HEDDA LUNDQUIST AND WORM
Rock ‘n’ roll is sex, sleaze, and lipstick. It’s your first kiss, your first beer, a mad dog barking at the moon. It’s burning rubber, black eyes, hormones so wound up they pop like big, pink bubbles. It’s loud. Really loud. That’s the only rule.
— The Strip by Hedda Lundquist
West Hollywood, 1985.
Hedda Lundquist is one of thousands chasing a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy on the sex and drug fueled Sunset Strip; she’s one of one when it comes to the ancient power hidden in her Scandinavian bloodline, a power chasing Hedy as its chosen heir.
Back home in Minnesota, topflight doctors and third-rate shrinks have labeled her a dangerous enigma. Her overbearing mother still wants her committed to a psychiatric ward. That’s totally unreasonable. Yes, when she’s startled, she suffers brainstorms that scare the hell out of people. She blacks out—the craziness that happens after that—all that electrical stuff—is it really her fault?
When Hedy dashes into Jade Dragon’s ladies’ room, where the risky sex and hard drugs part of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll goes down, she stumbles into a standoff between a pair of punk rockers and a trio of metalheads. Two rival music scenes matter in Southern California. There are the spike-haired punk rockers, brash adherents of the gritty, anti-fashion hardcore scene, and their exact opposites, the metalheads, the lovers of glam, hairspray, hard drugs, and sleaze. Their disdain for one another’s music, style, and credos is loud, mutual, and sometimes violent. Only these rivals are less oil and water and more fire and gasoline; they are more than human, and their rivalry is ancient, hidden from humans, and always violent. When one of Hedy’s electrical meltdowns blows apart their standoff, the young rivals recognize a singular force no one in the world of fairytale and myth can ignore. The wisest are in awe of her. The most seductive find her impossible to resist. Malevolent elders want to manipulate her.
As Hedy grapples with each new discovery—she can harness electricity from a wall socket, the pain between her shoulder blades might be emerging wings—she must navigate the lures and repulsions coming from within and without. Is she good or is she evil? She feels trapped in between. She wants to hit rewind, to go back to her life as the down-to-earth singer-songwriter from nowhere Minnesota taking her little shot at fame; that’s not the way any of this works. And when a rancid, one-armed monster takes her one true friend, Hedy must partner with unexpected allies with mythical powers of their own. If they fail? Hedy’s one true friend dies, and her body and soul will be lost to the darkest parts of the inhuman mind.
Monster Me by Hedda Lundquist —
My closet is full of skeletons, call them my scars. My heart is covered in scars, call them my bones. Screw happier ever after, I’ve got that wicked witch smile. Run and hide, Romeo, the monster is me.
CHEMIST MARTYR JINN
Chemistry student and first-generation American Abigail Adulai’s mother has died. When a distraught woman brings her mother’s service to a crashing halt, a secret is unearthed, a secret—and the presence of a ghost. A ghost who reveals an unfinished journey Abigail must finish no matter the risk or the sacrifice. Abigail's relentless devotion will take her deep into a mire filled with unimaginable danger, Iraq 2007, a warzone where the long fingers of treachery and the threat of a violent death lurk around every corner.
Abigail is the Chemist.
Titan Mercier is a good young man trapped in a disposable life. When his superstar younger brother commits the ultimate gangland sin, Titan is ordered to pay the price. To stop an all-out street war, he will join the military and carry out an impossible mission: steal high powered weapons, ship them home to a Machiavellian gangland overlord. Titan’s success or failure will decide if his kid brother lives or dies.
Titan is the Martyr.
The stoic Spectre is an Iraqi translator who recently hired on with Dragon Fire, a grizzled platoon fighting in and around Baghdad. When Dragon Fire teams with intelligence agents to raid an operation trafficking stolen antiquities, Spectre’s hidden skills lead him to discover the operation’s leader, a corrupt American Sergeant. The Seargent turns the tables on Spectre, threatening to reveal Spectre’s secret; he is in truth a hunted man living in disguise.
Spectre is the Jinn.
In the harsh, breathtaking expanse of Iraq’s Arabian Desert, Abigail’s quest will intertwine with Titan’s desperate mission, Spectre’s masquerade—and the fate of a secretive, tortured young man whose desires will put all their lives in grave danger.
DEATH IN DRY ROCK
Arizona Territory, 1889.
An exploding shell killed his twin brother, Tiber, at Cold Harbor in 1864. After the surrender at Appomattox had ended the war, work on the frontier for a war hardened young man had been easy to arrange. By the time he was twenty-one, he’d settled into the job that would define his life.
Tagus Rome was a hired gun.
Tag had killed or wounded too many to count. He had done it without much to say about the work prior to and after the fact. He was neither proud nor ashamed. It was work that he knew how to do, so he did it. He had never had any special magic that had kept him alive. He fought fairly with an equal chance of dying. He was a straightforward man with a gun for hire, and when the gun would not suffice, he had hired out his fists. His knuckles were more scar than skin, and the bone underneath had started to ache through the night, keeping him awake all too often.
All the old knocks and wounds had started hurting so much that moving faster than a tortoise now called for a burst of grit and determination. Hell, only dumb luck had saved his life outside the brothel on Gunpowder Lane. That the young man he had been hired to capture had fumbled his six-shooter had been dumb luck if not an honest miracle. Only fools count their luck as earned or wave off an honest miracle.
More clearly said, it was time to retire, and he picked the city of Dry Rock as the place to do it.
What’s in store for him when he gets there? Max Duggar, is a cutthroat outlaw working for Steig Lowth, the slimy sheriff, who is obsessed with protecting the city’s Founders’ Day celebration, which features a production of an international play, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, planned to be performed at the unveiling of a grand new theatre, The Emerald Odeum and Museum. Meridith Powell, a San Francisco reporter, is in Dry Rock to cover the play’s lead actor, the famed tragedian Brodie Doyle, after having covered the same play in Boston, then London, the latter having been performed at the time of the White Chapel murders. Only Meridith has found a better story. He’s investigating a string of grisly murders, the victims all being risen brides, ex-prostitutes who a gambler’s widow, Stell Harper, matched with forlorn men in need of loving wives. As for Stell Harper? Tag Rome should have known he’d pick trouble.