“Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 1, 2014)

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.

This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in the subversive sect was animate, inflamed, ephemeral, breathing — a mix of temporal and performance art and the avant-garde/punk scene. This was also an age of conceptual art, which grew out of minimalism and stressed the artist’s concept rather than the object itself. Time was the concept of Reno’s art, something to be acted upon.

“You have time. Meaning, don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit…I felt this to be true. Some people might consider this passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

The novel, narrated by Reno, is all about her observation and experiences as she comes of age in a revolutionary time. She lives in a shabby, run-down hole in the wall in New York–“blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint like a plaster death mask over the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling.”

As she gets caught up with the underground movement in the East Village, called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and later with the Red Brigades of Rome, Reno is herself a conduit for the people she meets and gets involved with, such as her older, rebellious boyfriend, Sandro Valera, son of the Fascist-friendly mogul of Valera motorbikes.

Reno came to New York by way of Nevada, eager to demonstrate her art through photography and motorbikes. She’s “shopping for experience.” Sometime after a particularly moving one-night stand, and attempting to navigate her life and bridge her isolation and loneliness, she meets sculptor Sandro Valera and his friends, a group of radicals and artists who offer her exposure to working-class insurrection in this “mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.”

Reno was looking for a sense of identity, and she wanted enchantment.

“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

The bridge between life and art, and Reno’s invigorating speed of 148 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats, (where she went with her new friends to make land art), demonstrates the crossover between gestures and reality, and a liberating energy that was “an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.”

On the one hand, Reno seeks self-sovereignty, but on the other hand, she inhabits a male-dominated and often misogynistic landscape where men exploit women for artistic and political gain. When she visits Sandro’s family in Italy, she is subjected to derision by Sandro’s misanthropic brother and his sneering mother.

In another scene, a male photographer asks women to punch themselves in the face until they are battered, and then pose for him. Reno narrates this with an unemotional but subtle raillery, noting the incongruity of women on a pretense of independence. She acutely observes that “certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures.” And, in Rome, the question of feminine mystique versus male dominance is addressed by a Red Brigade revolutionary radio broadcaster, when he states to women that “Men connect you to the world, but not with your own self.”

Are women “meant to speed past, just a blur” as Reno speculates? And the more I think about that line, the more paradox it evokes.

Artists, dreamers, terrorists, comrades, iconoclasts, all populate this novel, replete with iconic images and fallen debris in a swirl of electrical momentum. New York and Rome aren’t just scenic backdrops; they come alive as provocateurs– firebrand cities with flame-throwing agitators.

Kushner is a heavyweight writer, a dense, volatile and sensuous portraitist of the iconographic and the obscure. Arch and decisive moments throughout the novel heighten the ominous tension that rumbles below the surface, and the reader wholly inhabits the spaces of Reno’s consciousness, and those of the people she meets.

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment…And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulder like a stinking vulture…we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. That is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 194 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Kushner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview with Rachel Kushner On writing Flamethrowers
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hard to find anything similar, but will mention this one anyway: My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru

Bibliography:

• Telex from Cuba (2008)
• The Flamethrowers (2013)

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 508 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our reviews of: Anathem Quicksilver The Confusion Snow Crash

Bibliography:

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• The Diamond Age (1995)
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• Anathem (2008)
• Reamde (2011)

The Baroque Cycle

• Quicksilver (2003)
• The Confusion (2004)
• The System of the World (2004)

Non-Fiction

• In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (1999)
• Some Remarks (August 2012)

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

• Interface (1995)
• The Cobweb (1997)
• Artists’ Multiples, 1935-2000 (2002)

“I’d lied to Rachel. I knew what I feared. Knew why I feared it. I closed my eyes and they were there — two lightbulbs hanging in the darkness of the Chicago Subway. Inside their glass skin, a question mark.  Something the old historian himself might struggle to decipher.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (AUG 7, 2011)

Michael Harvey’s sequel to The Third Rail is We All Fall Down, in which PI Michael Kelly wears out a great deal of shoe leather trying to save the citizens of Chicago. An unidentified perpetrator may have released a biological weapon in the city’s subway system. When people begin to sicken and die, a highly trained team of brilliant scientists is called in to identify the substance (is it a strain of anthrax?) and try to find a way to contain it. Kelly is a student of Thucydides, who wrote eloquently about the Plague of Athens in his classic work, “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Kelly wonders whether, twenty-four hundred years later, a modern, man-made plague will decimate Chicago.

