Dev Manny, Information Technology Private Investigator (serial fiction)

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Dev Manny, Information Technology Private Investigator, by Andy Kaiser

WEB ADDRESS: http://www.devmanny.com

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Information Technology Private Investigator. The full title doesn’t fit well on a business card, and no one’s heard of the acronym. Even walking someone through the pronunciation tends to glaze them over.

But that’s me. That’s what I do. I investigate mysteries and problems, all of which revolve around information technology. Networks and computers, data and systems, gadgets and gizmos, tools and toys.

I’m not the best information technology private investigator. There are others better than me, others more experienced, others with better stories to tell.

But I haven’t met them yet.

MY REVIEW: If you like mystery fiction, and if you're a computer-junkie, chances are you'll enjoy Dev Manny. Each post is a complete short story, and there's one a month or so. The story is told in first-person by Dev Manny, "Information Technology Private Investigator" and the stories are pretty relevant today!

Check out this blog!

A few sample paragraphs from Chapter 5

Red tail lights swarmed in front of me. They’d be far away, if I’d been walking. But I wasn’t. My car was chattering down the expressway 25 times faster than my usual saunter. The traffic jam up ahead guaranteed I’d come to a fast and painful stop.

Just to make sure, I slammed on the brake again and my stomach lurched to a stop while my car did not.

I’d seen the evidence but my brain didn’t want to believe. So it told my foot to try one more time. And once more, just in case reality would permit me to cheat. Unsurprisingly, I continued hurtling ahead, foot pumping mechanically while my hands clenched white on the steering wheel.

It’s an emergency, I thought. Better use the emergency brake.

Then I realized… I was right. The emergency brake wasn’t connected to my now-flaccid hydraulic brake system. The emergency brake was cable-connected to the rear brakes. If I was lucky I might live through this, assuming the ancient cable was still good. And that it hadn’t been cut.

I grabbed the brake handle with one hand and heaved up as hard as I could. I heard the click-click-click-click-click of the ratchet as the cable tightened and strained against the brake drums. Friction engaged. Physics, as it had done ever since the Big Bang, continued to work.

I slowed, but not enough. I was still flying plenty fast enough to get a speeding ticket from any police officer with bifocals or better. The emergency brake was designed to keep the car from rolling while parked. It wasn’t meant to be used while flying at highway speed.

Desperate, I let go of the steering wheel with my other hand and ignored the sudden, violent back-and-forth shimmy. I twisted sideways in the seat and used both hands to heave up on the emergency brake. I managed to get two more clicks from the ratchet.

The traffic jam was just a few dozen feet ahead of me. I was seconds away from hitting cars that were exponentially more expensive than mine. Their insurance was probably paid up, too.

Thanks to my rarely-adjusted wheel alignment, my car had drifted left after I’d stopped steering. I grabbed the wheel and wrenched it even further left.

I heard a squeal followed by a gravelly crunching as my car whipped to the side and passed the traffic jam on the median.

RECENT POSTS:
-Superliminal chapter 1: The captured keys
-Superliminal chapter 2: Constructed destruction
-Superliminal chapter 3: Showing the case fantastic
-Superliminal chapter 4: The plot slickens
-Superliminal chapter 5: Line noise

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New Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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Check out the following blogs:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

Wred Fright's Blog (fiction serial, humor)

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Wred Fright's Blog, by Wred Fright

WEB ADDRESS: http://wredfright.blogspot.com/


BLOG DESCRIPTION: A blog by Wred Fright, author of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, that mainly features poems, rants, and God knows what else. Currently, it's featuring a serialized novel called Blog Love Omega Glee.

MY REVIEW: I've recently become interested in serial fiction blogs...and truth to tell I don't know if the Kindle is suitable for it. I'd always assumed that the Kindle presented all the archives of a blog...but this is not so, they only display 7 pages worth, or sometimes even less. So you sign up to a serial fiction blog and you may not get the very first chapter of it.

But, you can always go to the web to read the initial chapters, and once caught up, continue to read it on your Kindle.

As for Blog Love Omega Glee...I have a prejudice against stories written in the present tense, so I can't fairly review the author's writing. However, I've shared his latest blog post, so you can get a sense of his writing and of the story itself. If you like it...check it out.

