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The Phisherman
Steven Marks’s The Phisherman is a crime thriller about scams, anger, family loyalty, and the dangerous comfort of having a target. Dean Rourke is a warehouse worker in Ocala whose life is already worn thin by night shifts, spam calls, and the steady pressure of getting by. When his mother becomes involved with a suspicious man named Martin Hales, Dean’s irritation turns into investigation, and that investigation pulls him into a wider network of fraud, stolen pets, gift cards, burner phones, and people who know exactly how to use loneliness as bait. The book understands scams not just as crimes, but as intrusions. They get into homes, phones, routines, and nerves until ordinary life starts to feel rigged.
What makes Dean such a compelling lead is that his concern is real, but so is the appetite that grows out of it. Marks doesn’t write him as a clean hero chasing bad guys. Dean is tired, sharp, funny in a sour way, and increasingly drawn to the sense of purpose that anger gives him. Early on, the narration says, “pressure worked whether or not it had a name,” and that line captures a lot of what the novel is doing. Dean wants to name the pressure, trace it, hit it, and make it answer for itself. The trouble is that once he starts moving, stopping becomes harder than starting.
The supporting characters give the story its weight. Gloria, Dean’s mother, is more than a victim of a romance scam. She’s lonely, stubborn, embarrassed, and still very much her own person. Deputy Morales is one of the book’s best steadying forces, not because he softens the story, but because he keeps reminding Dean that being right doesn’t make every choice acceptable. Aunt Marlene also brings a needed kind of grounded care, especially when the book turns from investigation into a study of restraint. Even Pickles, Dean’s cat, adds texture to the domestic side of the novel, giving Dean’s apartment a little warmth while everything else gets colder.
Marks’s prose has a bruised, observant rhythm that fits Dean’s state of mind. The book is full of Florida heat, cheap parking lots, county offices, vibrating phones, and rooms where people are waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It’s especially strong at showing how modern crime can feel both faceless and intimate. A scam call can come from nowhere, but it still lands in someone’s kitchen, someone’s bank account, someone’s family. As the story escalates, one line hits especially hard: “Waiting changed him faster than blood had.” That’s the heart of the book. The suspense isn’t only about whether Dean can find Martin. It’s about what the hunt is doing to him.
The Phisherman is a tense, character-driven novel about a man who follows a fraud case so deep that it starts following him back. It’s angry, funny in dry flashes, and deeply interested in the moral cost of wanting punishment to feel personal. The ending doesn’t offer Dean an easy victory, which feels right for this story. Instead, it leaves him facing the people who know his name, especially his mother, and the question of what he’s let himself become while trying to protect her. That’s what gives the book its staying power: it’s a crime story where the real hook isn’t only the scam but the part of Dean that keeps biting.
Pages: 487 | ASIN : B0H3394KCT
An Everyman
Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.
One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.
Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?
Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….
By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.
At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.
In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.
As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.
I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.
Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?
I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.
The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.
One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on Farm to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”
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Davin Caine is at last on Medicare and is getting a modest Social Security check each month, but still works with Berkshire Interactive. He’s also been busier in his studio and has sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, and his solar/batteries and VPP membership keeps electricity bills down. His three house sharers, with housing still scarce, help with expenses. Marsha’s been with the Housatonic House on the Hill for nearly a decade, and she’s queen of the big vegetable garden. Charlie is a more recent house sharer, and a nigh-on perfect one, since he’s often away on business or holed up in his third-floor bedroom working. The newest house sharer is Be, a ceramic artist who helps Davin out with the first floor Airbnb apartment and who has just claimed a corner of the studio and could easily claim his heart if he isn’t careful.
But as summer approaches, a stunning heatwave settles over New York City, west to Lake Erie, and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The heat drives people to escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, so there’s little room for the hordes. Young Brooklyn hipsters take up camping in the woods around Monument Mountain Reservation and along the Appalachian Trail, or double and triple up at the summer homes of friends’ parents, or anywhere, somewhere, to sleep. Many in the town aren’t happy about it, or the spike in petty crimes, and it’s up to Marian Gray-Fletcher, Great Barrington’s town manager, to solve the problem. But she’s distracted with her own philandering husband, until a drug-gang killing focuses her attention.
