The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  “Don’t let them know you can see them.”

  Graduate students from a local university are dying, and former lover and FBI agent Maggie Trent is the only person who believes their deaths aren’t as accidental as they appear. But the truth can only be found in something from Corrigan Bain’s past, and he’s not interested in sharing that past, not even with Maggie.

  To stop the deaths, Corrigan will have to face up to some old horrors, confront the possibility that he may be going mad, and find a way to stop a killer no one can see.

  Corrigan Bain is going insane ... or is he?

  Because there’s something in the future that doesn’t want to be seen. It isn’t human. It’s got a taste for mayhem. And it is very, very angry.

  Fixer Redux

  Someone’s altering the future, and it isn’t Corrigan Bain

  Corrigan Bain was retired.

  It wasn’t something he ever thought he’d be able to do. The problem was that the job he wanted to retire from wasn’t actually a job at all: nobody paid him to do it, and nobody else did it. With very few exceptions, nobody even knew he was doing it.

  Corrigan called himself a fixer, because he fixed accidents that were about to happen. It was complicated and unrewarding, and even though doing it right meant saving someone, he didn’t enjoy it. He couldn’t stop—he thought—because there would always be accidents, and he would never find someone to take over as fixer. Anyone trying would have to be capable of seeing the future, like he did, and that kind of person was hard to find.

  Still, he did it. He’s never been happier.

  His girlfriend, Maggie Trent of the FBI, has not retired. Her task force just shut down the most dangerous domestic terrorist cell in the country, and she’s up for an award, and a big promotion.

  Everything’s going their way now, and the future looks even brighter.

  Unfortunately, that future is about to blow up in their faces…literally. And somehow, Corrigan Bain, fixer, the man who can see the future, is taken completely by surprise.

  Fixer Redux is the long-awaited sequel to Fixer. Catch up with Corrigan, as he tries to understand a future that no longer makes sense.

  FANTASY

  The Immortal Novel Series

  Immortal

  “I don’t know how old I am. My earliest memory is something along the lines of fire good, ice bad, so I think I predate written history, but I don’t know by how much. I like to brag that I’ve been there from the beginning, and while this may very well be true, I generally just say it to pick up girls.”

  Surviving sixty thousand years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers—someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide. Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.

  Immortal is a first person confessional penned by a man who is immortal, but not invincible. In an artful blending of sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, and humor, IMMORTAL introduces us to a world with vampires, demons and other “magical” creatures, yet a world without actual magic.

  At the center of the book is Adam.

  Adam is a sixty thousand year old man. (Approximately.) He doesn’t age or get sick, but is otherwise entirely capable of being killed. His survival has hinged on an innate ability to adapt, his wits, and a fairly large dollop of luck. He makes for an excellent guide through history ... when he’s sober.

  Immortal is a contemporary fantasy for non-fantasy readers and fantasy enthusiasts alike.

  Hellenic Immortal

  “Very occasionally, I will pop up in the historical record. Most of the time I’m not at all easy to spot, because most of the time I’m just a guy who does a thing and then disappears again into the background behind someone-or-other who’s busy doing something much more important. But there are a couple of rare occasions when I get a starring role.”

  An oracle has predicted the sojourner’s end, which is a problem for Adam insofar as he has never encountered an oracular prediction that didn’t come true ... and he is the sojourner. To survive, he’s going to have to figure out what a beautiful ex-government analyst, an eco-terrorist, a rogue FBI agent, and the world’s oldest religious cult all want with him, and fast.

  And all he wanted when he came to Vegas was to forget about a girl. And maybe have a drink or two.

  The second book in the Immortal series, Hellenic Immortal follows the continuing adventures of Adam, a sixty-thousand-year-old man with a wry sense of humor, a flair for storytelling, and a knack for staying alive. Hellenic Immortal is a clever blend of history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, mystery and romance. A little something, in other words, for every reader.

  Immortal at the Edge of the World

  “What I was currently doing with my time and money ... didn’t really deserve anyone else’s attention. If I was feeling romantic about it, I’d call it a quest, but all I was really doing was trying to answer a question I’d been ignoring for a thousand years.”

  In his very long life, Adam had encountered only one person who appeared to share his longevity: the mysterious red-haired woman. She appeared throughout history, usually from a distance, nearly always vanishing before he could speak to her.

  In his last encounter, she actually did vanish—into thin air, right in front of him. The question was how did she do it? To answer, Adam will have to complete a quest he gave up on a thousand years earlier, for an object that may no longer exist.

  If he can find it, he might be able to do what the red-haired woman did, and if he can do that, maybe he can find her again and ask her who she is ... and why she seems to hate him.

  But Adam isn’t the only one who wants the red-haired woman. There are other forces at work, and after a warning from one of the few men he trusts, Adam realizes how much danger everyone is in. To save his friends and finish his quest he may be forced to bankrupt himself, call in every favor he can, and ultimately trade the one thing he’d never been able to give up before: his life.

  Immortal and the island of Impossible Things

  “I thought I’d miss the world.”

  Adam is on vacation in an island paradise, with nothing to do and plenty of time to do nothing.

  It’s exactly what he needed: beautiful weather, beautiful girlfriend, plenty of books to read, and alcohol to drink. Most importantly, either nobody on the island knows who he is, or, nobody cares.

