Something personal

I must apologize for the lack of activity on this site, but as I indicated on my Facebook Group page someone very dear to me passed away just recently and I had my mind on things that were, quite frankly, more important to me.

Emotionally I'm in a weird kind of limbo right now. I don't think my mind has truly registered the loss and the consequences it bears for my family and me.

My grandmother died, and with her passing away my last remaining grandparent has left this world. I grew up with her and my grandfather in the same house and I've returned frequently - pretty much every weekend for the past one and a half years, in fact - to visit her and my parents in the countryside. Even after my grandfather's death six years ago she remained independent in her high age and was, infact, a force in the household to be reckoned with. Crossing her was... unwise. But at the same time I cannot think of another person who gave her love as unconditionally as she did.

Looking back at the part of her life I consciously experienced it's as if she didn't spend a single waking moment without working or helping her closest kin.
She grew up poor, one of many children, and had tor work hard on the family's farm from an early age on. She also had to take care of her sick mother. The war came, and with it came the bombs and hardships. But she survived, made it through the chaos of the last months of the war and the uncertainty of the years after the unconditional surrender. She and her family didn't have much. But with hard work it proved to be enough, and my grandfather stepped into her life. There's much I could write about the man, too much to tell it all here, but despite him passing away more than half a decade ago I still remember him as both the strongest and kindest man I ever had the honor of knowing.

Their life wasn't easy. They had little but one another for much of the time, but that bond proved to be strong enough to weather all ups and downs. They were married for more than fifty years, had two wonderful daughters and five grandchildren. Both of my grandparents always gave whatever they could, whether it was love, support or advice.

But the one memory that has stuck with me the most is my grandmother's retelling of the bright moments of her life, of the feastdays and parish dances as a young woman to the tunes of Zarah Leander or just the best the local brass band had to offer, of finding the love of her life who shared her love of singing and dancing.

When I finally stepped into this world a long life of hardships and back-breaking labor had already taken too much of a toll on both of them. The dust from constructions sites he had worked on over the decades had weakened his lungs to the point where he needed a near constant supply of additional oxygen. Her back was hideously marked by ostoporosis. I never got to see them dance. I'm not a very religious person, but I like to imagine that when she left this world my grandfather took her by the hand and invited her to dance again. Not in the bodies they left in, marked by the decades in which they gave my family all the love and strength they had - and more -, but as they were when they first met each other.

Yes, I like to imagine that.

But I've got to continue what I'm doing, as much as my mind would like to rest on other things closer to my heart right now. I've made promises - to you, to the deceased, and to myself - that I intend to keep. Things may take a slower pace than I had hoped for, but they will move forward nonetheless. That much I can guarantee you.

Review - "Black Flagged" by Steven Konkoly

Good lord, it's feels like it's taken me years to finally getting around to doing this. Well, probably not years, but way too long. I certainly pushed this one around far longer than I initially wanted, and that kind of stepmotherly treatment is something the novel under no circumstances deserved. 

BLACK FLAGGED is fellow author Steven Konkoly's second novel after his excellent superflu thriller THE JAKARTA PANDEMIC. For those of you not wanting to read the linked review I very much enjoyed The Jakarta Pandemic for its believable characters and its plausible plot and can highly recommend it to everybody the least interested in thrillers and post-apocalyptic novels. At its heart it's not quite about the end of the world, but about the all too thin veneer between civilization and savagery nowadays humans take for granted.

Then what about Black Flagged? Let me try this with adjectives. Uncompromising. Fast. Intriguing. Surprising. Hard. 

The Jakarta Pandemic was a good debut novel. In Black Flagged Steven Konkoly shows he has honed his skill further in the meantime. The cast is larger, the stakes are higher, the players' motives more diverse and nebulous and ultimately deadly. Konkoly replaces a simple father stuck in suburbia during a global pandemic with a trained killer and the halls of Washington and Langley. 

