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WesternSFA


Perfectly Dead
Homeland Security Services, book 2
by Michael A. Stackpole
Stormwolf.com, available on Amazon, 100pp
Publish date 2016

Michael Stackpole has long been a fixture at science fiction/fantasy conventions both for his stories in those genres and for his writing workshops.  He is well-known for his gaming-centered stories and his Star Wars titles.  So, although he is well-known to me, his stories had never appealed.  As a result of a conversation with him at the Fan Fusion convention in Arizona, he convinced me to try one of his other titles which was quite divergent from his usual fare.  And, I have to say, I am well-pleased.

Homeland Security Service agent Miracle Dunn and her partner, Abraham Fyn, are tasked with investigating a murder in Phoenix (both Stackpole’s and my hometown.)  The victim, Connor Moran, was a failed science fiction writer and the evidence was squarely pointing to a friend of his.  The story revolves around the existence of a new novel that Moran was writing; a story which was stolen from his apartment.  The puzzle for Miracle and Fyn was figuring out why a stolen manuscript was worth a murder.  To help them, they enlist a local world-famous occultist to explain some of the events and evidence they uncovered.

The plot sent the duo and the reader in several directions as the two agents, with the occultist Merlin Bloodstone, investigated and debunked those clues.  Until, at last, the trio found themselves in the desert wilds of Arizona at the compound of what seemed to be a cult.  But as heinous as cults tend to be portrayed, they are still protected by the US Constitution and people are still allowed to believe as they will.  But what the three investigators uncover was truly unbelievable; and much of what occurred had been sanctioned even at higher levels of authority in our government. 

The series is actually an alternate-history series set in an America where the World Trade Center disaster occurred in 1993 from a truck bombing and was much worse than in our reality, and then The Patriot Act was easily and quickly made into law.  While it is obvious that the author was writing a cautionary tale of government oversight run wild; the fact that the actual Patriot Act has fizzled away into obscurity well after this book was written makes this reader disappointed that there will probably be no more stories of Miracle and Fyn.

I enjoyed the characters of both Miracle and Bloodstone (although his name is a bit on the nose, don’t you think?) but thought Fyn got short-changed.  And I really enjoyed the plotline using both a desert cult (something that Arizona knows about) and our local county sheriff.  Thanks for the recommendation, Mike.   ~~ Catherine Book

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