed on all Caerphilly's public buildings, and all employees have evacuated --except one.  Phineas Throckmorton, the town clerk, has been barricaded in the courthouse basement for over a year. Mr. Throckmorton's long siege has only been possible because of a pre-Civil War tunnel leading from the courthouse basement to a crawl space beneath the bandstand.
The real reason for Caerphilly Days is to conceal the existence of the tunnel:  the tourist crowds camouflage supply deliveries, and the ghastly screeching of the tunnel's rusty trap door is drowned out by as many noisy activities as the locals can arrange. But the lender seems increasingly determined to evict Mr. Throckmorton—and may succeed after one of its executives is found shot, apparently from inside the basement.  Meg and her fellow townspeople suspect that someone hopes to end the siege by framing Mr. Throckmorton. Unless the real killer can be found quickly, the town will have to reveal the secret of the tunnel—and the fact that they've been aiding and abetting the basement’s inhabitant. Meg soon deduces that the killer isn't just trying to end the siege but to conceal information that would help the town reclaim its buildings--if the townspeople can find it before the lender destroys it.

Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault  (HarperCollins trade paperback, 31 July 2012).

I loved Arsenault's first two novels The Broken Teaglass  and In Search of the Rose Notes, this one promises to be just as gripping.

Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller Tammyland—a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a "honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love." But her writing career is cut abruptly short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident and no one suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor.
But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than Tammyland: a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave—suggesting her death was no accident . . . and that Jamie must piece together the story someone would kill to keep untold. 

 A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel #4)  by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge hardcover, 17 July 2012).

Hannah Vogel is a fascinating protagonist; definitely a flawed character, but the underlying reasons for her actions are honorable.

Journalist Hannah Vogel is in Poland with her son Anton to cover the 1938 St. Martin festival when she hears that 12,000 Polish Jews have been deported from Germany. Hannah drops everything to get the story on the refugees, and walks directly into danger.
Kidnapped by the SS, and driven across the German border, Hannah is rescued by Anton and her lover, Lars Lang, who she had presumed dead two years before. Hannah doesn’t know if she can trust Lars again, with her heart or with her life, but she has little choice. Injured in the escape attempt and wanted by the Gestapo, Hannah and Anton are trapped with Lars in Berlin. While Hannah works on an exit strategy, she helps to search for Ruth, the missing toddler of her Jewish friend Paul, who was disappeared during the deportation.
Trapped in Nazi Germany with her son just days before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Hannah knows the dangers of staying any longer than needed. But she can’t turn her back on this one little girl, even if it plunges her and her family into danger.