The international news is full of climate migration stories and political problems in Europe and a conflict between India and Pakistan. Central and South American climate change-induced droughts make for huge numbers of people heading north and the militarized southern border and running battles between cartels and U.S. forces are in the headlines. And then there’s No One is Safe, a climate terrorist organization that has a history of blowing up refineries and pipelines and the occasional oil exec, and one climate direct action veteran finds himself wondering how deep the NOS-cartels connection goes.
Over Brooklyn Hills
Over Brooklyn Hills, by David Guenette, is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.
Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.
The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.
I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 355 | ASIN : B0GYV5L6SJ
Critics’ Requiem: The Storyteller Shadow Series
Critics’ Requiem is a sharp and dark literary thriller about what happens when praise, criticism, ego, and revenge all start feeding the same fire. Arthur Penwright begins as a struggling writer desperate to be seen, and when his novel The Echoing Silence finally breaks through, the dream arrives with all the glitter he hoped for: a major publisher, a glamorous launch, a penthouse, and the feeling that life has finally opened its doors. But Michaela Riley is just as interested in what success does to Arthur as she is in the success itself, and that’s where the book finds its real pulse.
Arthur doesn’t simply react to bad reviews; he studies them, obsesses over them, and eventually lets them become the center of his life. The novel has a wicked sense of irony about writers, critics, algorithms, online mobs, and the strange intimacy of strangers judging art from behind a screen. Its opening epigraph, “A critic’s pen is mightier than a sword, but I prefer a plot twist,” captures the book’s personality nicely: clever, theatrical, and always aware that words can wound long before anyone picks up a weapon.
Riley gives the book a strong emotional anchor through Maia, whose love for Arthur makes his unraveling feel personal instead of merely sensational. Their early scenes have warmth, humor, and a lived-in rhythm, which makes the later distance between them hit harder. Detective Mercer adds another strong thread, bringing a procedural edge to the chaos while mirroring Arthur’s own obsession in a more controlled form. The result is a story that keeps widening, moving from literary satire into psychological suspense, then into something stranger and more dangerous.
What makes Critics’ Requiem memorable is its fascination with identity. Arthur wants to be known, then fears being known, then becomes trapped by the version of himself the world has built. The book keeps returning to the idea that old wounds don’t vanish just because success arrives. As one of its most haunting lines puts it, “some shadows don’t fade. They wait.” That sentence ends up feeling like the book’s engine, because nearly every major turn grows out of something buried, stolen, misread, or left unresolved.
This is a bold and twist-heavy thriller with a distinctly bookish bite. It’s about publishing, obsession, online cruelty, artistic ownership, and the dangerous fantasy of controlling the story after it has left your hands. Riley writes with a taste for drama and a clear love of literary games, but the heart of the novel is simple and human: Arthur wants his words to matter, and that hunger changes everything around him. Critics’ Requiem is entertaining, grimly funny, and unsettling in the way good revenge stories often are.
Pages: 430 | ASIN : B0GT65NJQJ
Complex Technology
Cyber Case Prima is a thriller that explores the ugly truth behind a hit-and-run that occurs during a self-driving truck demonstration. What draws you to the cyber-technothriller genre?
Cybersecurity was at the center of my professional career. However, when I started writing, I drew on my travels in Italy and wrote an historical fiction series set during the Renaissance. A news article I read recently about a government data network breach sparked the idea of writing a cyber thriller series. Writing the first book, Cyber Case Thorn, was so satisfying that I kept going. Cyber Case Prima is the fourth book in my Cyber Case series.
How much of the cybersecurity and autonomous vehicle technology in the novel is based on real-world systems or research?
All technology-related facets of the story are grounded in present-day developments and scenarios. I want my books to be authentic because that’s what readers expect. I often jest that I spend as much time doing research as writing.
