Showing posts with label santa barbara. Show all posts
Showing posts with label santa barbara. Show all posts

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Deluge: A Fictional Account of What Would Happen if Extreme Weather Hit California




atmospheric river


Deluge is a disaster story. A real potential disaster is bearing down on the East Coast, and people would be wise to take every precaution. Everyone stay safe.

 Here is an snippet from the book that tries to put moving water in perspective.
Evarts examined the sky. He could discern not even a dull glow where the sun would be at this hour. He swiped water from his eyes.  The rain was bad enough, but the wind made the ocean surface bumpy, and the nose of his surfboard kept splashing salt water in his face as he paddled. He wanted to keep a clear eye out to sea, so it presented more than an annoyance. The larger, outside waves could be brutal, and he didn’t want to be caught inside in what surfers called the impact zone. People generally thought of water as benign. It watered gardens, you could drink it, bathe with it, freeze it to chill a drink or a sore back, swim in it, or laze on the surface in a boat or on a floater. Water was an essential element of life, useful and often great fun. But surfers knew water could also be a killer. No one who had been hit by a huge wave disrespected moving water. You couldn’t fight it. You couldn’t beat it. You could only get out of the way or let it throw you around like a rag doll in a Rottweiler’s grip.


Storms,politics, and gangs pillage California but that isn't the scary part.


Tuesday, May 29, 2018

New James D. Best Novel on June 4th!



In 1862, a sixty-five day downpour pummeled the western United States. California suffered the brunt of the storm. Almost a third of the state was under water, roads were impassible, telegraph lines down, rivers overflowed, hundreds of people died, and hundreds of thousands of animals drowned. Sacramento remained under water for six months, forcing the state government to move to San Francisco.
Geological evidence shows that a flood of this magnitude hits California every one to two hundred years.
What if it happens again?

I took a break from Steve and his friends to write a disaster story. This one's a corker. I didn't know I could imagine such mayhem.

For Steve Dancy fans, I have started Coronado, A Steve Dancy Tale and it should be available before the end of the year.

Back to Deluge. Greg Evarts and Patricia Baldwin are back from The Shut Mouth Society. The stories are unrelated, so Deluge is not a sequel. The novels just shares the same cast and locale. The characters have changed, of course. Greg is now chief of police in Santa Barbara. Patricia is still a history professor, but has transferred from UCLA to UCSB. When the sky falls on California, our two heroes must once again save the day. There's rain, inept and ept politicians, murading street gangs, cage fighters, spies, and collapsed dams that send mountains of rolling water toward everything we hold dear.

Deluge will be available in print and Kindle formats on June 4th. Happy reading.

Can a 150-year-old conspiracy be unraveled before it’s too late?