Snippet Sunday: Gene Cards

From GENE CARDS, Chapter 14:

Guarded by firewalls, connected by underground tunnels, nourished by stocks of bioengineered food and the lake’s twenty cubic miles of water, the city of Liasis was an unbreakable fortress to the outside world. Yet pockets of underworld existed within the city, too. Dark alleys where you could trade a joint for cheap sex, where eyes had no color and faces no mouth. Here, the QNet warped into black holes of solitudes: Internet games, cybersex, virtual worlds where lives melted into a multitude of non-existing possibilities, the rabbit hole where Alice kept falling and falling and falling...

Skyler knew such world well. She was once an Alice too, and climbing out of the rabbit hole was the hardest thing she ever did in her life.

It's actually 5 sentences, but it felt complete like that, without adding the following 3.

The above is my Sunday snippet submission for the Weekend writer Warriors (you can find the Snippet Sunday group on Facebook, too). Make sure you check out all Weekend writer Warriors participants, it's a fun way to find forthcoming books -- all genres welcome, there's something for everyone's tastes.

Now that MOSAICS is out in the world, I thought I'd switch gear and introduce you guys to my next thriller, GENE CARDS, a dystopian mystery set in the future which is due out in October (you can read the blurb at the end of the post). I know, two book releases in less than a month, how crazy is that? The truth is that I've been waiting so long to push these out -- you can read this post if you're curious about the whole story behind my books and why they've been sitting in my drawer for so long.

On other news, I've polished a short story I wrote a while ago and I'm planning to send it out to all my newsletter subscriber before I release it on Amazon. So, if you want to read for free... sign up! :-)

GENE CARDS (A Skyler Donohue Mystery)

When the cure for some means death for others, how far will you go to save your own?

    Yulia Szymanski is a murderer and one of the best hackers of the century. Her mission: break her brother out of a high security jail before he dies of a rare genetic condition. On her trail is Biothreat Agent Skyler Donohue, a decorated Muay Thai fighter with a strange fascination for corpses. The obstacle to overcome: an invisible, deadly disease that strikes at random and has the city of Liasis locked in a bioterrorism siege. 

    When the latest to fall ill is Skyler's best friend's daughter, Skyler wants to drop the Szymanski case to chase the baffling pathogen that nobody is able to isolate. What she doesn't know is that finding Yulia is the only way to stop the epidemic and save the child's life. 

   In a world where identities are based on gene cards, and privacy no longer exists, survival is only granted to the rich, the healthy, and those who've learned to become invisible to the system. 

Download the first chapter here.