ABOUT US

We love books – real books you can hold in your hands, feel and smell the paper as you turn the pages. If we had a bookstore, this would be it.

Welcome to Mike and Diane’s online bookstore, where we promote and sell only books written and published by us individually or collaboratively. Diane writes sinister crime thrillers like Rings of Smoke and Cold Blooded, whereas Mike prefers science fiction (The Arcanum Legacy) and non-fiction (The World’s Gone Mad).

Mike is a ghostwriter and has written many books for others under different names – in this bookstore, you will find books by Bernard Fryer and Michael Ridgway – but Diane writes under her married name, O’Toole.

BOOKSTORE

This is where we post information about our books.

The Serial Killer Series

Rings of SMOKE

Rings of Smoke tells the story of a serial killer whose life is turned upside down when he finds his latest victim is not what he expected her to be. Leonard Fitch, a neurosurgeon and a respected member of the medical community, has issues with women. To be more specific, mothers. He hates his own mother and believes it is her fault that his father died in a car accident when he was a young boy.

Erin Fallon is the fifth in Fitch’s current killing spree, labelled the “Birthday Girl Killer” by the British press. Her four predecessors were all taken on their birthdays and murdered twelve months later, their mothers receiving birthday cards enclosing photos of their precious daughters, dead. Erin, the daughter of Irish immigrants, differs from the rest because she doesn’t have a caring mother. What she has is a hard-working father, just like Leonard’s dad.

On discovering a link between the Birthday Girls and the new abductee, the detectives investigating the case know they only have two months to find Erin before she becomes the fifth murder victim. With very little to go on and limited resources, it’s a race against time for DS Harris and DC Jones.

Set in Northern England in the 1970s, when forensics wasn’t as advanced as it is now, it seems a hopeless task for the two detectives pitting their wits against a highly intelligent and meticulous killer. Can they find that crucial clue? Will they get to Erin before her next birthday? Buy the book to find out.

Cold Blooded

Cold Blooded continues where Rings of Smoke left off. Serial killer Leonard Fitch faked his death in a massive fire and explosion at his lodge in the English Lake District, but not before nursing his fourth Birthday Girl victim back to health and leaving her safe for the police to find. He left behind a suicide note and a dead body for the police to discover — that of his mother. The body was too badly burned to be identified, so it was assumed to be that of Firtch. Case closed.

But Fitch wasn’t dead, far from it. He had escaped the fire and, with a new identity, was able to travel to America to continue his reign of terror. From Chicago, all along Route 66, he leaves a trail of dead bodies until settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he slips back into his old ways in his secluded lodge in the forest around Lake Tahoe.

Fitch, now Noel Radditch, makes one mistake in his so far unblemished career as a serial killer. A year after releasing his last victim, Erin Fallon, he sends her a birthday card from Boston, signing it Leonard. Alerted to the fact that Fitch might still be alive, the case is reopened, and the two detectives who investigated the original crimes, Harris and Jones, are sent across the pond to investigate.

The Arcanum Legacy

The story begins in 2090, in a world where gleaming corporate citadels tower over crumbling government buildings. The New World Order of the 2020s has surrendered to the iron grip of transnational corporations (TNCs). These giants, whose logos adorn everything from instant meals to rental cars, form “The Dominion,” ruled by the Directorate—twelve pale-faced executives who never appear in public without their signature tailored graphene suits.

Fifty years earlier, the revolution had torn through society like wildfire. Blood-soaked streets witnessed the fall of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. The Western populace, hollow-eyed from endless proxy wars, their faces raw from mandatory masks during the fifth pandemic, finally snapped. The overthrow was swift, but the anarchy that followed was brutal—food shortages, roaming militias, and makeshift tribunals. For a decade, humanity teetered on the brink until the TNCs deployed their private armies, establishing a new order with surveillance drones humming overhead and corporate law enforced by mechanized peacekeepers.

However, the members of the Directorate, despite their wealth and power, are merely puppets. In dark boardrooms with ancient symbols etched into marble floors, they take their orders from the Anunnaki—ancient beings responsible for shaping the human race from Neanderthals into what it is today. Their existence remains the greatest secret, whispered about in underground networks as the Arcanum Legacy—the inherited burden of hidden truths that continue to influence humanity’s destiny.

Book One: The Dissidents

The year is 2090, and the Western world is ruled by a handful of transnational corporations (TNCs) that control everything from the food we eat to the drugs we take. Many people live in Smart Cities where travel and social activities are limited. Although free to go, most remain because the Dominion -the ruling body caters to their needs for all TNCs.