A graduate of the Department of Defense's experimental Black Flag program, Daniel Petrovich carries secrets he'd rather keep buried. Secrets his government has hidden in the deepest vaults of the Pentagon. Unfortunately for Daniel, someone is trying to raise Black Flag from the dead and bring Daniel back with it. Someone who knows all of his darkest secrets.

In exchange for the promise of a clean slate and a chance to keep the life he has built with the woman he loves, he agrees to carry out one final mission.

Daniel's life is about to disintegrate, as he becomes the focus of a relentless FBI manhunt and the target of a vengeful CIA agent. To survive, he'll be forced to release a dark side he fought for years to keep suppressed. A dark side with few boundaries, and even fewer loyalties.

Daniel Petrovich and the cast of characters he works with or against are memorable and distinguishable, not a small feat on its own considering the sizeable number of men and women appearing in Black Flagged. The action is hard, brutal and unforgiving, and while Daniel Petrovich may be the novel's protagonist he is no white knight in shining armor. Konkoly makes it painfully clear that the world of covert operations and espionage is not a field suited for romaticism. People die, some quite horribly so. The fact that Black Flagged is uncompromising in its portrayal of this reality (without straying into territory too gory for comfort) is one of many points that endeared the story to me. A second point is that it's a decidedly gray novel, concerning its overall morality. There truly are no good or bad guys (except the Serbian paramilitaries appearing in a few flashbacks; those are decidedly bad). Everybody acts they way they do for a good reason. Who is like and why is completely up to you, the reader.

I can't go into the plot because whatever I'll say will spoiler something, but suffice to say it's fast, hard and mature.

The novel's Amazon description reads Black Flagged lays the foundation for a gritty, unapologetic series exploring the often unceremoniously brutal world of covert operatives and government agency politics. Technically, I could leave it at that because this is one of those rare cases of "What you see is what you get". This isn't about a goody-two shoes agent but about a man drawn into a mission and into a life he had hoped to have left behind a long time ago. About the fight against international terror, but even more so about one man's plot against the US government - with the end goal to help that very government!

One thing the novel also achieves quite superbly - and that's a rather rare treat in that type of thriller - is that Black Flagged is largely apolitical. The very genre usually leans heavily in one direction or another, but I felt and saw none of that here. Now, as a foreigner I'm admittedly not privvy to many of the subtleties of US, but that's what I took from Black Flagged, and that's good thing. I don't want my thrillers to be neo-conservative or liberal or preachy in general; I want them to be hard and entertaining. Black Flagged is the latter.

I thoroughly enjoyed Black Flagged, even more so than I did The Jakarta Pandemic. So much, infact, that I've just bought the sequel, Black Flagged Redux. I really can only sing the highest praises of these novels. They are well worth your time and money.

CLASH of EAGLES Campaign Concludes - Thank you!

The IndieGoGo campaign for CLASH OF EAGLES has concluded. I didn't quite reach my funding goal but I quite happy with how far we *did* get! I'd like to thank all you backers out there and all of you who did spread the word around. It wouldn't have been possible without your support!

If you're a backer, go and check your email... ;)

CLASH of EAGLES Campaign Update 3 - The MAP!

Well, the IndieGoGo campaign is coming to an end, but there's still more than two days to go. It's been a great run so far and I'm very grateful for everybody who has contributed so far. For those of you and for the ones still on the edge I've got a set of new pictures. Part of the perks you can get for lending your support is a huge 33x23 inch map of the changed Europe in late 1940. And here's the template for it:

The map template printed out and held in place by a cup of coffee and a white... something. On the right there'll be the map's legend. The final map you'll get ill includes front lines, battle dates, zones of occupation and a slightly yellow-ish touch to emulate old paper.

A close-up of the map.

A table, a dashing young man, and the map template. Mainly to show you the size you'll get.

The final map you'll get includes front lines, battle dates, zones of occupation in different colors and a slightly yellow-ish touch to emulate old paper. The paper quality is very high. I won't disclose the full price one of these costs, but suffice to say it's a good deal above $20 per piece.