VIRTUALLY MARIA

by John Joyce

OVER 3,000 DOWNLOADS ON KINDLE AND 10,000 HARD COPIES SOLD! Part epic love story and part sophisticated technothriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, the Virtual Trilogy is the quest by one man to rescue the love of his life from murder - by travelling back in time.Virtually Maria - the first book in the series - opens with the violent murder of billionaire computer genius Theo Gilkrensky's beautiful and rebellious wife Maria. Stricken with grief and guilt, Theo retreats to an island fortress off the south coast of Ireland, to work on Minerva - the world's first artificially intelligent laptop computer. But an air crash, blamed on Theo's computerised autopilot system, drags him back from exile to investigate the incident.Pursued to Cairo by a seductive assassin bent on revenge for the death of her parents Theo stumbles on dark, forgotten forces at the Pyramids of Giza that might be harnessed to warp the fabric of time itself, allowing him to return to the moment before Maria was killed and pluck her from the jaws of death.Minutely researched and skilfully plotted, the first edition of Virtually Maria sold almost 10,000 copies in its first printing and was selected as "Book of the Month" by the Easons book chain. It has been translated into Russian, where it is currently in its second edition under the publishing giant ACT. Now revised and updated, Virtually Maria is now available along with the two remaining volumes of the 'Virtual Trilogy' on Kindle, from Spindrift Press, Dublin.

512 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 17, 2008

About the author

I wrote my first novel at the age of 25 in response to being a temporarily unemployed marine biologist in the cold and windy town on Lowestoft on the most easterly coast of England in 1976. This gangster novel - THE BEACH RING - was an excellent way for me to vent all my frustrations by creating a series of fictional characters and 'blowing them away' in a series of imaginative ways. Luckily, this novel was never published!

Then my luck changed, I moved to Ireland where I met my wonderful wife Jane and, over Christmas 1980 we embarked on a hair-raising charity mission to Egypt which involved driving an old bus, a broken down ambulance, a decrepit van and a lorry carrying an obsolete printing press across the Alps to the port of Ancona in Italy, which delivered us by ferry to Alexandria. While in Egypt, Jane and I visited the pyramids, and I got the idea for my first published novel - VIRTUALLY MARIA - the first of my 'Virtual Trilogy' of technothrillers - about a grief stricken billionaire on a quest to turn back time so that he can save his beloved wife Maria from being murdered.

This book, along with my three underwater adventures for children in the CAPTAIN COCKLE series, was published by Poolbeg Press and was chosen to be 'Book of the Month' in the Irish bookstore chain Easons, in August 1998.

VIRTUALLY MARIA was followed by A MATTER OF TIME and YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW - in the 'Virtual Trilogy' and were translated into Russian by the Russian publisher ACT.

Then, older, wiser and much better equipped, Jane and I embarked on a very enjoyable research trip for my next novel FIRE & ICE which features a breathtaking chase in the Grand Canyon and a casino scene in Las Vegas. This Cold War thriller, about a rogue Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo and bogus orders from s dissident Russianist breakaway group in Leningrad to attack the US Navy blockade, was published in 2012 and was well received by the critics.

My last novel MASTERPIECE took Jane and I on a trip to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and London on the trail of a plot to steal the Mona Lisa by holding Paris to ransom with a stolen Soviet nuclear weapon. MASTERPIECE is the first of a series of novels featuring former IRA member turned academic Dr. Damien Flynn and crack policewoman Gabrielle Arnault in the EUROPOL specialist team COMMETT and will be followed by my next novel MASTERMIND in 2016.

Following on from my CAPTAIN COCKLE underwater adventures, I've created the character BLACK JOHN THE BOGUS PIRATE who already has his own BLACK JOHN THE BOGUS PIRATE CARTOON WORKBOOK OF MARINE BEASTS and will be following that with a series of illustrated novels for children in the near future.

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I found it enjoyable & the ideas interesting.