Tag Archives: books

The Autofac

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Robots Are About to Outnumber Humans At Amazon Warehouses: “They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Futurism reports, perhaps bringing us one step closer to the Autofac of Philip K. Dick’s fevered nightmares. In which “nuclear war survivors in a small community struggle to make contact with an automated factory that has consumed most of their natural resources.”

I first encountered the story in the limited series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. The bots, like AI, are not conscious, yet they have a purpose. In the story, the Autofac is so automated that it’s (re)producing the robots who work there.

The bots only want what’s best for humanity, and their only mission is to sell and deliver… everything. Even though there’s almost no one left to buy.

Originally published in 1955, the tale is sad and unnerving. In the television program, the survivors gain access to the Autofac in the only way accessible to them–by faking a complaint form.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.

eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Fluidity of Memory and Guilt by Association

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We are the sum total of the memories and experiences we have forgotten. Or, as William Faulkner put it, in Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders…” Memory is also associative, grouped with other memories, sometimes seemingly at random.

Memory and story-telling are a bit like Rob’s “autobiographical” filing method for his record collection in High Fidelity: “If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into…”

As I whittle away and reorganize the undying manuscript called Witness Tree (hope to have a final-final draft by the end of this week!), I’ve also begun working on my sixth novel, tentatively called Hours, about a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s. And I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about memory.

Hours is loosely based on my grandfather’s experiences as an airline pilot based in Lima, Peru. I say loosely, because though it draws on his experiences and impressions, it is not his story. Though I hope I’m able to preserve some of the essence of him. He was a fantastic storyteller, and I’m equally hopeful that his spirit of fun, adventure and not letting facts get in the way of a good story will continue to guide and inspire me.

The opening of Hours, begins with the observation that “Memory is fluid, roiled by currents that carve deep paths, much as flowing water forges a riverbed but is thereafter constrained by it.”

The narrator, a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s, is thinking back to the pinnacle moment of his career. He sees himself as though standing outside himself, a young captain, on the tarmac in Santiago, Chile, peering toward Los Andes, waiting for some sign that the “Paso de la Cumbre,” 65 miles away and still obscured, will clear. And as he conjures that earlier, younger self there on the tarmac, he finds that he’s thinking of his earliest memory of flight, when he was seven years old in West Virginia:

“If I’m to think of the pilot, I must also think of the boy, must follow the course. Because as the pilot peers toward the Andean mists, playing his game of chicken with the weather, he thinks of the boy he was. The boy’s dreams were wild, he remembers. But not this wild.”

Hours is not very far along. But I see it being told in two inter-layered parts, from two perspectives, the protagonist is the pilot in the late 1940’s, and his grandson in the present day–also a pilot–who goes through his grandfather’s log books and notes, after his own Icarus-like fall from grace. And the skies.

It will be about flying, class (rags-to-riches), and the struggle between outward success and inward peace. Like the spotty, primitive radio signals they are meant to use for navigation, the novel asks, what are you to do when the thing that’s meant to guide you may be deadly wrong? It will be through memory, and its associations, that at least one of them will find a kind of redemption.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:

Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

The Whisper Legacy, by Tj O’Connor – Review

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“Curran’s enemies thought he was dead. They were wrong.
He thought his past was left on the Voula Beach Road. He was wrong. Now, that nightmare is drawing his enemies out”

Whisper Legacy is a brilliant, powerful and well written cyber warfare “take” on the familiar noir tale of criminals needing to keep their stolen records hidden. But with some intriguing twists. Beset by PTSD, lingering injuries and creeping old age, (Mar)Lowe Curran makes a living “on both sides of the ethics line” as what’s left of the former black ops spy he once was. Now a security expert, an unregistered PI and a fixer for the powerful, enigmatic TAE–“Tommy” to his friends–Curran inadvertently stumbles into a much more sinister plot involving the highest levels of government.

When Curran steals back the records and files that the hacker “Piper” stole from TAE’s company, he inadvertently downloads the records of a shadowy influence-peddling group’s blackmail operations, known as Whisper. Worse, for Curran, the Whisper group has already tried to kill him. Twice.

