Bøger af Barry H. Wiley

In 1879 England, a butcher-shop clerk, Charley Garner, (1857-1922) was hired by the American performer, W.I. Bishop, to be his secretary to handle his burgeoning social demands. Bishop's sensational performances of apparent thought reading, and the gold and bank notes that flowed from them, showed Garner a lucrative world that he had never known existed. Garner wanted in. In Victorian Society, however, butcher-shop clerks were nonentities. To join Society, Garner created the upper class persona of Stuart Charles Francis Cumberland, attempted to match Bishop's remarkable feats, and became a thought reader. Tales of a Thought Reader, though historical fiction, reflect some of Cumberland's real experiences with impossible murders, errant nobility, and aggressive disbelief not only in his apparent powers, but also in his own persona. Calamity, even prison, was never more than a misstep away.

It is 1895. In Revelation of the Impossible Piddingtons, the members of the Bing On tong are convinced that the girl with the green-eyes was a tulku, an occult wraith, when they discover the body of Wong Woon, their master, with a silver dagger in his heart inside his sealed windowless office with its only door still barred from the inside. The girl, a threat to the tong's opium and slave trade, should have been dead; but it was Wong who was dead and the girl vanished. Only a tulku could have passed through the barred door and out of the grasp of the tong. The Bing On tong was almost right. The girl is sixteen year old Kyame Piddington. Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons tells the story of her adventurous life as part of The Impossible Piddingtons, a father-daughter second sight act. In the course of the novel, Kyame matures from a frightened eleven year old desperately trying to take her dead mother's place in the family second sight mindreading act, striving to learn the secret silent codes and cues from her father as they travel through the towns and cities of the American west, 1890-1895; to becoming, at sixteen, a tall black-haired green-eyed beauty, an accomplished artist; a mesmerist, whose subtle powers work most of the time; a hardened stage performer experienced in creating psychic illusions; and, as predicted by Dr. Mar Tan, a Chinese astrologer in New York, a young woman with the spirit of an implacable assassin. Revelations portrays Kyame's growing polished toughness gained from encountering difficult audiences, lusting young men, con men, jadoo-wallahs, hatchet-men, spirit mediums, bank robbers and killers -- along with suffering constant social rejection because she is only a theatre girl, and thus is not acceptable to proper society. Several historical personages appear in the novel, e.g., Collis P. Huntington, the last of the Big Four and the richest man in California -- and the most hated; writer Jack London; and J. W. Cadwell, the greatest traveling mesmerist in America, who becomes, on the death of her father, Kyame's most trusted friend. In reading Revelations, you will learn how some psychic illusions are done. Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons is the first novel in the Adventures in Second Sight series. The second novel is Shadow of the Tiger currently on Kindle.

In the Kirkus Media review of the first book in the Adventures in Second Sight series, Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons, Kirkus, after declaring that Kyame Piddington was a girl ready for her dragon tattoo, concluded by writing: "One looks forward ... to whatever Wiley plans do with his heroine next." They will find their answer in Shadow of the Tiger, volume two of the series. It is 1896, eight months after the conclusion of Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons. All of the British intelligence agents in the South of France have been murdered. Even their replacements have been murdered within only a few days of their arrival on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, requests aid from President Grover Cleveland. Can he send some American agents to investigate the circumstances until Salisbury can find replacements from somewhere in the British Empire? But America has no intelligence agents in Europe, so the President must turn to the Anglo-Oriental Marine Insurance Co., the informal troubleshooting group that reports to his Secretary of State, Richard Olney. Only one member of the group, in the opinion of the group leader, Judson Rowland, has the breath of talents and abilities necessary to meet the British need. It is seventeen year old Kyame Piddington. In Shadow of the Tiger (those who have read the first volume of the series know where that name comes from), Kyame must use all of her strange talents, even her use of the ruhmal, the deadly yellow scarf of the Thuggee, to defeat repeated attempts to kill her. Surrounded by the wealth and glamor of Monaco and the Monte Carlo Casino with its titled and flamboyant gamblers, Kyame must rely on a local banker, Victor Bethell (a historical person), and the only British agent left, code-named Muffin, as her only allies in her quest to discover who has killed the British agents and why. And in the midst of her adventures, she encounters a young Frenchman who steals her heart, then disappears, only to reappear in time to save her life, only to disappear again.

Kaarin Larsson, former physics professor and now a professional mentalist, has been booked into a venture capital conference in Bermuda. Though she has never been on Bermuda before, and knows no one on the islands, she is attacked by two killers on her first night on the islands. Why her? In the midst of trying to understand why killers are after her, together with the pressure of her performances at the conference, Kaarin has an even more personal question she must answer. Is she human?