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Novels
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Announcing:
Killers App
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
The killer app, the Holy Grail of the technical world, is an
application that makes billionaires and legends. The killing is
figurative, what happens to the devices the app replaces, or how
the app has changed our lives from previous to new. Think the
cell phone and Facebook.
Amar Gupta, a tech genius in his early 40s, is betting on
the next killer app, an electric automobile with the
practicality of the gasoline engine. Gupta’s personal life has
its problems, such as his affair with a young colleague. More
serious are the accidents that hospitalize him – are they bad
luck or is someone relentless trying to kill Gupta?
On the streets, the homeless are being murdered, victims of a
shooter. Detectives Ben Schwartz and Al Di Natale, Boston
Police, investigate. Schwartz goes undercover as a vagrant to
find the murderer. Di Natale works with software engineers to
discover if computer code can be used to murder. If so, that is
another killer or killers app. |
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Empty Doorways
(Publication Date: December 9, 2019)
Len
Abram's newest novel
Published
by
Foundations Book Publishing.
"Click on
Empty Doorways
to read
the
first chapter.
Order
EMPTY DOORWAYS (Kindle & Paperback)
From
Amazon or
Barnes & Noble
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The
search is on for the missing black twelve-year-old, Gabriel
Clay. Few know Gabriel has a secret, with built-in dangers.
Seasoned Boston detectives Ben Schwartz and Al Di Natale join
the search, knowing full well that the area the boy and his
grandmother live in is plagued with drugs and violence.
However, the school he attends, George Washington Carver
Charter School, offers a first-rate education and an
outstanding basketball program.
Wounded Army captain, Ty Douglass, a graduate himself, returns
from Afghanistan and joins the hunt. Douglass connects with
old friends, Solomon Greer and Charles O’Toole ("Tool"). They
share a tragedy from their youth; the unsolved murder of a
friend.
Empty Doorways has many secrets. Gabriel Clay has his, City
Councilor Marty Doyle has his own, and Douglass wonders if
Greer and Tool, whose illegal business is becoming more
treacherous, know more about their friend’s death than they
are admitting.
Detectives Schwartz and Di Natale must risk their lives to
uncover the secrets.
Otherwise, there will be more empty doorways,
more loved ones who never come home. |
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On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania, Cunard's most luxurious
vessel, winner of the international prize for the fastest ship
of its kind, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the
Celtic Sea, Ireland.
The ship sank in 18 minutes with a loss of 1,201
lives, of which 128 were Americans. Among these were Alfred
Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in America, and Charles Frohman,
the impresario who brought the play Peter Pan to the New York
stage.
Boston was well represented on the casualty list,
including Leslie Lindsey, age 28. Her father William was known in
Boston as the self-made millionaire who became a writer. Leslie and
her husband, sailing to England on their honeymoon, both drowned.
When a trawler found her body, she still wore a necklace, her
parents’ wedding gift.
William Lindsey and his wife Anne used the jewels as
the down payment for a chapel in Leslie’s honor. Weddings are
performed today in the Leslie Lindsey Memorial Chapel at 15 Newbury
in Boston.
The Lusitania was carrying contraband, bullets and
shells, so the ship was targeted regardless of the civilians. The
German Embassy warned travelers not to sail -- largely ignored.
How did German intelligence learn about the
contraband? Spies. That much we know, along with the heroics of
Vanderbilt and Frohman as the vessel sank.
Who these
spies were, in the novel two young men from the German army and a
young woman from the Ukraine, and what happened to them and the
people with whom their lives intersected, that is what Debris, a
95,000 word work of fiction, attempts to find out.
Click on this
link for the first chapter.
The 100th anniversary of the disaster – and the
publication date of the novel – was May 7, 2015.
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Sasha Denisov, a Ukrainian immigrant and Chechen war
veteran, drives a Boston cab. He dreams of buying his own taxi
medallion and remarrying Ani, a Russian immigrant, whom he first
married to get a green card -- and then fell in love with. She has
other dreams, however, which she believes her work for an escort
service will make come true.
When Sasha tries to purchase his medallion, he comes
into conflict with a Colombian taxi owner, who has interests in
drugs and prostitution. In the violence that ensues, Sasha is
forced to fall back on survival skills he learned in the brutality
of the Chechen war and thought he would never need again.
The Medallion is
an 70,000 word suspense novel set in contemporary Boston. If the
novel has literary godfathers, they would be Robert Parker, Dennis Lehane and Martin Cruz Smith; the first two for compelling action
around Boston, with its interesting history and ethnic diversity, a
melting pot still coming to a boil; and the third writer for
resilient characters in a failed society (the Soviet Union and the
Russian Federation).
In the tradition of Parker and Lehane, the novel
careens through the streets and little known neighborhoods of
Boston, following Sasha's attempt to woo his love and ensure his own
survival, even as his freedom is threatened by Ben Schwartz,
a Boston homicide detective nearing retirement. Haunted by a
decade-old murder of a medical school professor in her prime,
Schwartz and his partner Di Natale get an unexpected break in that
case while pursuing Sasha and push both investigations forward.
In the novel, the transplanted Russians, Israelis,
Somalis, Colombians, Haitians, among others and some illicitly, are
pursuing the American Dream. Readers, I believe, will find a
connection with their striving.
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