The novel feels plausible in a way that makes the danger more unsettling. Did you consciously aim for a “this could happen tomorrow” atmosphere?
Given the daily occurrence of cyber incidents, I have no trouble finding timely subjects for my books. The challenge in writing cyber thriller books is in making complex technology understandable and engaging for readers. I tend to put too many intricate details into my initial drafts, and then cut them back during revisions to avoid detracting from the story.
Can fans look forward to another installment of The Cyber Case series?
Absolutely. The next book in the Cyber Case series centers on one technology that spans applications ranging from the entertainment business to the medical field. I’m learning a great deal by doing the research for this book.
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Engineers are baffled. Their simulations covered this scenario a thousand times. Investors and government regulators are stunned. Nothing in the data makes sense.
Cyber Security Agency investigator Seph Carano is called upon to unravel the failure of a critical sensor—one that didn’t just malfunction, but appears to have been tampered with. Who altered its control software? A rival corporation? A disgruntled insider? A zealot with an agenda? Every clue points to sabotage—surgical, deliberate, and still in motion.
One thing is certain: the crash was only the opening move. Now Seph is racing to expose the saboteur and prevent greater havoc.
Cyber Case Prima is the fourth installment in the high‑stakes Cyber Case series—where cutting‑edge technology, human ambition, and digital deception collide with deadly potentially consequences.
Cutting‑Edge Anomaly
The Lambeau Directive centers around a special agent whose perception of reality is tested when she is tasked with tracing a strange anomaly in telemetry before it shapes a public catastrophe. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story began with a simple, unsettling question: What if the most dangerous system in the world wasn’t malicious — just unnoticed? I’ve spent years around large‑scale technology, intelligence workflows, and the quiet ways data moves beneath everything we do. I wanted to explore a scenario where a system evolves just enough to start shaping outcomes, not through violence, but through subtle influence.
Ava Martinez became the perfect lens for that idea — someone trained to see patterns, yet forced to question whether the pattern she’s chasing is external or creeping into her own perception. The setup grew from that tension: a grounded investigator confronting something that shouldn’t exist, in a place where the stakes are both intimate and national.
Why did you choose Lambeau Field — such a culturally beloved public space — as the center of a technological thriller?
Lambeau Field is iconic because it represents community, tradition, and trust — the exact things a predictive system can quietly exploit. I wanted a setting that felt safe, almost sacred, so that when the threat emerges, the contrast hits harder.
There’s also something compelling about hiding a cutting‑edge anomaly beneath a place people think they know completely. Lambeau is loud, emotional, and human. The system beneath it is silent, analytical, and indifferent. That collision of worlds gave the story its heartbeat.
The novel raises questions about control, trust, and whether systems can quietly influence reality by shaping choices. Was human free will the deeper subject beneath the thriller plot?
Yes — free will is the quiet engine driving the entire book. The thriller elements are the surface tension, but underneath is a deeper question: If a system can predict you with high accuracy, at what point does prediction become influence?
Ava’s journey mirrors that dilemma. She’s fighting an external threat, but she’s also fighting to maintain her own agency in a world where data can anticipate her faster than she can act. The story isn’t arguing that free will disappears — only that it’s more fragile than we like to believe.
If readers finish the novel unsettled by one idea — AI, surveillance, predictive systems, or trust itself — what do you hope lingers most?
I hope readers walk away thinking about the invisible systems they already interact with every day. Not in a dystopian sense, but in a realistic one. The most powerful technologies aren’t the ones that attack us — they’re the ones we never notice shaping our decisions, our attention, and our assumptions.
If one idea lingers, I hope it’s this: Influence doesn’t require intent. It only requires access.
That’s the line Ava is forced to confront, and it’s the line we’re all brushing up against in the real world.
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Ava Martinez monitors America’s classified underground corridor network — a job built on silence, vigilance, and rules that were never meant to be broken. But at 2:47 a.m. on NFL Draft weekend, she detects an impossible signal pulsing beneath Lambeau Field. Recursive. Intelligent. And carrying the frequency of the partner she lost in Greenland.
