Category: SUSPENSE

Blog: Who Dares Wins

This week’s Excerpt

Escher’s Staircase
Copyright © 2013 by Lazlo Ferran
All Rights Reserved

Again it’s from The Detective section from Escher’s Staircase (published as Lotus). If you like US Muscle Cars, you’ll love this section.

It’s you or me now, Blue. Killing one of your own! Shame! But now I have the proof… Macar Tadek!
My breathing slowed almost to a stop while I focused through the infra-red sight. I held my index finger delicately over the trigger and waited. I could see no movement. Minutes went by.
Surely he has to move!
I saw just the faintest variation in light up on a second floor balcony of the fire-escape. Something had moved. Continue reading “Blog: Who Dares Wins” →

Blog: The Fast and the Furious

This Week’s Excerpt
This week it comes from the upcoming publication which is currently going under the name Lotus. I am going off that title though; anyway its an erotic suspense novel with deep philosophical angles (I hope!). This part is from an unnamed section but lets call it The Detective. If you read the novel you will know where it fits in.

Lotus
Copyright © 2013 by Lazlo Ferran
All Rights Reserved.

The red 1971 Pontiac LeMans Convertible streaked along the highway at full speed. The muscular driver behind the wheel was wearing Ray Ban’s and his medium-length brown hair was ruffled violently by the air-stream over the windscreen. He seemed intent only on the road ahead. He held the accelerator flat to the floor with his foot. On the passenger seat was an elegant blonde. Her hair too was flowing out behind her head in the turbulent air. Her head was reclined and at rest on the top of the seat. She appeared to be asleep. The car raced on. Continue reading “Blog: The Fast and the Furious” →

Blog: Are You Experienced?

if you don’t know the the origins of this week’s blog title, look it up! You won’t be disappointed.

Many times young writers ask me if it’s okay to write about something you have not experienced. I usually say yes, if you absolutely must, but there is no substitute for experience.

Landscape and Location
This is particularly true of places – landscape and location. In my first novel, The Ice Boat, a kind of odyssey of a young musician, I stuck to places I knew: London, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (update: this also helped for The Hole Inside The Earth – Ed), Den Haag (The Hague in Holland), Amsterdam and Stockholm. The second volume is yet to be published because the manuscript was lost for years and I only just found it again. In it the main character visits Siberia and and even the top of the world (I was influenced my Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here!). Ironically I hadn’t even been to Russia while writing it but later I actually married in Kyrgyzstan, in the far east of the old USSR. There the ethnicity is largely that of Mongols from the far north. Perhaps this was a case of life imitating nature. My second book The Man Who Recreated Himself was largely set in England and in places I knew. By the time I wrote Infinite Blue Heaven I had married in Kyrgyzstan and so it made sense to write about the landscapes and people I had experienced. I hope this comes through in the book. Continue reading “Blog: Are You Experienced?” →

Deep Cover: Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate

Excerpt of the week.

Here is the new Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate cover – designed and completed by Omri Koresh.

I hope you like it! Omri and I have worked together over the last few weeks to produce a cover which expresses the soul of the book as well as illustrating one of the scenes in the book. Those of you who have read it will recognise the Cover Girl. The cover will appear on the Kindle in the next 48 hours and on the paperback in the next two months.

I am also repositioning this book as an Occult Thriller. I have always had problems fitting this book into any genre: mystery/detective, historical fiction and fantasy/historical or fantasy/myths and legends don’t seem quite right so let’s see how the new genre works.Amazon applies categories very loosely to the books anyway so it might not make much difference.

Free Books! Continue reading “Deep Cover: Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate” →

11 May Updates – Preview of Lotus

Sneak Preview
This week’s is a unique (to date) look at a book I have been working on on and off for two years. It has no title as yet, but for the purpose of this I will call it Escher’s Staircase. It’s not easily categorized, so I think I will just give you the excerpt and let it speak for itself.

Escher’s Staircase (Later published as Lotus)
Copyright © 2012 by Lazlo Ferran
All Rights Reserved.

“I’m not fucking going down that! You gotta be crazy!”
I pulled away from the open hatch. “Don’t anybody think about pushing me either! Six hundred and eighty bloody feet! That’s … that’s like as high as a bloody sky-scraper!”
“Well, if you don’t do it, you will never get beyond Cadet Helmsman. Up to you matey!”quipped Shorty, lifting the glass bottle’s open neck to his scowling lips. Everything about Shorty was a tattoo – gaudy, colourful and in bad taste. Continue reading “11 May Updates – Preview of Lotus” →

27 April Updates – Draft of WWII Drama

I am getting very close to a final draft of the WWII drama Attack Hitler’s Bunker! so hopefully there will be an excerpt from that here next week. For now, however, another excerpt from Worlds Like Dust, this time an amusing one.

