Dark Digital Sky
Carac Allison
LA Private Investigator Chalk is hired to find three adult sons a Hollywood mogul fathered through a sperm bank many years before. United, the three half brothers discover they share a desire to be warriors. They plan a heist to prove they are worthy of enlisting with a paramilitary leader who has taken both a name and a mad inspiration from Kubrick’s dark satire Dr. Strangelove. General Ripper’s forces begin by robbing pharmaceutical warehouses and then mailing the stolen prescription drugs to America’s veterans. They escalate to kidnapping video game designers and broadcasting their deaths.
The ensuing chaos builds toward a culminating drone attack that will forever prove Ripper's warning that graphics have made warriors terrorists.
Introducing a complex and unique Private Investigator. This is sharply told LA noir for the 21st century.
Modern security threats and issues of identity are given the old-fashioned hard-boiled treatment in the first of a new series. High tech gadgets and computer forensics are the tools of Chalk, an ex-FBI man who also uses his Porsche 911 and Glock, in addition to all the fancy cell-phones and IT, as he attempts to find three biological sons in this complex tale.
Chalk is the literary aware PI, having been named Chaucer by his English professor father. He references his favourite novels and even has their covers tattooed onto him. Different doesn’t begin to cover it. Chalk is bi-polar, a struggle that is under some control through medication but is challenged by his lifestyle and personal demons, not least the loss of custody of his son. He is highly intelligent, brilliant even, and has talents that were spotted and nurtured by a Fed.
Chalk’s been hired to find three young people sired by an unpleasant and powerful mogul. The case sends the PI and computer expert spiralling into a dangerous situation, a deadly organization linked to a potential drone attack.
There are some nasty characters at work, a “dark pantheon” of killers, and Chalk, also being an expert in underground cults, is the man for the investigation.
A pacy, stylish, complex, techno-thriller. The next generation of PI has arrived, and his name is Chalk.
About Carac Allison:
Carac started playing with PET and Tandy computers when he was a young teen. He learned to write on a Commodore 64 but he was never much of a programmer. It was the connections the computers made possible that interested him: the connections between people alone in the dark listening to the strange music of modems, the pirated games they shared and the bulletin boards they chatted on before the internet. At York University Carac studied English Literature. He read modernist and contemporary novelists but his main interest was always the detective genre. He wrote about the works of Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft and William Gibson. While studying in Toronto he fell in love with the theater. Unable to afford the ticket prices as an impoverished undergrad he became a reviewer for a small magazine called Scene. This made it possible for him to see almost everything that came to the stage. His first play, Luck is a Lady, was produced in his freshmen year at Calumet College. Finished his undergraduate degree, Carac started working for the University of Western Ontario as a low level clerk. Soon after he began transforming paper forms into web forms. This streamlined service delivery and brought an office still dependent on microfiche and stamps into the right century. He went on to found the Web and IT Team in Student Services. He has directed projects on database security, electronic data interchange, mobile devices and distributed online identity. For too many years following the performance of his first play, Carac had amateur workshops and small productions of his dramatic works. These titles were always focused on adult relationships in the blossoming age of the internet—hidden love, secretive lust and virtual sex. He was a finalist in Theatre BC’s national playwriting competition with Cardboard Boxes. But professional success on the stage never came for him. For his Masters in the Philosophy of Education Carac studied the psychology of crime in the HBO prison drama Oz. And he wrote about how technology is changing concepts of value in higher education. Carac now lives in London Canada with his wife Beth and their children.
bio from caracallison.com