Governed by an unelected group of leaders from the most powerful corporations, known as the Directorate, society is strictly hierarchical, with lower-caste workers at the bottom. The middle caste comprises skilled workers and engineers—the critical thinkers who have become the most disillusioned. Many have left the Smart Cities to start their own society of dissidents.

Book one in this series of four tells the story of Lena Ashcroft, a surveillance officer who watches over the lower and middle castes and reports to the Directorate. Her life is good until one day, she intercepts a memo from higher up the chain telling her of a secret plan to release a pathogen to control the minds of the middle castes and make them more compliant.

Lena flees the city to find the dissident encampment, where their leader, known simply as the Oracle, will advise her on what to do. Jonas Pierce, a high-ranking enforcer for the Dominion, is tasked with tracking down Lena and returning her to the city. Will he succeed in stopping the Dissidents, or will the Dominion crumble in the wake of rebellion? 

Book Two: The Evangelists

The Dominion has fallen, and the world has become a democracy once again. The President of the new Union is Maxim Falk, AKA The Oracle, brother of Joshua Falk, the former leader of the Dominion.

A group of religious people known as the Evangelists arrive, preaching the word of God and promising salvation against the impending doom to those who believe in Jesus as the son of God. However, they have a hidden agenda, which is to reintroduce Dominion ideology and overthrow the government.

Jonas and Lena join forces to keep the city safe from Dominion intervention, Jonas bringing in other religious leaders to reduce the Evangelists’ influence over an increasingly frustrated populace. Many of the former lower caste see no improvement in their lives despite now being free of any caste labels. As manual laborers, they are more important than ever to society, but they remain the poorest. The unrest in the city reaches boiling point when a representative of the workers, Francesca Jamerson, is seriously injured in a riot.

The Evangelists have close ties with a terrorist organization that has lain dormant for years—the TransNational Liberation Front (TNLF). This highly militarized group is funded by the transnationals involved in armaments and defense, specifically Blake Buckley, through one of his subsidiaries, Pantheon. The Evangelist leader, known simply as the Preacher, is also a past Grand Master of the Order of the Sons of Ra, a cult-like brotherhood that meets in secret every two months in locations known only to its members. Together, these two factions become the biggest threat to humanity that the world has ever known.

Book Three: The Order

The Order of the Sons of Ra is a secret society, a brotherhood dating back to the ancient Egyptians, and its center is the Sun God, Ra. Its former members include royalty and the richest dynasties in modern history. These people historically claim to have direct lineage to the original sons of Ra—the pharaohs and kings of ancient Egypt.

It becomes apparent that the true sons of Ra were not what they thought, but rather descendants of an alien race—the Anunnaki, who came to Earth from a doomed planet and, through genetic engineering, created the first human beings from Neanderthal Man.

The ties between the Order, the Evangelists, and the transnational corporations become so intertwined it is almost impossible to separate them, but President Falk is determined to do so. With Francesca’s newfound ability to get into people’s minds, the president has his own secret weapon.

In this third book, we see the beginnings of a democracy reminiscent of the old days. The newly formed Union of Nations celebrates Christmas and holds its first Presidential Election, neither of which sits well with the Evangelists and the TNCs, and terrorism returns to the world after decades of comparative peace.

Freedom always has a price. 

Book Four: The Anunnaki

An artefact that disappeared in a plane crash in 1969 turns up in the Sierra Nevada desert one hundred twenty-five years later. It attracts attention from all corners of the world, in particular, two strangers to the town of Lone Pine. A man and a woman whose names appear on the manifest of the downed airplane, but whose bodies were never found.

The artefact is a solid-gold statue about twelve inches tall, inlaid with emeralds, shaped like an Egyptian Ankh, a symbol of everlasting life. It was discovered by friends of Mateo Martinez, one of the government’s Counter-Intelligence team, and is now with him for safekeeping until the origin and actual owners can be established.

Mateo, having carried out extensive tests on the Ankh, makes a chilling discovery that, if made public, would turn science and religion upside down.

In book four, we encounter those who really are in control of the world. Not a secret society or a powerful transnat, but the Anunnaki. The Gods from the Sky, as the ancient Egyptians called them, but they’re not gods. They are an advanced race who managed to escape their planet, Anunigin, just hours before a cataclysmic collision with a giant asteroid that knocked it into an elliptical orbit billions of miles from the Sun.

Now, they need our help getting back as Anunigin passes through the solar system once again. But first, they must return the Ankh to its rightful place, and Francesca senses there is more to the golden artefact than eternal life. She senses the death of the human race. 

Non-Fiction

The Hot Tub Bible

Diane and Mike installed a hot tub in their humble home in the UK in 2005. It was nothing special, just a basic plug ‘n’ play. Nobody else in their neighbourhood had one; none of their friends would even dream of owning one, but they did.

