Big Feet and Big Ears

Imagine Murder on the Orient Express with the setting of an expedition to discover Bigfoot. Minus the train. Each character has their own reason to come along, several with hoaxes in mind. A double love triangle to boot. When Sheriff Jeff McQuede's friend, Barry Dawson, tricks him into attending a Bigfoot convention at the small town of Trail’s End in Wyoming, he finds the adventure is only beginning. He is soon invited by the head of the research team, Dr. Adam Kurtz, to hike with them into the isolated mountains below Lost Man's Peak where few people ever venture. Several murders soon punctuate the camp amid supposed sightings of the monster. Who is playing whom, and why? This becomes a sorting out of motives and accusations. BLAME IT ON BIGFOOT is a good title to try out the fiction of sisters writing team Loretta Jackson and Vickie Britton, and is number ten in the High Country Mystery Series at BooksinMotion.com. Narrator Michael Bowen services the characters with appropriate voices to keep them separated. This requires a little exaggeration, but never over the top. 

You are being tracked and watched. Even by iWatch. That information is stored in supercomputers and your profile is kept by the NSA without your knowledge, but with your consent. When you clicked “Agree to Terms” at Facebook or Instagram or even Angry Birds, you agreed that they own everything you post and can use it however they wish. Oh yes. It’s in their Terms of Service, which author Marc Goodman in FUTURE CRIMES calls, “terms of disservice.” Read the fine print, normally toward the end of 25 pages of dense copy in 6 point type…of course our attention span is now less than a goldfish, and they know this. Now, maybe you don’t care. It’s the price of freedom, right? Well, if you are ever in a felony, or fall under suspicion, that info can be used against you. And maybe it’s a felony you didn’t commit. Maybe you were set up by hackers. Maybe your identity was stolen. Are you in the “cloud?” The Cloud can be hacked. It is not invulnerable. Many don’t even know what it is. Your info is just “up there, somewhere,” exposed, where storms can happen. Data storms. Lightning fast. Thousands of USPS employees had their information stolen instantly, and millions at Target, which became a target. And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg. Also listen to the audiobook LIGHTS OUT by Ted Koppel. That’s about hackers getting into the electrical grid and putting our lights out for weeks. Not to frighten you, but black swans appear now and again. 9/11 helped create the paranoid surveillance state, Paris shows that they can’t know what terrorists will do, even with boatloads of tracking devices…if they go off-grid. One way you can partly go off grid yourself is to quit using Facebook or Instagram or “free” gaming apps, but if you can’t stop that, at least trade in your iPhone for a flip phone. If you have an Android smartphone you’re even worse off, since they are easier to hack in coffee shops and elsewhere. (iPhone is proprietary software, Android not.) The horror stories of what can happen (and is happening more often) is detailed in Future Crimes, which is scarier than anything Stephen King has written. It’s not future only, too, it’s about right now, with chilling examples of real cases. Question: would you rather know this, or not know this?