Harvey has been praised for his punchy prose style, clipped dialogue (“I don’t know.” “I have to go out.” “I’ll talk to you later.” You get the picture.), and his gritty take on a city that is legendary for its corrupt politicians, ruthless mobsters, gangbangers, and cops on the take. Although Kelly narrates, Harvey occasionally switches to the third person. For example, the author depicts an obnoxious racist named Donnie Quin, who comes from a long line of police officers but does not wear his uniform with pride. Instead, he is an extortionist who forces both legitimate and illegitimate businessmen (better known as drug dealers) to turn over part of their proceeds on a regular basis. He feels no guilt, since everyone knows that Chicago’s City Hall was “a fat, greedy, happy goose, taking in soft money at one end and cranking patronage deals out the other.”

How does Kelly fit in to all this? A sleazy guy from Homeland Security threatens to throw Kelly in jail on trumped-up charges unless the PI agrees to assist Ellen Brazile, “one of the foremost experts in the world on the genetic engineering of bioweapons.” Kelly powwows with Brazile and her team, the Mayor of Chicago, John J. Wilson, and the representative from Homeland Security. They try to come up with a game plan that will minimize loss of life without causing panic.

The prospect of “a molecular arms race,” in which “black biologists” create new strains of bacteria to use against their enemies is genuinely frightening. This novel has some neat bells and whistles–modern tools that can both create and neutralize “the most lethal pathogens known to man” and “smart clothing” made of nanofibers that can stop a bullet and release antiobiotics into the victim’s system. There are the usual violent confrontations, convoluted twists and turns, and a slam-bang ending in which a few loose ends are purposely left dangling. Although certain elements in We All Fall Down are far-fetched and confusing, Harvey manages to hold our interest thanks to his hard-hitting plot, sardonic dialogue, and his tough and savvy hero, Michael Kelly.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Fifth Floor The Third Rail

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better. I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 12, 2011)

Imagine that you’re a working class Cockney mother with a husband who detonates bombs and a young son who is four years and three months old. You stave off your anxieties about the uncertainty of your life through mindless sex encounters. Eventually, you meet a neighbor – a journalist named Jasper – and, while your husband and son are at a soccer game, you invite him to your flat. At the exact same time you are in the throes of sexual abandon, there’s a massive terrorist bomb attack at the London soccer stadium, vaporizing over one thousand people – your husband and son among them. How do you go on? How do you live with the remorse?

Chris Cleave explores that question in an epistolary structure; the nameless woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the attack. The epistolary form is used with caution as a framing device (Nicole Krauss’s The Great House and Moshid Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist come to mind), because it is not easy to pull off. The reader is a fly-on-the-wall and can choose to connect with the narrator – or not. And if truth be known, Mr. Cleave is not entirely successful in his narrative control as the conceit of writing to Osama begins to wear thin.

What he is successful with is developing a fragile persona – an obsessive woman who is gradually unraveling as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and who is quickly spiraling downward. The anonymity of the character makes her everywoman, trying to survive in a post-terrorist world. The woman writes, “Before you bombed my boy Osama I always through an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”

The bombing and PSTD, though, is only the beginning. London is quickly transformed into a virtual occupied post apocalyptic territory as the woman fights her own inward battles. She is drawn into a psychological maelstrom with Jasper and his fiancée, Petra, an upper-class fashion journalist who happens to resemble her closely.

Indeed, Petra and the narrator may very well represent two parts of London, which is described as “a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking.” Each cannot exist without the other. And so they enter a danse-a-deux of symbiosis and betrayal. Eventually, the novel veers toward a stunning denouement and an over-the-top ending.

It’s extraordinary ambitious for a first-time novelist (this book was written before Chris Cleave’s more well-known Little Bee) and sometimes the prose comes across as rather self-congratulatory or forced. Mr. Cleave’s intention, it seems, is to portray a decadent Western society that struggles to break free of its class distinctions – without success, setting itself up as something to tear down. Yet at the core of the novel, there is an emotional void. The characters are not quite satirical, yet not quite real. And as a result of the epistolary form, we, as readers, are held at arm’s length, not quite embracing them.

