I suppose I might be on a five-year cycle. But a new book is coming very soon. It’s not the sequel to Slow Boil Rising that I’ve been peppering away at. But it is a distant prequel to SBR, set much closer to our own timeline.

The backdrop: A university seismologist named Terry Joyner detects suspicious vibrations for a number of days, then BOOM! An explosion levels an old industrial complex in Chicago, killing hundreds in the initial blast.

While Joyner tries to figure out just what happened, he runs afoul of a new government agency bent on silencing him by any means necessary.

It’s an expansion of the short story, The Blue Ribbon Panel of Academic Experts, a version of which I wrote for the first Event compilation with Steve Metcalf and Robert Miller.

It’s definitely a work forged during the pandemic of 2020. Themes explored include bungling bureaucracies, intellectual integrity in the face of anti-rationalism and puritanism, paranoia, and anxiety.

So yes, it’s a comedy!

What’s it called? Well, still working on that! But the working title is: Terry Joyner: Criminal Seismologist.