The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

60 NOVEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Monsters Michael Michaud, independently published, 2020, $6.99/paperback, e-book available, 232 pages. A female oceanographer and a charter yacht captain with a strained relationship lead a voyage with four younger scientists to observe whales in a Mexican lagoon. They discover a frightening reptilian mother and her child, apparently identical to a seagoing reptile species that went extinct 60 million years ago. The animals escape into the Pacific Ocean, heading toward an unknown destination. The voyagers begin a quest to prove that these creatures exist, at first meeting with ridicule. They begin to suspect that people with vast financial resources used powerful genetic engineering techniques to make new, enhanced versions of extinct plesiosaurs. New sightings show that those animals have multiplied and spread to other parts of the Pacific Ocean. In Monsters , Michael Michaud explores the potentially threatening implications of genetic manipulation, and how the concentration of great wealth in a small elite may lead to the irresponsible use of that technology. The implications are vast: synthetic biology can be used to modify any form of life into a new species, potentially including human beings. Who are the monsters: the plesiosaurs, or the billionaires who made them? The author of more than one hundred published works, Michael Michaud was a Foreign Service officer for 32 years before turning full time to writing. He served as acting deputy assistant secretary of State for science and technology and director of the State Department’s Office of Advanced Technology. He also served as minister counselor for environment, science and technology in Tokyo. Okuda! A Dryden Universe Corporate Wars Novel Daniel B. Hunt, iUniverse, 2018, $20.99/paperback, e-book available, 396 pages. This sci-fi thriller, set in the late 25th century, focuses on Lucy Okuda, a schizophrenic psychopath who has been bred to kill. After escaping her space station prison, Lucy is hunted by the Obsidian Order, her former captives and tormentors. She lives a life on the edge as M-Prov Carnival Supply Company’s top assassin. Cloned in Synapse Biotech’s space lab from the remains of Okuda Yoshiko, a female samurai warrior who died 13 centuries earlier, Lucy’s mission for M-Prov could prevent an intergalactic war. M-Prov has assigned her to kill Jillian Caldwell, CEO of the Linn Corporation and “the most powerful women to ever have lived.” Meanwhile, Lucy considers revenge against Synapse and its CEO, Takeshi Yamata, after she learns that the company’s lab plans to make another clone from Yoshiko’s mummy. In a universe full of corporate deception and intrigue, all is not as it seems. Lucy Okuda finds herself, along with a recovering drug addict, a criminal syndicate’s boss and an advanced robot, on a mission that might just end in intergalactic war. Okuda! is the fourth installment of Hunt’s Dryden Universe series. Though it has some returning characters, it can be read as a standalone novel. Daniel B. Hunt, a regional security officer in New Delhi, grew up in eastern Kansas. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in creative writing. Okuda! is his seventh book. Parricide: The Second Volume of the Misdemeanours of Dr Felix Culpepper Richard Major, Indiebooks, 2019, $17.22/paperback, 376 pages. Felix Culpepper is a tutor in classics at St. Wygfortis College in Cambridge, and also an assassin-at-large for the British establishment who moves smoothly from task to murderous task to save himself from, as the author puts it, “the monotony of stuffing Latin into the well- groomed yet empty heads of Britain’s aristocracy.” His only match is Margot Fontaines, his student, sidekick and soon- to-be nemesis. In Parricide , the sequel to Quintember (2018), readers discover much, perhaps too much, about the reprobate Felix Culpepper, and he discovers more than he can digest about himself and his family origins in the wilds of 19th-century Spain and the gory lore of the bullfight. Though the book conveys a commanding grasp of historical context, it is more than a historical novel. It is, as the author and reviewers have described it, a “Gothic fairy tale for adults.”