Series: The New Espionage Collection #1
Publication date: November 14th, 2022
Synopsis:
Can you survive the new espionage?
There are no sidelines.
There are no boundaries.
In the new world order, there's no such thing as an innocent bystander.
Seven shocking stories from the New Espionage Collection by award-winning author JR Pomerantz.
The Terrifying Importance of Mental ealth Jesse's suffering from synthetic broccoli's surprise side effects. When he gets hospitalized with both its victim and perpetrator, who will pay the ultimate price?
T-Rex The Deputy Administrator of the State Department has a bone to pick with the Secretary of State, and they both might be fossils.
Golden Boy 144: Marigold Baby Jalia helps Harper give birth in the depths of their corporate greenhouse. Will the labor interrupt their labor long enough to get both of them fired?
The Farm When their visit to their older brother's pot farm turns deadly, Michael and Baxter fight for their lives in the Northern California woods.
Golden Boy 288: Marigold, Baby Only Jalia knows whose image is manifesting in the mysterious marigolds of Fulfillment Center 6: Can she and Harper keep it a secret from the rest of the greenhouse?
Maury Always Makes It After Maury's son-in-law goes missing at sea, he and Rico take the investigation into their own hands. Can two elderly alcoholics get to the bottom of a deep-sea fishing mystery?
The Sucking Clarity of Mental ealth The battle of Hampton Behavioral Health Facility continues. With synthetic broccoli on the menu, justice can't be served.
Bystander is your first peek at the subversive, satirical, smart-mouthed New Espionage Collection.
Brace yourself to enter the terrifying near-future of synthetic food, mind control experiments, and one man's battle for justice against a bad broccoli.
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Excerpt from The Farm
If I'd driven my own rental car up here, or had any other way out at all, I would have loaded Ax into it right the fuck now and gotten us the hell out of here.
So here we were, in a rotting, barely functional outdoor kitchen, surrounded by weed trimming hippies in northern California, three half-brothers, one of them insane, one young enough to find insanity cool, and the third left to--
"Spec, is that a gun?"
He took a pistol out of his belt and waved it around. I'd never even seen a gun in person before. "Can't have the bears eating the help," he said. Then he shrugged, as if he'd accepted that it would occasionally happen anyway. "There's another one under the floorboard in the trim room if you need it. Pepper knows where it is."
And he crossed the clearing. And got in his pickup. I watched the cloud of dirt he created all the way down the road as he abandoned us. And now we were supposed to entrust our lives to Pepper: a 20-year-old weed-trimming hippie named after a vegetable.
"Are you mad, Mikey?"
I was taking things from one corner of our hovel and moving them to another corner.
"Yeah, Ax, a little."
"I can tell."
"How?" I rolled up my sleeping bag, walked a few steps, picking my way through a few dozen nails sticking up from the unfinished flooring, and slammed it down near a gaping hole in the drywall. I could see outside. I could see outside through any of the window cavities, too. It wasn't a house, it was a drywall colander, open to the outside all around us. No bears right now. Maybe later. Tonight. While we were sleeping. A bear could reach in and grab my brother out from his shitty old mummy sleeping bag his half-brother had loaned him. And I'd be left alive to explain to my mom that her first pick for a husband was full of dumb-as-fuck DNA and killed the offspring from her third pick.
Sorry, mom, Ax got eaten by a goddamned bear because you thought it would be a good idea for all your various sperm-and-egg concoctions to hang out together for once AND IT WAS A DISASTER.
JR POMERANTZ was raised in New Jersey, moved sixteen times, from Albuquerque to Kabul, and now resides in Silver Spring, Maryland. Hobbies include using all the forms of transportation in the world, flamenco guitar, and knitting. She hopes to one day own and operate a coffee farm, or at least live on one. Or near one. Just down the road, maybe. She won't pop in every day to say hello.
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