BLACK TRACE

BLACK TRACE, my first science fiction novel, is up in part over at Wattpad and WriteOn (probably in a few other places at well). Wattpad is just the easiest to link to. I plan on running the first several chapters, enough to give folks a sense of the story and the setting. I have no plans to put the whole thing on the internet, much less for free.

Go on and give it a look.

You’ll see me use the word “nopocalypse” in reference to this. More on that later.

Here’s the back cover copy, were it printed and had a back cover to put copy on:

—

After the Great Big Zero.

After the United States came untied.

Life went on.

 

Jake Culver is a driver, a fixer and an enigma. Out in the no man’s land of desert California, people don’t often ask what anyone did before or how they got there. But now the state police are asking him and he doesn’t have the luxury of refusing an answer.

Left no choice, he agrees to return to his old haunts in the manufactured paradise of Orange County. The Orange Trust runs it like a company town, which would be fine if Jake and the man at the top didn’t share the baddest of blood. Jake’s got only days to find out who’s stealing from the hotbed of high-tech, and to find if it’s the same someone who is trying to get the biggest criminal organizations in the county to pick a very public war with one another.

From the cracked asphalt and no rules motorized combat beyond the reach of authority to the regulated cool of the icehouse and back again, Jake and his reluctant partner Tommy Manh dig through the above-ground and underground of a decadent near-future California. The chase leads them both through the abandoned subway tunnels run by the electrified Mozarts and the subtle digitality of the Weave, to the neon playground of Fascination Street.

But all the paths Jake finds lead him back to his past, a past that is fast overtaking him.