  “This probably sounds boring, and maybe it is. It’s possible I have no compass to help determine boring, or maybe I have a different threshold than most people. From my perspective, though, the vast majority of human history has been boring, by which I mean nothing happened, and sure, that can be dull. On the other hand, nothing happening includes nobody trying to kill anybody, and specifically, nobody trying to kill me. That’s the kind of boring a guy can get behind.”

  Nothing last forever, though, and that includes the opportunity to do nothing. One day, unwelcome visitors arrive in secret, with impossible knowledge of impossible events, and then the impossible things arrive: a new species.

  It’s all impossible, especially to the immortal man who thought he’d seen all there was to see in the world. Now, Adam is going to have to figure out what’s happening and make things right before he and everyone he loves ends up dead in the hot sun of this island paradise.

  Immortal From Hell

  Not all of Adam’s stories have happy endings

  * * *

  “Paris is romantic and quests are cool. But the threat of a global pandemic kind of sours the whole thing. The good news was, if all life on Earth were felled by a plague, it looked like this one could take me out too. It’d be pretty lonely otherwise.”

  --Adam the immortal

  When Adam decides to leave the safety of the island, it’s for a good reason: Eve, the only other immortal on the planet, appears to be dying, and nobody seems to understand why. But when Adam—with his extremely capable girlfriend Mirella—tries
to retrace Eve’s steps, he discovers a world that’s a whole lot deadlier than he remembered.

  Adam is supposed to be dead. He went through a lot of trouble to fake that death, but now that he’s back it’s clear someone remains unconvinced. That wouldn’t be so terrible, except that whoever it is, they have a great deal of influence, and an abiding interest in ensuring that his death sticks this time around.

  Adam and Mirella will have to figure out how to travel halfway across the world in secret, with almost no resources or friends. The good news is, Adam solved the travel problem a thousand years earlier. The bad news is, one of his oldest assumptions will turn out to be untrue.

  Immortal From Hell is the darkest entry in the Immortal series.

  Immortal: Last Call

  “I’m something like sixty-thousand years old, and I’ve probably thought more about my own death than any living being has thought about any subject, ever. I used to be unduly preoccupied with what might constitute a “good death”, although interestingly, this has always been an after-the-fact analysis. What I mean is, following a near-death experience, I’ll generally perform a quiet review of the circumstances and judge whether that death would have been objectively good, by whatever metric one uses for that kind of thing. I’m not nearly that self-reflective while in the midst of said near-death experience. Facing death, the predominant thought is always not like this.”

  A disease threatening the lives of everyone—human and non-human—has been loosed upon the world, by an arch-enemy Adam didn’t even know he had.

  That’s just the first of his problems. Adam’s also in jail, facing multiple counts of murder, at least a few of which are accurate. He may never see the inside of a courtroom, because there remains a bounty on his head—put there by the aforementioned arch-enemy—that someone is bound to try to collect while he’s stuck behind bars.

  Meanwhile, Adam’s sitting on some tantalizing evidence that there might be a cure, but to find it, he’s going to have to get out of jail, get out of the country, and track down the man responsible. He can’t do any of that alone, but he also can’t rely on any of his non-human friends for help, not when they’re all getting sick.

  What he needs is a particularly gifted human, who can do things no other human is capable of. He knows one such person. He calls himself a fixer, and he’s Adam’s—and possibly the world’s—last hope. That’s provided he believes any of it.

  Immortal: Last Call is the sixth book in the Immortal Novel Series, and also the end of a long journey for one immortal man.

  Immortal Stories

  Eve

  “…if your next question is, what could that possibly make me, if I’m not an angel or a god? The answer is the same as what I said before: many have considered me a god, and probably a few have thought of me as an angel. I’m neither, if those positions are defined by any kind of supernormal magical power. True magic of that kind doesn’t exist, but I can do things that may appear magic to someone slightly more tethered to their mortality. I’m a woman, and that’s all. What may make me different from the next woman is that it’s possible I’m the very first one…”

  For most of humankind, the woman calling herself Eve has been nothing more than a shock of red hair glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in a crowd, or from a great distance. She’s been worshipped, feared, and hunted, but perhaps never understood. Now, she’s trying to reconnect with the world, and finding that more challenging than anticipated.

  Can the oldest human on Earth rediscover her own humanity? Or will she decide the world isn’t worth it?

  The Immortal Chronicles

  Immortal at Sea (volume 1)

  Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land.

  Hard-Boiled Immortal (volume 2)

  The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people. The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.

  Immortal and the Madman (volume 3)

  On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.

  He could be right. Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

  Yuletide Immortal (volume 4)

  When he’s in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?

  Regency Immortal (volume 5)

  Adam has accidentally stumbled upon an important period in history: Vienna in 1814. Mostly, he'd just like to continue to enjoy the local pubs, but that becomes impossible when he meets Anna, an intriguing woman with an unreasonable number of secrets and sharp objects.

  Anna is hunting down a man who isn't exactly a man, and if Adam doesn't help her, all of Europe will suffer. If Adam does help, the cost may be his own life. It's not a fantastic set of options. Also, he's probably fallen in love with her, which just complicates everything.