The Terminals: Spark
About this ebook
Terminals solve crimes in this realm by investigating them in the next.
There is an afterlife. Christian Hell. Buddhist Naraka. Greek Tartarus. Mayan Xibalba, Haida Hetgwauge, Muslim Jahannam. All religions are right. And should the US government need information from one of their dead, the Terminals can send believers in to get it.
When the case file arrives from the Oval Office, the handler, Christine Kurzow, convinces someone of the appropriate beliefs to die early – surprisingly, even the terminally ill are reluctant to let go. Go figure. If there isn’t a military veteran in the database Christine must find a civilian replacement.
Next, Attila Liltay does his magic and creates a bond with the agent that will allow the dour psychic to talk to him while he’s dead.
Deeth sedates the terminal with propofol, An andenosine injection stops the heart and starts the clock.
This is for real. Under General F. Aaron the Terminals have stopped nuclear attacks, found lost submarines, and foiled bioterrorist plans all from Purgatory, their operations on the top floor of the NYC Veterans Hospital.
In Terminals: Spark, Lt. Col. Christine Kurzow, fresh from a failed suicide attempt after she cost 11 of her soldiers their lives, is recruited into the covert unit of Terminals as a handler. It's an easy sell. If she's really determined to die, it’s a chance to give her death meaning.
But her first case—convincing a monk to chase Hillar the Killer into the afterlife to find the location of a missing bus and the children it carried—has her wondering how to make a dead psychopath talk.
Christine must follow the clues sent back by the shotgun-toting monk, who tracks Hillar through the seven deeps of hell, so she can find eleven kids before it’s too late.
Maybe this time killing a man will give Christine a reason to live.
About the author
Michael F. Stewart is the winner of the 2015 Claymore Award and author of the Assured Destruction Series (a Foreword Book of the Year Honorable Mention, Library Journal's Best Self Published Book 2015: runner-up, semifinalist in the 2014 Kindle Book Awards, and winner of The Creation of Stories: Best YA Award at the Toronto International Book Fair).
He likes to combine storytelling with technology and pioneered interactive storytelling with Scholastic Canada, Australia and New Zealand’s, anti-cyberbullying program Bully For You. He has authored four graphic novels with Oxford University Press Canada’s award winning Boldprint series. Publications of nonfiction titles on Corruption and Children’s Rights published by Scholastic Education as well as early readers and three forthcoming novellas with Pearson.
For adults, Michael has written THE SAND DRAGON a horror about a revenant prehistoric vampire set in the tar sands, HURAKAN a Mayan themed thriller which pits the Maya against the MS-13 with a New York family stuck in the middle, 24 BONES an urban fantasy which draws from Egyptian myth, and THE TERMINALS—a covert government unit which solves crimes in this realm by investigating them in the next.
Herder of four daughters, Michael lives to write in Ottawa where he was the Ottawa Public Library's first Writer in Residence and runs free writing workshops.