The Whisper Book and You

As many WCW readers know, I have an MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. THE WHISPER BOOK is my current novel manuscript. Below is a short pitch followed by video of me reading the first chapter (just under 9 minutes). At the end, a WHISPER BOOK playlist on Spotify .

            THE WHISPER BOOK is a 92,000-word secret-society thriller—think The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper meets The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. It may appeal to readers of The Night Agent by Matthew Quirk and Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. 
 
            Rucker Newbolt is a Virginia State Police detective whose past includes the Marines and an ill-fated stint at the CIA. Rucker’s present is mostly uncertainty, and opioids for an old leg injury–until, against a background of presidential impeachment and campus unrest, Rucker is called out to a radical professor’s murder at tiny Wythe College in southwest Virginia. A Washington dark-money group has decided that impeachment may not be enough to get rid of the sitting President. Caroline Eden, a professor at Wythe who discovered her colleague’s body, hides a Wall Street crime of her own. The Churchyard, a secret society at Wythe College going back to the eighteenth century, has powerful alumni on Wall Street and in Washington—including the current President.
 
            The Whisper Book, the secret society’s ledger of its mission and its misdeeds, has gone missing. The bodies pile up on campus. The President faces a coup.
 
             Everybody—the dark-money plotters, the President and his sister (who is also his Director of Central Intelligence and Rucker’s former mentor), and the Churchyard—everybody needs to find the Whisper Book. Rucker and Caroline must find it first—to solve a slew of murders, to save the Republic, and maybe to save themselves. 

             The novel opens with a scene of a present-day Churchyard initiation—a “haunt”—at tiny Wythe College in southwest Virginia.

Soundtrack

Music for Rucker, Caroline, Dylan, Alanis, and Quo Vadis.