Author: Suzanne van Rooyen
Release Date: November 1, 2011
Age Group: adult
Description from Goodreads:
You can never outrun your past...After years of war ravage the globe and decimate humanity, civilization is revitalized in the city of New Arcadia, a cybernetic playground where longevity treatments promise near immortality.Detective Cyrus, fond of fedoras and narcotics, is hired by Benji MacDowell, heir-apparent to an eugenics empire, to find MacDowell's long-lost biological father. Employing his network of shady contacts within the underbelly of the city, Cyrus uncovers a murderous web of corporate corruption and political conspiracy with ties to the old Order, a tyrannical organization whose sole intent was perfecting the next generation of genetically engineered soldiers.Now Cyrus knows too much and finds himself caught in the cross-hairs of super-soldier assassins while the dark secrets of his past snap at his heels, forcing him to confront the truth he's been running from... and discover his own terrifying purpose.About the Author:
Suzanne grew up in the urban sprawl of Johannesburg, South Africa where she studied music and penned a few angsty poems. After a brief stint in Australia, Suzanne settled in Finland where she completed a Master's degree in music and started writing in earnest.
Suzanne now works as a freelance writer, author and part-time dance teacher. Her short stories have appeared in Golden Visions Magazine, Cast of Wonders, and Earthbound Fiction among others. When not writing she strums away at her guitar and entertains her shiba inu, Lego.
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Excerpt from Dragon's Teeth:
I never knew my father. It seems, perhaps, that no one did except the woman with whom he joined to give me life. My mother they remember; I’ve heard all the stories. Every version ends the same: her dying as I screamed my way into the world.
Back then, given limited access to medical technology, I guess it wasn’t a surprise that her pregnancy resulted in undiagnosed pre-eclampsia, seizures, death and a child born an orphan. I was born on the back of a truck heading south just as the last snow of winter fell. My mother was fleeing in the chaos and confusion that followed the collapse of her northern nation.
After her death they, her rebel friends, burned her body and scattered her ashes along the road. Another woman in the truck, having birthed a stillborn child, took pity on the mewling babe, alone but alive, and raised me as her own. For that I thank her and I love her, my mimetic mother.
She told me fantastic stories about the uprising, the fear, and the cold. She was only eighteen when she claimed me as her own, but no one could believe it: a woman with black hair and even darker eyes with a child pale, blond and blue-eyed. Later she married a man who took pity on the ghost-like four year old boy without a father and adopted me. He seemed a gentle man. He told me that I was his son now and not
to ever worry again. Over the years, I forgot that I wasn’t his son, though gradually I became more aware of my strangeness. I was something other and they no longer looked at me with love, but with something more akin to fear.
When in that tender state on the threshold of manhood, I heard them arguing in their bedroom, their anxious whispers wondering what I was, I knew they had no answers for me.
Gradually, I learned to ignore my oddities, blending in with my peers at school. My parents started to love me again. I often wonder what kind of man my own father might have been, and if he is dead or still alive. Vials of blood can only reveal so much, and there is more to being human than the double helix.
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