The new website

michaeljalcorn.net

is complete.

Nothing fancy. Just the basics of all my published books and how to get a hold of them. Quick reminder: if you live in the Denver metro ….

I have a few dozen of each of these in my basement. Happy to deliver them.

All that’s left now is the official release of………

any moment now

“Valkyrie’s Kiss” is Book Two of a series. “The Tools of Oblivion.”

Book One was a little tome I put out two years ago called “Charon’s Blade.” In case you didn’t have a chance to catch that one, it is still available, and, in fact, is also getting strong reviews.

This is a screen shot of the Coverfly Red List for Thriller Books/Manuscripts.

AND THAT THERE IS MY LITTLE BOOK IN POSITION #8.

What is Coverfly? Coverfly is a website/clearinghouse whose purpose is to connect creatives with movie makers.

only one of those is me. some days

Many contests that I submit to go through Coverfly, and Coverfly sponsors events all throughout the year to accomplish their purpose. The “Red List” is their High Scores list. How they come up with these scores is a combination of results from sponsored contests and …. and I don’t know. It’s about like trying to figure out how the East German judges came up with their scores back in the day.

But I’m scoring well, so I’m not going to complain!!

So if you’ve got an interest in “Valkyrie’s Kiss” (COMING VERY SOON), it would behoove you to grab a copy of “Charon’s Blade” to learn how Billy Devereaux and Ally Blanchard became a team and learned about The Guild. And if you’re Denver metro, I have a handful of them in a box in my basement that I would be happy to deliver!

COMING SOON!!

He eased onto the accelerator again, his eyes trying to penetrate the darkness under the bridge. They drove most of the way past the space before Ally saw something.

“There, right back there, near that beam.”

“Where? I didn’t see anything.”

“He’s pretty well hidden.” She paused to look up ahead. “There, quick, pull past that hedge and park.”

He eased the car behind the bush she was indicating, and drove up on to the curb right behind it.

“Leave it running,” she said. “We may need to beat a hasty exit.”

“Wait, how do we do this?”

“What do you mean?”

“We just go in, guns blazing?”

She looked to the stadium, noticed the happy crowds starting to file out. “We don’t have time for a neat plan. You go wide behind him, see if you can get him to announce his intentions. I’m gonna try to get in front of him and at least disrupt his line of fire.”

They got out of the car and went their separate directions.

Billy recognized this feeling. The last time he felt it was in the mountain home over a year ago. The pulse pounding in his head; the taste of adrenaline; the rush of energy. Sadly, this time it was without the lingering effects of Vicodin.

Billy ran quickly up to one pillar, glanced around. Through the opening in the tunnel, he could see the wide, concrete stairway on the south end of the stadium filling up. That no shots had been fired yet was small comfort, but he knew that wouldn’t last.

No shadow of a gunman in this compartment. Ten yards to the next pillar. GO GO GO!

He ran, knees bent, Sig-Sauer pointed down, to the next pillar, eyes focused into the shadows. Once at the pillar, he stood with his back to it, and took two deep breaths to try to master his nerves.

No luck.

He moved ever so slowly to the edge of the pillar, leaned to where he could get a view around it. Sharp intake of breath.

There, barely visible by the light of the parking lots behind them and the occasional car passing overhead or around the neighborhood, was a man, crouched down behind a short support wall. The man peered around the wall once, then pulled back and revealed a long-barrel rifle. As Billy was watching, the man stood, raised the weapon and braced it on the wall, and adjusted his stance.

“Hey! What are you doing?” It was lame, but it was all Billy could think of. The man whirled around in a flash and brought the rifle to bear on Billy. Billy had barely enough time to pull back behind the pillar. Three concussions followed immediately …

Strike that.

There is no “bad” news at this point. There is only news.

I did not win the Book Contest. [thus the face up above]

BUT…..

That means now I get to put it out into the world! [thus also the face up above]

[yes, that is my real face]

It will take a couple of days to do the mechanics of it–these things don’t just spring out of the ground–but by the weekend or early next week

“Valkyrie’s Kiss” will be LIVE!

Stay tuned……

“Come on, let’s think. We may be wrong, but what is, if it were you, what is the worst-case scenario? Where would you go to do the most damage, inflict the most harm?”

“You’re thinking, start from the worst, and work our way towards the most likely?”

“Something like that.”

Their conversation came to an abrupt halt, as the sound of a very large concussion filled the air. Two seconds later, Billy thought he saw the evergreen trees around them start waving in the wind, ever so slightly. None of the dead leafy trees seemed to notice anything, but two young men walking up the street in the opposite direction were looking and started pointing to the southwest. At the crest of the next hill, Billy and Ally could clearly see smoke rising from the base of Green Mountain, a landmark hill to the west of Denver.

“Holy shit,” they said together.

“Dammit, I hate it when you’re right,” she continued, though, by her tone of voice, she wasn’t even amused by her statement.

“Yeah, me too.”

They rode on in silence for several blocks before she snapped out of it.

“Well, now we know there’s going to be something.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what’s it gonna be? What is that worst-case scenario? Think.”

“Okay.” Billy rubbed his neck for a moment, thinking. Suddenly, his face twisted, scared.

“What,” Ally asked.

“Well, there’s about to be . . . “

“Seventy-eight thousand people exiting a single building all at . . .”

“. . . at the same time.”

They looked at each other for a second, then turned their attention elsewhere. Billy, to the road, which he accelerated down at a reckless pace. “Okay. Here we go.”

Billy veered off of Sheridan Street and onto Colfax Avenue, headed straight into downtown Denver. He glanced down at the clock.

4:45.

Isaac, sitting in the passenger’s seat, glanced down at his watch. 4:23.

Abraham steered the black Toyota 4Runner out of the street and into the parking lot on the south side of the Western Mills Mall in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, and casually up and down a couple of aisles. To anybody on the outside, it would appear as if he was looking for a prime parking spot on the second Sunday of the Christmas shopping season.

What he was really doing was surveilling the parking lot to make sure that the police presence was no more than they expected it to be.

The Western Mills Mall was a behemoth of a shopping structure, covering over a million square feet. From overhead, the mall looks like a gigantic toy train locomotive, with a very long center body, widening out on the east end like the cab of the locomotive. Inside, the layout is essentially a giant rounded, triangular loop in roughly the same shape as Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. The main corridor, all 15 feet of width, goes from the east end, where it begins at the theater (which widens into the “cab” structure), and proceeds in a straight line down the length of the mall, past one anchor store on the right, past the food court on the left, past another anchor store on the left and down to the western end. At that point, the corridor angles to the left, then takes a sharp left at another anchor store to head back all the way to the eastern end of the mall where it ends again at the movie theater, passing the food court again on the left.

Isaac found the layout of the mall amusing—suburban housewives and the elderly used it as an indoor race track during the week, getting their exercise by walking the circuit. The only place in the mall where you could cut across from one side to the other was through the food court, which is where the mall walkers went to eat off their exercise. They had no way of knowing that very food court was about to become a graveyard.