Having toured America extensively along both coasts, they realised how essential this was to their happiness and well-being. They broke all the rules, stayed in way too long, and drank alcohol, but they survived.

Later in life, Mike began writing articles for a Texas company on various aspects of owning and maintaining a hot tub, which led him to research topics such as chemicals to use, keeping the water balanced, and energy usage. This book is the product of all that research, plus some practical experience thrown in.

Here are the topics covered in this essential guide:

• Alkalinity and Acidity
• Sanitization
• Ozone and Saltwater
• Regular Maintenance
• Removing the water
• Cleaning the Tub
• Heating the Water
• Hot Tub Electrics
• Common Problems and Their Solutions
• Types of Hot Tub
• Where to Position your Hot Tub
• Bugs, Rats, and Snakes

The Corfu Diaries

Follow the journey of two people who followed their dream and left the UK to start a new life on a beautiful Greek island. Many talk about it, some even look into it, but only a few actually do it.

This couple sold their house in England, packed everything into a storage unit, and drove across Europe with just a few belongings packed into their car. Initially titled One Way Ticket, because once leaving home, there was no going back, this is a true story with only names and places changed to protect those involved.

The journey starts with a trip to the laundrette, and ends in Villa Faros, Mike and Diane’s new home in the sun – and rain – on this beautiful Greek island. The road trip itself is an epic adventure. When they arrive on Corfu, they find that the adventure has only just begun. Building a home from an ancient olive press, a stone building, possibly over a hundred years old, used to store and crush olives for oil, was never going to be easy. Aside from the physical aspect of making the place habitable, there was the bureaucracy. The Greeks love paperwork; it keeps people in jobs, and our hapless couple thought they were keeping half of Corfu employed at one point.

This book will appeal to those who want to emigrate to Greece and to those who have already done so. It is, at times, hilarious, but, like all true stories, it also contains sadness and disaster as the couple copes with car problems, lockdowns, floods, and sickness.

Was it all worth it? You’ll have to buy the book to find out.

The World’s Gone Mad

We are living under a New World Order, and this book tells us how we got there, from the Pan-European Union to the World Economic Forum. Through pandemics and climate emergencies, we find ourselves being ruled by faceless, unelected organisations forcing us to live in 15-minute cities and eat bugs.

This book is aimed at those who want to understand the truth and learn how to unravel the web of deceit spun by our leaders. The world has gone mad, but there’s hope. The lunatics may well have taken over the asylum, but so long as we hold the keys, the human race will survive. We are the many, they are the few.

Here are the main topics covered:

• The New World Order From Kalergi to Schwab
• The WEF, the UN, and the WHO
• The Impending Food Crisis
• COVID-19 and the Vaccines
• The Climate Emergency

New Books in the Making

Behind Blue Eyes

Imagine seeing a brutal murder through the eyes of the killer in your dreams. Then imagine meeting the murderer in real life. Then imagine finding out it is the twin you never knew you had.

Bartholomew (Bart) Hodge is a college janitor in Boston, MA. He was raised in Roxbury, one of the poorer areas of Boston, by two devoted parents who died several years before our story began.

Bart wasn’t stupid, but he was a slow learner and attended a special school, something he was proud to tell others about when he got the chance, which wasn’t often. He lived alone with no family that he knew of, and nobody he could call a friend – apart from Jim.

But Jim only existed in Bart’s head, had been doing so ever since he developed dissociative identity disorder shortly after his parents’ death. It was Jim who talked Bart into killing people, which started off as unplanned murders around the college campus, but this escalated into carefully planned, brutal killings.

Ronald Brody lives in Bar Harbor, Maine, but he was born and raised in Seattle. He had a privileged upbringing, and with his job as a cybersecurity expert, he lives a comfortable life with no major issues until he begins having nightmares. These vivid dreams see him carrying out vicious attacks on women, mostly. They are so clear that he wakes up feeling as though he actually committed the murders. He checks his fingernails and clothing, but there’s no sign of a struggle.

This book explores the lives of twin brothers who grow up in separate families, neither knowing the other exists. The second-born, Bart, has a traumatic birth and is starved of oxygen for several minutes. As a result, the midwife informs the mother, Helen, that there may be brain damage.Unable to cope with bringing up a disabled boy, Helen rejects the baby and puts him up for adoption. Were Bart’s problems caused by the birth trauma, or did the rejection of his mother play a part in his later crimes? His adoptive parents gave him a loving home, but they could only afford the basics in life, so did growing up in the Projects have an effect on him?

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