The Straw Man

by Dominic Tzimisces

Overview

It appeared one day, a simple scarecrow draped across a hastily-built post overlooking the grand estate of New Byzantium's most powerful family. A nuisance, at best; an eyesore and nothing to be concerned about...or was it? When the clan's seneschal takes it down, he thought that that would be the last of it. Until it came back again...and again...and again. Now he must outwit the sociopath whose dark shadow's cast a pall over the entire estate, threatening all that he's created, all that he's lived for, all that he's loved... It's a race against time, between the monster who's stalking him...and the one he thought he'd buried long, long ago...

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012873293
Publisher:	Mavronero Press
Publication date:	09/06/2010
Series:	Tales of the Mavronero Mythos , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	56 KB

About the Author

I'm an aspiring author with a passion for a good mojito (or at least a mint julep). After 21 years in the Air Force I've finally decided to grow up...leaving me only to figure out what to grow up into. I've been a writer for most of my life (ask both my kindergarten teacher and poor supervisors over the years) with an unfortunate penchant for acquiring rejection slips. They make good wallpaper, though. My current focus of work revolves around a series of short stories and novellas set in an alternate reality wherein a group of refugees from Constantinople managed to escape the fall of the eastern Roman Empire and flee to America. There they found a land where things...weren't quite right. It's a volatile mix of weird fiction, alternate history, scifi, and good, old-fashioned Lovecraftian cosmic horror that I'm still trying to find the right formula for. Centered around the town and lake of Mavronero, I call the series simply 'Tales of the Mavronero Mythos'.

Simultaneously, in the same alternity, I've a series of hard-boiled mysteries revolving around Det. Pik van der Tass of the Ysbergstad, Aleyska Police Department. A profiler-alienist (basically a criminal psychologist/psychoanalyst with a touch of psychiatrist), he's made his way up the ranks in a city dominated by the close-knit Afrikaaner families who fled from the Boer Republics in the 19th century to the Aleyska Territory. There, the immigrant mining combines carved out the City of Ice underneath the cyclopean gaze of the towering Mt. Ys, the tallest peak in North America. It's a dark city in a dark world, with people who are at once reserved and passionate, and where crime and redemption go hand-in-hand.

I've played the van der Tass series fairly straight in terms of realism, leaning towards the noir vice the weird fiction of the Mavronero Tales, though because of the alternate history angle, some of the technology is different (think the World of Tomorrow you'd see in pulp fiction). I use the same world as a touchstone, to give the readers two sides of a shared world, and to stretch out my literary wings a bit.

I'm happy to hear any feedback you'd care to offer and I'll try to respond as quickly and as completely as possible. So sit back and enjoy a trip into the strange!