A Pre-Taste of Upcoming Novel
This is a shameless teaser. After the first of the year, you will receive notice of publication of my spy novel. You will no doubt rush to Amazon and order several copies, one for yourself and one for every friend who is still talking to you. Recalling that the theme is a poison agent dropped into the water supply of Russian Ukraine, see a below excerpt of the effect of that action in one Ukrainian town. Apologies for the graphic nature of the below:
No answer at the door, Petro opened the unlatched front door as he had done many time before.
“Roman, are you here? Are you ill?”
The daylight filled the small room and Petro saw Roman’s back in the bed on the far wall.
“For God’s sake, Roman, get the hell up, you bum. You have all your work left from yesterday to do.”
Petro walked over to the bed and gave Roman’s shoulder a gentle shake. It was just enough to roll Roman onto his back, revealing a blotched face and wide staring eyes.
“Roman! Roman! Roman, can you hear me?”
Petro ran out to find the mayor. “I must remember to wash my hands,” he thought. “I don’t know what Roman caught, but I want to get any germs off my hands.”
On the evening of the 17th people in Sevastopol and Simferopol began to feel weak and dizzy; by the next morning they took to their beds and then they began to die. A few at first, then many. In the surrounding countryside, farm families and townspeople began to feel the symptoms; but not all. Those far from the canal system, reliant on local streams or deep wells and without need for vast agricultural water supplies, seemed to show no ill effects. By the 19th it became clear that a wholesale health crisis was descending on the entire Russian peninsula; health care providers and infectious disease teams began arriving from Western Russia, and World Health Organization crisis personnel arrived by private plane with advanced test equipment and powerful micron microscopes.
By the next week, the dead were piled in public buildings or lying in place, and ancillary diseases, typhus and plague, began to show up in the city cores.
About The Author
Stephen Honig
Stephen Honig has been writing fiction and poetry all his life. The sources of his writings are of course his life experiences: growing up in ethnic New York City; attendance at two alleged bastions of Ivy League erudition; a long career in the law with its attendant exposures to people, business and technology; reading everything eclectic along with alleged classics of the Western canon; wide travel including a gig in the USSR in the ‘70s to bring legal briefs to refuseniks; teaching at three colleges and at a law school in Russia; raising two families in very different generations. Now, Honig has completed his first novel, Event, a thriller combining the international espionage style of John Le Carre with the gripping pace of novels by James Patterson. If you’d like to sign up to automatically receive my blog posts, please go to the Contact page and submit the form. Thank you!