Hi, all. We’re T. C. Archer, the writing team of Evan Trevane and Shawn M. Casey. We’re going to talk a bit about our latest release from Silver Publishing, the alternate history/paranormal romantic suspense, Chain Reaction.
Former Chicago Detective Jordan Pierce put his life on hold in order to protect America's secret weapon against the Nazis, The Manhattan Project. But he can't protect himself as his humanity is eaten away by a mysterious disease that destroys him, while at the same time makes him more powerful than any man he's ever known. Jordan finds out how much the disease has devoured his soul when he falls in love with the woman who might destroy America and tear apart his last shred of humanity.
Chain Reaction is the first in the Phenom League series, our paranormal superheroes who fought, not for justice and the American way, but for freedom of thought for all beings.
Like most people, we have an ongoing love affair with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the superhero crew. Evan is the one who came up with the idea of setting our series during WWII, and making our superheroes the men (and women), working behind the scenes to ensure that no one was left to the mercy of madmen like Hitler and his cronies.
Chain Reaction is told from the point-of-view of former Chicago Detective Jordan Pierce. Eight months prior to the story’s beginning, Pierce was attacked in an alley and made into a vampire. He quit the Chicago PD and now heads night security for The Manhattan Project’s secret lab at Chicago University, where the race to achieve the first nuclear chain reaction is raging. Jordan is trying to reverse the “disease” that has infected his body and forces him to drink blood, while protecting America’s most important secret.
If you ask us what it is about Chain Reaction that makes it special, we say it’s the fact our characters are every day real people taking courageous action in the face of situations they never before had any idea existed. They’re anything but perfect, yet do the most unexpected things—both good and maybe not so good, sometimes. Gladys is fearless—well, she acts despite fear. But it takes a great deal to scare her. She’s too curious for her own good, which makes her a very interesting woman, at least for Pierce.
But you don’t have to take our word for that…
Meet former Chicago Police Detective Jordan Pierce
CHAPTER ONE
October, 1942
Tension fermented in the air like a sour mash whiskey. By chance, skill, stealth, and deceit I had kept my secret. But tonight I strode down the halls of Chicago University's Eckhart Hall with a feeling my time had run out.
Every evening I reported for duty as The Manhattan Project's head of nightshift security not knowing what I missed during those midday hours when I lay dead to the world. Along with the bizarre sleep that immobilized me, the strange infection raging through my body made me dislike food and drink, stopped my smoking habit cold turkey, and switched me into permanent high gear. The worst part was the dread I barely kept at bay, knowing the people I worked for would turn me into a lab rat if they discovered the truth.
My gut coiled tighter as I entered Security Chief Lopez's office at six o'clock sharp. Lopez stood in front of his desk, hat in hand, while rifling through a stack of files. He looked over his shoulder and our eyes met.
I halted. His bloodshot eyes told me something was wrong even without the uncharacteristic loose tie and rumpled black suit. He straightened and raked strands of greased hair over the bald spot in the back of his head.
"Pierce," he said, "there's been a security breach."
Relief washed over me. This had to be a repeat of the one and only security breach we'd had a couple of weeks ago. In a fit of depression, Miss Therese Hance, a mathematics major here at Chicago University, had written a poem. I still recalled the verse verbatim:
Dear little neutronian who lives on a nucleus in an atom of my knee, if you do not stop jumping around, you are going to cause an atomic blast and blow up the universe.
With the top-secret race to beat the Germans to the first nuclear chain reaction going on at Chicago University, the poem hit too close to home. When Miss Hance's professor, Dr Albert, found the poem on her desk here in Eckhart Hall—Dr Albert had some vague awareness of the research going on—he passed the poem along to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer panicked. Lopez and I barely prevented the scientists from having a collective nervous breakdown.
I gave Lopez a not this again look. "Which student wrote another poem? Miss Hance didn't know a thing. It'll be the same this time." Then I added before he could reply, "Don't tell me you bought into the story about how her studies in group theory gave her a subconscious knowledge of the scientific research being conducted here."
Lopez shifted and I caught sight of the bright red, Eyes Only, top-secret folder beside the pile of folders he had been thumbing through. I started. An Eyes Only report could only have originated with General Groves, head of The Manhattan Project. This was no student poem.
"We intercepted a radio message north of the Ontario border last night." Lopez grabbed the folder and extended it toward me. "The code-breakers say the message contains the correct amount of Uranium 235 needed to sustain a chain reaction."
"The true U-235 amounts?" I blurted, mechanically reaching for the folder.
Our big edge over the Nazis was the knowledge of how little Uranium 235 was needed to start a chain reaction. Of the two isotopes of uranium, U-238 and the rare U-235, the Nazi's head scientist, Werner Heisenberg, believed they needed a uranium concentration of ninety percent U-235 to build an atom bomb.
According to our head scientist, Enrico Fermi, only a twenty percent concentration of the rare isotope would reach critical mass. The disparity was enough to keep the Germans busy doing nothing but enriching uranium until we drove them back to Berlin. But we had to attain the first nuclear chain reaction to ensure victory.
I dropped my stare to the folder and forced my fingers to close around it as Lopez's hand fell away. A bona fide breach here at Chicago Pile One? No one in the outside world knew what was really going on in Eckhart Hall's Metallurgical Lab. The real liability lay a block away at Stagg Field. The scientists were building an atomic pile in an abandoned squash court beneath the field's west grandstands. Damn it, I'd warned Lopez someone would get suspicious at seeing scientists constantly running between Eckhart Hall and Stagg Field, briefcases clutched so tightly their knuckles turned white. Suddenly Miss Therese Hance's poem didn't seem so farfetched. Who else had noticed strange activity at Eckhart Hall?
"Who else besides the CP-1 scientists have this information?" I asked.
Lopez's mouth thinned. "You, me, and General Groves."
Groves and Lopez were above suspicion. The transmission had to have come from one of the fifty-two scientists working on the project. They all understood the ramifications of an atomic weapon in the hands of a madman like Hitler. I couldn't believe any of them capable of selling out their country, much less the rest of the world.
I swung my gaze up to Lopez's face. "If the Nazis find out Heisenberg's equations are wrong…"
"And the Nazis get their hands on the correct equations…"
We both let the unsaid words hang: The US could lose the war.
"Any leads?" I asked.
"Nothing. I rang your apartment an hour ago when the report hit my desk, but you must have been out."
I nodded. Here was the reason for the dread I'd experienced tonight. A crisis like this could draw attention to the fact I was always out during the height of daylight hours. My service during the Great War combined with my position as a detective on the Chicago Police Force had gotten me through the security check for this job. Keeping a low profile had kept my secret safe—until now.
NOW AVAILABLE
SILVER PUBLISHING
AMAZON
BARNES AND NOBLE
ALL ROMANCE EBOOKS
We’re giving away a Kindle copy of Chain Reaction. Leave a comment, and you’re in the drawing!
Winners are chosen via random number generator and contacted via email.
Stay tuned to meet Dr. Gladys Nichols.
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