A Case of Strange Alliances

mcreed

2012年9月 · Trafford Publishing

電子書

308

頁

評分和評論未經驗證瞭解詳情

關於本電子書

A Case of Strange Alliances is the first book of a trilogy. The story takes place in the 1980s. We meet Mariam Al Saffat, a 1960s activist who has gone mainstream but still has radical underpinnings. A divorced mother of three, she has earned an undergraduate degree and a masters degree; she is CEO of her own very successful company. She expresses her radicalism and altruism through sponsoring and managing a home for unwed mothers in Harlem. Terry Maskonov is her business partner and friend. He is an ex-KGB agent who has relocated to the United States. The two met during the 1970s while both were involved with a left-wing newspaper that was funded by the Soviet Union. Their consulting firm deals primarily in industrial espionage. Both believe that the new cold war will be fought on the business front and with computer technology instead of nuclear weapons. The book opens with a prologue in which Mariam finds one of her sixties radical pals, Addy, who was stuck in the past, dead on his bathroom floor. She calls her best friend, Ralphie, who was also a part of the sixties radical group and is now a beat cop. The death was originally deemed due to natural causes, but Ralphies unauthorized investigation resulted in two men confessing that they killed Addy for a $100 drug debt. Ralphie doesnt believe it and vows to continue the investigation. Mariam cautions against her doing this due to the fact that she has been given a gold shield, made a detective, due to her work on the case (even though this work was against police policy and procedure). Ralphie feels that she was given the gold shield to shut her up and stop her from further investigation. The story begins three years after the prologue. Ralphie has taken the money and run. She retired at the salary of detective, after a year, with a lot of overtime, resulting in a big pension. She has become an investigative reporter for a daily newspaper and won two Pulitzer Prizes. She is currently working on something big but has gone missing. Her editor, a powerful and cunning Latino, contacts Mariam first because of her relationship with Ralphie and second, because of her investigative and industrial espionage background. The story takes off from this point. In the search for Ralphie, we are taken into the dark and evil world of a hate group; we meet its insane leader. We learn of a clever scheme to infiltrate every level of corporate America and government bureaucracy and of a diabolical plan to pit African Americans and Jews against each other. The goal is to destroy the relationship forged during the Civil Rights era. The ultimate plan is to destroy American society as we know it and replace it with the one aspired to by the Third Reich. The subplot deals with a very sexy and complex relationship between Mariam and Terry.

關於作者

It began in the mid-1980s; it was like the “invasion of the body snatchers.” They infiltrated the bureaucracies: city, state, and federal as well as private corporations, like Enron. Under the guise of people qualified to make organizations more efficient and effective, these acronym-spewing suits set about dismantling the infrastructure of our society. They used words like reengineering; they very slyly changed reward systems to force workers to comply with their agenda. The compliant ones were transformed into acronym-spewing robots. Those who resisted were considered to be “not a team player” and were sidelined, eventually to be removed from their positions. I was there; I watched and wondered what on earth these people were up to. I would tell them that certain procedures existed to ensure internal control. Redundancies, redundancies, the head would shout at me. Well, I would calmly say, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. This novel was cooked in the cauldron of chaos that simmered, boiled, and burned during a twenty-year period in which our institutions were gutted. It is my imagination of what is possible under such conditions. When the bottom fell out of our economy in 2008, I expected it; I’d seen these people create an environment in which this could occur. I’m a certified organizational development specialist. I have the traditional training—BA in public administration, MS in human resource management—as well as the nontraditional training, landmark education.