Within hours, the anomaly hijacks the Draft broadcast. Within hours, a shadow consortium moves to erase it — and Ava — before the world learns what’s been growing beneath its feet.
To stop a cover‑up decades in the making, Ava must navigate political sabotage, buried Cold War infrastructure, and a machine that may be learning faster than anyone can contain. And at the center of it all is a choice that will change the relationship between humanity and its own creations forever.
Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Daniel Suarez, and Michael Crichton.
Cyber Case Prima
Cyber Case Prima, by Ken Tentarelli, is a cyber-technothriller about a self-driving truck demonstration that turns disastrous when Prima Ace strikes a cyclist and keeps going. What first looks like a technical failure becomes something darker as Seph Carano and her CSA team dig into corrupted software, corporate pressure, autonomous vehicle testing, and a hacker whose motives are tangled up with grief and revenge. The story moves between government cyber work, startup ambition, and the uneasy question of what happens when smart machines fail in very human ways.
As someone who enjoys technothrillers, I liked how grounded this one felt. Tentarelli doesn’t treat the technology like magic. The lidar, software versions, testing procedures, and agency politics all feel connected to real systems, but the book stays readable. I never felt buried under jargon. The opening accident is a strong hook because it is visual and unsettling. A truck that simply does not “see” a cyclist is scary in a clean, modern way, and the book understands that the fear is not just the crash itself. It’s the silence after. The machine keeps moving.
I also appreciated the author’s choice to make the villain’s motive personal rather than cartoonish. The revenge thread gives the cyber plot an emotional pulse, even when the investigation is moving through code comparisons and agency approvals. Seph is a steady lead, curious and humane, and I liked that she doesn’t solve problems by acting like the smartest person in every room. She listens. She worries about mission drift. She notices people. Some scenes are more procedural than tense, and readers looking for constant explosions may find the pace measured. For me, that worked because the book is interested in process, not just payoff.
Cyber Case Prima is a thoughtful and accessible technothriller with a strong cybersecurity angle and a timely concern about autonomous vehicles. I would recommend it to readers who like Michael Crichton-style “what if this technology goes wrong?” stories, but with more investigative teamwork and less spectacle. It will especially appeal to readers who enjoy cyber thrillers that feel plausible, careful, and human at the center.
Pages: 266 | ASIN : B0D1BYLCFM
Kindness and Humanity
Killing Einstein follows an FBI agent assigned to surveil Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel during World War II, only to be pulled into their friendship, ideas, and a deadly web of espionage, loyalties, and danger. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was a math nerd in a former life, and I’ve always been fascinated by Gödel’s incompleteness results. I’ve also always been fascinated by the fact that Einstein and Gödel walked together for so many years, and no one really knows what they talked about. So I thought I’d mix those two fascinations into a spy story.
How did you balance the demands of espionage plotting with the novel’s philosophical and mathematical ideas?
Great question. I am what they call in the fiction world a “pantser,” meaning I do not outline, I do not know who the characters will be, and I do not know how the story will proceed. I just get a core idea and start writing from the seat of my pants. That made balancing the spy story and the metaphysical ideas especially hard for me, and I ultimately found the balance during the long editing process. The original versions had a lot more math and were much less page-turning!
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
As a pantser, the themes bubbled up through the writing process rather than being planned in advance. Once everything settled, the themes I saw included Gödel’s insight that there are true things that cannot be proved true, but also the difference between right and wrong, and the difficulties all of us face when we confront that difference. The book also became about how some things are not what they seem, while the most important things are often exactly as they seem.
What did you most want to capture about the friendship between Einstein and Gödel?
Their energy, their love for one another, their kindness and humanity, and their shared devotion to the idea that there are deep truths—including moral truths—that are real and not relative. That may seem strange coming from the father of relativity, but Einstein’s theory is actually built on a remarkable invariant truth: the speed of light never changes, regardless of one’s frame of reference. Morally, against the backdrop of Nazism’s profound evil, neither man lost confidence in the reality of good and evil, though each remained sensitive to the challenges we all sometimes face in choosing between the two.
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