This often disturbing, sometimes macabre novel has its own intriguing history. The morning after its initial launch party, in July 0f 2005, three suicide bombers detonated their devices in the London Underground. The book tour was shelved and the novel was temporarily withdrawn from sale by many UK retailers. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. And in Chris Cleave’s world, fiction is very strange indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 53 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition (January 11, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Cleave
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another epistolary structured novel: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Bibliography:

• Incendiary (2005; 2010 in US)
• The Other Hand (2008)
• Little Bee (2009)
• Gold (July 2012)

“The pieces of this case, maybe two or three cases, held together by the thinnest of wires: circumstance and an educated guess. The rest floated and turned in the darkness, offering themselves up as a piece of the puzzle, with no real clue as to how or why.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 22, 2010)

The Windy City is the setting for Michael Harvey’s fast-paced thriller, The Third Rail. Private investigator Michael Kelly is part of a task force that includes a detective named Vince Rodriguez and a no-nonsense FBI agent, Katherine Lawson. Their goal is to find a sadistic sniper who shot several passengers riding Chicago’s public transit system. Someone in the know contacts Kelly, and the conversation leads the ex-cop to believe that the key to this puzzling case may lie in the distant past.

Unwilling to be a helpless pawn in a psychotic individual’s twisted game, Kelly launches his own investigation with the help of Hubert Russell, a “twenty-something cyber hacker.” Kelly also consults a retired policeman named Jimmy Doherty in order to gather information and gain a fresh perspective. Michael scours his memory, as he tries to figure out what happened long ago that could have driven someone to commit such vicious crimes. He soon suspects that the shooter may have an accomplice who is nursing a long-standing grudge.

Not everything in this novel is gloom and doom. Kelly has a soft spot for his year-old spaniel, Maggie, and a high regard for a beautiful judge named Rachel Swenson. Although Rachel is uncomfortable with Michael’s penchant for getting into trouble, she cares enough about him to keep him in her life. However, as events heat up, Rachel may very well run out of patience with her boyfriend’s tendency to track down felons on his own.

Harvey has a spare and straightforward writing style, enhanced by brief, staccato sentences and crisp dialogue. Dramatic descriptive passages add to the tension-filled atmosphere. After the perpetrator picks his first victim, “He pulled the trigger, and the woman dropped straight down. Like a puppet with strings cut, she was all here and there, arms, legs, and a smear of lipstick across her lips and down her chin.” This is not a prettified Chicago. There are rats the size of cats, seamy alleys filled with dumpsters, and “the last remnants of the city’s Cabrini-Green housing complex project” provide a haven for gangs and other miscreants. In the high-rise, which is now little more than a shell, “metal mailboxes scored with bullet holes ran along one wall, and the linoleum floor was covered with broken glass and a handful of syringes.” Even Chicago’s blunt mayor, John J. Wilson, is a profane and arrogant boor who bullies people into doing his bidding.

This gritty police procedural keeps us engrossed until it wanders off track during the overly cluttered conclusion. Harvey throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix (terrorism, abduction, corruption, violence, cover-ups, you name it), and not all of the myriad twists and turns work well. However, The Third Rail is, for the most part, a suspenseful and entertaining novel that is as unpredictable and rough-edged as the most rundown areas of Chicago’s South Side.

Editor’s note: A portion of this book’s proceeds will be donated to The Cambodian Children’s Fund.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 51 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down The Fifth Floor

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“What happened to us? This country. This world. What went wrong? How the [hell] did we get here?”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (AUG 23, 2009)

On a fine Saturday morning in April, the Yale campus is suddenly jolted by terror the likes of which no one could ever have imagined. More than two dozen students have gone missing in the past thirty-six hours, many of them the children of parents prominent in industry and government, and most of them recently “tapped” for one of Yale’s secret societies–Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, and Book and Snake. All these societies own elaborate Greek edifices on campus, the most prominent architectural feature of which is the complete lack of windows. Inside these “tombs,” the societies’ secrets remain absolute.

