Familiar characters return, including reluctant freedom fighter Whistler, the vengeance-driven Molly Ivins, and George W. Bush, who is trapped in the darkness of a protected bunker as communications with the outside slowly fail. Determined to serve his country to the last, he undertakes a dangerous escape from the safety of the bunker. Loyalties are tested and people die as the last elected President of the United States races to save what is left of America. Secret Service Agent Stefanie Zamani never expected to live past the first awful moments of the Big Bang, when Air Force One plummeted through the air like a falling building. Surprisingly alive after the wreck, Stef saves the First Lady, and only they escape the destruction of the plane. Surviving raging wildfires, EMP attacks, and drunks with forklifts, the women manage to find safety in the backwoods of Texas before they are betrayed into the hands of the People’s Government of Austin, who capture Laura Bush. While Stef’s county may have been shattered, her devotion to duty and Mrs. Bush remains. The political suddenly becomes very personal as the Secret Service Agent plunges into the nightmarish depths of a “worker’s paradise,” determined to rescue the First Lady, and God help anyone who stands in Stefanie Zamani’s way. Moving across the continent, the second volume of The Lonesome George Chronicles paints the sweeping history of a nation under attack and the people who rise to defend her.
I was born in Texas City, TX, the son of a career Air Force meteorologist. Attended a variety of schools at all of the hot spots of the nation, such as Abilene, Texas and Bellevue, Nebraska. Sent to my grandparent’s house in Tucson, Arizona when things were tough at home. I was pretty damn lost, as my grandparents were largely strangers to me. My older brother, a more taciturn type, refused to discuss what was going on. Fortunately, like so many kids before me, I was rescued by literature. Or, at least, by fiction.
In a tiny used bookstore that was just one block up from a dirt road, I discovered that some good soul had unloaded his entire collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” series in Ballantine Paperback. Moved by some impulse, I spent my RC Cola money on the first book, “A Princess of Mars.” I think what struck me was how these books were possessed of magic: they were able to transport me far from this dusty land of relatives who I didn’t know and relatives pretended not to know me to another dusty land of adventure, heroism, nobility, and even love. It was the first magic I’d encountered that wasn’t a patent fraud, and when I closed the stiff paperback with the lurid images on the cover, I decided it was the kind of magic I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to mastering. And, thus, I was saved.
Since then, I’ve never looked back. I’ve written poems, short stories (twice runner-up in the Playboy college fiction contest), plays (winning some regional awards back East and a collegiate Historical Play-writing Award), and screenplays. I’m a member of the WGAw, with one unproduced screenplay sold to Fox Television. Along the way, I’ve done the usual starving artist jobs. Been a janitor, a waiter, a clerk in a bookstore. I was the 61st Aviation Rescue Swimmer in the Coast Guard (all that Tarzan reading wasn’t wasted). I’m also not a bad cook, come to think of it. Currently, I’m a husband, father, and cat-owner. I’m an avid bicyclist and former EMT.
I live in Southern California with my lovely wife. My friends call me “Griff,” my parents call me “Roy,” and my college-age son calls me “Dadman.” It’s a good life. By the Hands of Men, Book Three: “The Wrath of a Righteous Man” will be released in May, 2016.