SAMPLE POST:

Blog Love Omega Glee: Peanut Butter And Women (23 November 2012)

Sitting at a table in Fish Taco King, surrounded by Dashing Delivery Dudes, Jake and the other holiday helpers keep quiet while their drivers insult one another while eating lunch. "Hey, Lonnie," Luke, a driver nearly the size of his van, says, "Your helper hasn't said anything. Did you get another mute again this year?"

"No, he talks. He's probably worn out from all the packages we delivered already. We aren't lazy like you," Lonnie says while putting peanut butter on his tuna burrito, "Don't they have chunky peanut butter? I hate this creamy stuff."

"Luke told me you liked the creamy stuff," Roy, a driver with the kind of tan one gets after falling asleep in a tanning bed whose automatic shutoff is broken, says and laughs, slurping diet pop through his straw.

Lonnie pauses from peanut buttering his burrito and sticks his right index finger in the air like a talisman, "I like my peanut butter chunky and my women creamy."

"Oh, God, here we go again," Siobhan, the only female driver at the table, says.

"I heard it was the reverse," Luke says.

"What's your helper's name?" Roy asks Lonnie.

"Jake," Lonnie says, returning to buttering his burrito.

"Jake, has he made any special stops yet?"

Jake finishes chewing his bite of fish taco, and asks, "Special stops?"

"You know, the ones where he takes a half an hour to deliver a package and a woman walks him out and his overalls are mussed and so's the woman's hair," Siobhan explains.

"Half an hour?" Luke says, "I think five minutes for Lonnie would be a world record."

"Hey!" Lonnie says, index finger rising again, "That was just once and I told your wife to slow down."

Roy claps his hands, "Oh, snap!"

Luke laughs and gets up with his tray of fast food wrappers, "Speaking of her, it's time I stopped in for my daily quickie."

He beckons to his helper, a sleepyeyed midget, "C'mon, Jason, you can sleep in the van while I'm rocking the house."

Goodbyes are exchanged and Luke and Jason leave, sounding at the door the foghorn which thanks the staff for a good meal. "Well, we better get moving too," Siobhan says, nodding at her helper, a young woman with a squirrel like face minus the fur and whiskers, "I don't want an inspector showing up and hassling me for a long lunch."

"That asshole Allen already showed up this morning and was about to yell at me for leaving the back door unlocked. I had Jake in the back looking for a package though, so he couldn't say anything. That fucking guy. He's fucking unbelievable."

"I tell you what's unbelievable. All the shoppers out today and the traffic. I didn't think it could be worse than last year but somehow it is," Roy says, crunching up his empty soda cup.

"I hear ya. These fucking people . . . " Lonnie says, before launching into a tirade about having to work on the day after Thanksgiving, which includes 57 variations of the word "fuck".

By the end, only he and Jake are left at the table, and then they too must be dudes who dash to deliver.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.

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Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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Check out the following blogs:Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

Dead Monkey Society (arts & entertainment, fiction serial)

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Dead Monkey Soceity, by Penfold Crockett

WEB ADDRESS: http://www.deadmonkeysociety.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: The challenge? To write a novel in micro chapters of 4 and half lines or less. Confused? You certainly will be when you enter the mysterious world of the Dead Monkey Society.

"High Noon at Dead Monkey Junction..."
A lawless town. One man standing tall. A short guy called Clarence and a dead monkey playing the piano...

MY REVIEW: To start out, you might want to visit the website, to read the story from the beginning. For some reason the Kindle feed doesn't begin until Chapter 7.

It's an amusing story, perhaps an aquired taste. As the blog description says, each chapter is a paragraph. The writing is over-the-top, but amusing in that way, and the story is intriguing.

CHeck it out

Sample chapter:

Meanwhile, back in the Dirty Cowpoke the monkey was meandering through an early morning rendition of ‘the Forlorn Leghorn’ when a hail of bullets shattered the doors into matchsticks. The six remaining Klaun brothers stormed in, each one bigger, dumber and uglier than the one before…

RECENT POSTS:

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Check out the following blogs:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report