This morning, however, all the attention is on Book and Snake, where, it appears, the missing students are being held hostage. When Jonathan Simmons, a handsome senior, emerges from inside the tomb to face the assembled police, he lifts his arms and stops in front of the building. “Don’t come forward,” he yells to the police and bystanders. “I’m a bomb. I…am…a bomb. Stay where you are.” Receiving directions from someone inside the tomb, Simmons shows the bomb strapped to his chest and demands that the transmissions from the cell towers be restored within five minutes or he and the hostages will die. Like an automaton, he answers no questions, and ticks off the minutes, as a New Haven Police hostage negotiator tries to gain time by engaging him in conversation.

While this is happening in New Haven, suspended Boulder, Colorado, detective Sam Purdy is attending an engagement party aboard a yacht in Miami, where he meets Ann Summers Calderon, mother of the future groom. Ann very tentatively suggests a private meeting with Purdy and swears him to secrecy. She has received a bizarre message–from someone unknown, who demands nothing, but threatens her with unspecified consequences if she tells anyone about the note. “At some point,” the writer of the note assures her, “you will be desperate to reach me.”

In a third plot line, Deirdre, a CIA agent married to Jerry, another CIA agent, is at a Washington area conference where she meets up with FBI agent Christopher Poe, someone with whom she has been close since 1995. Poe is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and their occasional trysts provide him with an emotional lifeline that he desperately needs. Working as a one-man department for the FBI, Poe investigates low-probability, high-risk terror scenarios brought to the FBi’s attention by (usually wacko) private citizens, and he has developed a “feel” for how these odd details sometimes contribute to bizarre, but plausible terror plots.

Slowly, White develops his suspense, revealing the names and backgrounds of some of the hostages and their parents as the students are officially declared missing from campus. When Ann Summers Calderon receives a recorded message from the kidnapper, she persuades Sam Purdy to go to New Haven to act as her eyes and ears. She will tell him nothing more about what she plans to do, and he will have no traceable contact with her. The nature of the terror plot is so unusual, that FBI agent Christopher Coe decides on his own to go to New Haven, too. As special teams and hostage rescue teams arrive from various departments in the federal government, they take over from the Campus Police and the New Haven Police. The alphabet soup of agencies becomes daunting, and exactly who will make the final decisions is unclear to all.

As the novel unfolds, author Stephen Wright uses his formidable background as a clinical psychologist to create one of the most nail-biting thrillers I have ever read. The book is about four hundred pages long, and I read the last three hundred pages straight through in one evening—I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen! He has structured the novel so that the action rotates among the three subplots, but it is never resolved at the end of each scene, leaving something important up in the air, some question unanswered, some unexpected new drama unfolding. The reader can never feel comfortable with what is happening on campus, what may happen in the future, and what has already happened, either to the hostages in the tomb or to the frantic parents, police, and federal investigators. His psychologically vulnerable characters behave in plausible fashion, often sharing their emotional wounds with the reader and inspiring great empathy. The level of tension never wanes.

White is a master craftsman creating a unique story with innumerable clever and unusual twists and turns–and constant surprises. There is nothing formulaic about any aspect of this book. Each of the agencies involved in this hostage drama has its own ideas and its own set of “clues,” usually not shared with each other, about what is going on, leaving it up to the reader to stay engaged and put everything together. The resolution is a real tour de force, one that I certainly never expected, and which I suspect others will find as dramatic and shocking as I did. Most importantly, it is this conclusion which moves the novel beyond the immediate and local, and elevates it into a grander commentary on our foreign policy and international reputation. As Sam Purdy remarks: “He’s not trying to wound us or shock us. He’s looking for ways to bring us down. Cripple us. Bleed us to death. Starve us of oxygen…Us. America. Us, U.S., Us.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	The Siege
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen White
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of  DRY ICE and KILL ME Other books centered on terrorism: Terrorist by John Updike The Cyclist by Viken Berberian The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III

Bibliography:

Psychologist Alan Gregory Series:

• Privileged Information (1991)
• Private Practices (1993)
• Higher Authority (1994)
• Harm’s Way (1996)
• Remote Control (1997)
• Critical Conditions (1998)
• Manner of Death ( 1999)
• Cold Case (2000)
• The Program (2001)
• Warning Signs (2002)
• The Best Revenge (2003)
• Blinded (2004)
• Missing Persons (March 2005)
• Kill Me (March 2006)
• Dry Ice (March 2007)
• Dead Time (March 2008)

Sam Purdy novels:

• The Seige (August 2009)