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“Stormy, husky, brawling,” the busker rumbled. “City of the big shoulders.”

The busker, a long-haired Vietnam veteran whose only concession to his military past was his VSM service medal which he still wore with pride, was reciting verse from the works of hometown poet-made-good, Carl Sandburg. The poem was appropriately titled ‘Chicago’.

“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”

The busker looked directly across a busy thoroughfare at an old vagrant who had been humming tunelessly to himself as he warmed his bony hands over a fire he’d lit minutes earlier in a drum long since blackened by perhaps a hundred such fires. Certainly more fires than he, or any of his street cronies, could remember. He’d stopped humming when the gravel-voiced busker began his poetry recital.

The vagrant imagined the busker smiled at him, though he couldn’t be sure in the fading early evening light. Even so, he flashed a toothless grin in the other’s direction.

Soon, the old man was joined by half a dozen street pals. All homeless like him, they appeared like disheveled ghosts out of the shadows, attracted partly by the warmth of the fire and partly by the busker. They listened intently to the poet’s words that flowed effortlessly from the busker’s mouth. Words that painted images so vivid in their minds it was as if the men were watching a kaleidoscope of their own youth.

* * *

So begins the prologue to our coming-of-age spy thriller The Orphan Factory co-authored by son James and I.

A prequel to our bestseller ‘The Ninth Orphan’, it’s an epic, atmospheric story that begins with 23 genetically superior orphans being groomed to become elite spies in Chicago's Pedemont Orphanage; it concludes with a political assassination deep in the Amazon jungle.

Gapers Block Book Club, Chicago, Illinois, has this to say about this novel: “It’s an eerily relevant lesson in our media-saturated world."

And Welcome Home Soldier Reviews has this to say:
"Black ice and black ops perhaps have a lot in common. You don't see 'em coming until you spin out."

>>> Reviewer enquiries welcome for this or any book in The Orphan Trilogy. Email Lance at: sterlinggatebooks@gmail.com