Worlds Like Dust
Copyright © 2012 by Lazlo Ferran
All Rights Reserved

(Unedited excerpt)

The four Ischians made a comical sight, squeezing their huge bodies into the small Maintenance POD. With two minutes to go, Luxmi Davidos had just finished rigging the main Nitrogen and Oxygen tanks to explode when she heard a tapping sound beside her. She had just sent the last grunt back with some tools, and grabbed her laser to defend herself.
There was a small grubber tank – filled half way with liquid around a rocky island, next to her. “Oh God, I had forgotten about you. Why the hell did you have to emerge right now! Now I will have to take you too!”
She grabbed an old oily towel, hanging next to a disfunctional diesel engine, and lifted the lid of the tank. Scooping the cat sized, grub-like, wriggling creature, she wrapped it in the towel and stuffed it under her arm.
“Who knows? You may be the only life-form from Earth alive, besides us, when this is all over! Time to go!” Continue reading “27 April Updates – Draft of WWII Drama” →

Fighting a Dip in sales – 6 April Updates

Here is this week’s sneak preview – a short story provionally entitled Vampire: Beneficence, to be published as the first story in the new Short Stories Volume III along with The Jesus Monster. The punctuation may seem a little strange without the paragraphs before this excerpt but it is correct.

Vampire: Beneficence

On a warm evening at the end of the 2010 summer, I was stalking the Vicar of St James Church in Clerkenwell. I am what is commonly called a vampire, d’you see …?
“Let me get one thing straight, though. We have been around forever. Homo Sapiens wouldn’t be Home Sapiens without us. We are the more evolved manifestation of the species. I know all this because I was once a writer, and have spent many lifetimes researching the subject. I have even visited the far-past … but that is another story … Continue reading “Fighting a Dip in sales – 6 April Updates” →

Competition – Solve Codes to Win £15!

I hope you like the new look of the blog. I have also added a permanent link to the Lazlo Ferran Merchandise on the right in the Lazlo on the Web section of links, so you will always be able to find it. The Merchandise is part of the prize in the competition.

Competition
In line with the release of my WWII thriller Attack Hitler’s Bunker! – at the end of June, I am having a competition. Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate: Second Edition had secret codes at the beginning of each chapter, which I hoped, added some depth to the book, once they were solved. Attack Hitler’s Bunker! will also have codes – to be broken, at the beginning of each chapter. So it seemed appopriate to base the competition on breaking one of the codes in Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate: Second Edition.

The coded cryptic puzzle in question is at the beginning of the Epilogue. These codes are used by the Ordo Lupus to conceal their secret teachings. If you feel you have what it takes to join the Illuminati, Knights Templar (if they still existed), or the legendary Priory of Sion you will have no trouble solving this coded message. Please email me with your answer at the email address at the top of this blog. Continue reading “Competition – Solve Codes to Win £15!” →

The Sparrow, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I have been in Spain for almost 3 weeks – just soaking up the sun really and doing what I do best – philosophy. Okay, okay so I know the saying: a philosopher is someone who has abandoned (left?) their community. But I rarely get time to think properly so it was nice to have some time. Plus Spain at this time of year is gorgeous and …. NOT RAINING.

I did manage to squeeze in some reading: The Lost Road by Tolkien (well, by Chris Tolkien as much as John, but nevertheless an interesting take on Atlantis), A Spanish/English Dictionary and phrase book (yep- I plan to retire there so I have to learn), The Sparrow and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Not sure if I will get both the latter reviews down tonight but I want to say something so I will give it a go.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

I must admit, I have a big problem with this book. I have many smaller problems and I will start with those: first of all I found myself on page 5 and still not really engaged. I was no wiser what the premise of the story was until around page 100! I had to keep rereading the back cover to remind myself why I had got suckered into trying it. Basically loads of people had recommended and of course it sells very well, so being an author, I wanted to see what this guy had got. I soldiered on but when I came to a bit which said (and I am writing this from memory because I simply don’t want to open the book again): ‘She pulled him down to her breasts. Then she asked him if he wanted to stay the night.’ I threw the book down in disgust. “Women just don’t say that!” I shouted at my apartment walls. There was much worse to come and while the main protagonist’s mistress was a dominatrix editor and super-stunning (apparently) she seemed to be a docile sop in bed. I just couldn’t buy it. I had to literally force myself to read on because several times I felt sick at the stupid misogyny that seemed to fester within these dark pages. Every woman in the book seemed to either suffer an extremely unpleasant and violent death or cause one. I was nervous for Lisbeth – the eponymous character of the book’s title, thinking that she too would meet some awful, sticky end and I won’t give the plot away by revealing her fate. I also found that I guessed the main ‘twist’ in the tail of the story by page 120, although I was partly wrong. I was close enough to make reading the rest rather pointless but I soldiered on just so that I would qualify to write a review. How can I criticise if I haven’t read? Continue reading “The Sparrow, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” →