The Serpent Finder

About the Book

This thrilling story moves from California to France to Canada and back to California while the hero grows from a playboy to, as one of the women in the story says, “a truly rotten bastard.” A lot happens on the way to make him that way.

He is a little careless about the women in his life until he falls in love with one of them. Associating with him becomes hazardous to her health, as it is to all those around him, because he makes powerful enemies who are not fussy about how they achieve their aims. His guide through his difficulties is Sun-Tzu who wrote “The Art of War” over twenty-two hundred years ago. The hero, who is really not very heroic, tries to follow Sun-Tzu’s advice, but of course he may not be the only person involved who has read the book.

There is a heroine and a villainess, but you won’t guess which ones they are until a long way into the book. The real villain, whose influence threads through the book like a serpent in the grass, is a greedy corporation. Couldn’t happen in real life, right? The hero, who is also the narrator, starts the book comfortably well off. This is as well as he gets into some very expensive projects, all with the fading hope of making a profit. One of the girls in his life develops a taste for diamonds, so, as he says, “he can feel his credit card trying to squirm deeper into his wallet.”

Much of the action takes place on water of one sort and another. The hero and captain of the boat in which part of the action takes place, is quite hurt when his official description as “a prudent mariner” causes his crew to roll on the floor in hysterical laughter.

The action is set a few years into the future in the real world of real people and places. Sorry, no dragons, fairies, or little green men. If some of the characters are modeled after real people I’ll never tell.

About the Author

The author was born in Burma, raised in England, emigrated to America over forty years ago. He has been happily married to the same woman for forty-eight years. They have three children and four grandchildren. He worked in the space business, including the Gemini and Apollo launch vehicles and satellites of many sorts, and was an assistant project manager on the 1976 Mars Lander biology and meteorology instruments. When he got bored with this he sold yachts for a few years, in the process getting a Coast Guard license to carry passengers for hire in a vessel of a hundred tons a hundred miles out to sea on any ocean. He retired from the yacht business, moved to the wilds of Oregon where he took up writing magazine articles in the long wet winters. This is his second book, look for a reissue of his first, “Rain in Oregon,” soon.