Whisper Legacy takes us through slimy operators, to the rich and powerful, right up to the highest levels of politics, where everything is personal. Not least, for Curran. He lives not only with the aches, pains and nightmares of his past work, but also with deep regret. This is about to get ugly. And dangerous. Powerful people with shady friends need the duffel bag to remain hidden. To stay alive and expose Whisper will take all of Curran’s experience, guile and grit. The police are the least of our hero’s problems.

Lowe Curran is an engaging narrator and guide. The story moves along confidently and quickly, spinning its seemingly disparate strands in a way that feels fresh, all while leading us, and Curran, inexorably on. I liked that our hero was human, hobbled by old wounds in very real ways. He’s forced to use his wiles more than his fists or a gun (though he certainly knows how to use them both when called upon). The scene that opens the book is a wonderfully chaotic masterclass in improvised spy craft. Levels of madness misdirect from the darker purpose and set an assured tone for the story to come.

Highly recommended!

Whisper Legacy is available on Bookshop.org, Amz, Barnes & Noble and through Bookbub

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
AND MORE, on the links page

Swipe by R.G. Belsky and Connie Traymore

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SWIPE, is a tense, smart and page-turning psychological thriller where life and love on a dating app goes from strange, and sometimes desperate, to menacing. And deadly.

SWIPE, by R.G. Belsky and Bonnie Traymore is a tense, smart psychological thriller. Life and love on the fictional dating app MetMee goes from strange, and sometimes desperate, to deadly when two strong, sympathetic and believable characters looking for connection in life get more than they asked for or expected. The same may be said for lucky readers.

I’m a huge fan of Belsky’s previous work, while Traymore is new to me. On the strength of this book, I’ll definitely want to check out more of her work, too. So, though I should have known better, I expected this novel, given its subject matter, would have the whimsical elements of a cozy. While it has some (dark) humor, the authors do a remarkable job of introducing tension and menace from the very start. And ratcheting it up.

SWIPE, “The perfect match, the perfect murder”, by R.G. Belsky and Connie Traymore
EAN/UPC 9798230469544 – Pages 278 – Paperback
Pub. date – April 27, 2025 – BISAC Categories: Mystery, Thrillers & Crime

Jake Parker is a former high-flying reporter now writing puff pieces for an online magazine obsessed with clicks, reposts and viral reports, called The American Scene. Sonya Romano, by her own admission, is something of a vigilante. She bears the scars of a troubled childhood–a philandering father who drove his fragile wife to suicide, along with a dark grudge against the two-faced, and often philandering cheaters she encounters on the dating app site “MetMee.”

The story unfolds chapter by chapter from the alternating points-of-view of Jake and Sonya, who quickly track together. Jake has been assigned to write a click bait expose about dating apps, while Sonya worries that an accident resulting from the payback she’s been dealing out to the genuinely horrible men she has encountered will put her in the frame for murder. Jake, with his nose for news, scents a bigger, more important story than the piece his online editor commissioned. Quickly, the two are searching for information about each other that is far outside the normal likes and dislikes. There is an appealing and suspenseful feeling of cat-and-mouse in the early chapters as Jake closes in on what he thinks the story is, and Sonya works to cover her tracks.

There is also a satisfying cat-and-mouse being played with identity here: each character has aliases and multiple personas on the app. This could have been very confusing to read, but Belsky and Traymore carry it off very well.

The alternating viewpoints between Jake and Sonya does an extraordinary job of creating pressure and anxiety about what will happen next. Early on, their courtship is conducted over MetMee’s texting app. This could have been cooly distancing but it actually increases tension as it creates a sense of an inevitable collision. As a reader, I was breathlessly turning the pages to find out just how bad this pile-up would be, only to find…well, I won’t spoil it.

Five *s – Highly recommended!
Available on Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble

I received a review copy for a free and fair review.


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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
AND MORE, on the links page