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= Longer Reads No. 3 =
Read-a-Latte—Read Free Or Buy
All We Ask (if you enjoy the read) a Fair and Honest Review Online
 Valley of Seven Castles a Luxembourg Thriller by John T. Cullen. It is a Progressive Thriller, meaning it dumps many stale tropes and harnesses the thriller genre to progressive social ideals (meaning: good for all of us majority Plebeians rather than simply the 1% Patrician oligarchs who are destroying the world). Text includes a detailed Thrillerology showing my discovery of what I call "Alfred Hitchcock's Final Secret." Hint: there is a clear trail discernible from John Buchan's 1915 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps to not only the movie Hitch made of that in 1935 (The 39 Steps) but directly leading to Hitchcock's most famous movie. Another archetypal classic that influenced Valley of Seven Castles (2016) was Robert Ludlum's 1980 thriller The Bourne Identity and the 2002 thriller film starring Matt Damon and Franka Potente. [read online].
Siberian Girl:—The World is Round: Memories of Love and War 1942-1992. A Parisian woman, adopted by wealthy Parisian family as a toddler in Siberia after World War Two, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 goes on a global search for her parents' identities (and thereby her own). Her quest in 1991 parallels the adventures in love and danger of her father (U.S. Navy officer and spy) during World War Two. My longest and most complex work; homage in various directions: Herman Wouk Winds of War, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, touches of John Dos Passos (USA Trilogy), a slight time displacement of Paul Bowles in Africa, and others; but ultimately my own original broth.
Doctor Night[or]Orbital Sniper—a Tomorrow Thriller introducing Private Agent Jack Gray ("anything goes with Gray"). It's a rich mix: homage to Ian Fleming's James Bond, plus a strong Progressive political statement about a world where democracy is all but dead. The technology (assassinating a political enemy using an orbital glider/gun) is based on 1960/70s aerial surveillance methods. As always, the thrilling suspense runs parallel with an urgent, passionate love story. In this case, echoing Bond in some novels, Jack Gray is both an accomplished, fearless agent but also a melancholy, grieving man who sometimes meets the spirit of his late wife in lonely airport bars (she was murdered by an enemy hit man, a case that Jack Gray will spend his life solving). It's complex, exhilarating, and real.
Also Coming Soon
The Sibyl's Urn—Historical Fantasy (Journey Back to Ancient Rome)
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