Books by Susan Hasler
KRILL: When the Good Choices are Gone
What would you be willing to do to humanity to save humanity? Seas are rising, ice caps melting, and the world’s population growing increasingly desperate and violent. A back-up U.S. government has taken to sea on a handful of refurbished aircraft carriers. Mary Campbell, a CIA expert on the refugee crisis and Sam Bostock, a Navy pilot—struggle with love, End-Times ethics, and a batshit crazy billionaire selling solutions to the world’s climate crisis.
KRILL is speculative fiction with a dose of dark humor from the author of Intelligence, The Flat Bureaucrat, and Project HALFSHEEP. [ Available for purchase from Amazon.com. ]
Excerpt from KRILL:
Campbell took her turn last, partly because she wanted to make sure everyone else was out, but mostly because she was terrified of helicopters. She was fine with planes. She got planes. They were aerodynamic. They looked like they belonged in the air. Helicopters were another thing altogether. They appeared heavy and ungainly and always on the verge of dropping straight to the ground. They were held up by fragile-looking blades that could break or decapitate someone at any second. Campbell had a very short list of things she was afraid of, but helicopters sat at the top of it, underlined and in boldface.
When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she took a deep breath and grasped the hand that reached out to help her into the craft. It was a dry, strong, clean hand belonging to a naval officer who had volunteered for rescue duty. As he pulled her up, she panicked and shouted into his ear, “No. I don’t want to fly. Can’t you send a boat instead?”
He squeezed her hand and said, “No, you’ll be fine.”
“What good is a fucking navy that can’t send a boat?” she shouted.
The Flat Bureaucrat
For Shelby Wexler, being crushed by falling concrete is only the beginning of a bad afterlife. As a senior official of the CIA, he considered Congressional oversight committees the highest form of retribution. He never entertained the possibility of post-mortem accountability. Enter Virgil, an obnoxious and expired polygraph examiner, who sends Shelby on a backward journey through the events leading up to the terrorist attack that killed him. Who was responsible? Who dropped the ball?
The answers are not the sort likely to surface in a Senate hearing room. The Flat Bureaucrat is the stand-alone sequel to Susan Hasler’s hilarious and terrifying debut novel, Intelligence. Informed by Hasler’s two decades in the Agency, these books will make you laugh and make you think about the CIA and national security in a whole new way. [ Available for purchase from Amazon.com. ]
Excerpt from The Flat Bureaucrat:
We pass into the shade of the long concrete portico in front of the Old Shafts Building. I take a few last steps, then … a blood-curdling auditory assault—an excruciating, high-pitched, rapidly-pulsing shriek that penetrates my tympanic membranes like an ice pick. Arthur looks up, yells something I cannot hear, and is gone. I look up and see the concrete ripple like water. I want to run, but I can’t move. The wave breaks over me. I gasp and breathe in dust. The world tilts. Darkness pricked with stars. Weight. Things explode around me and inside my body. Capillaries in my eyes and face erupt in a thousand tiny bursts. Ribs crack in rapid succession. Air hisses from my lungs into the pleural cavity. Organs rupture. The weight of all the Mines and its history crushes the wall of my chest. A last word rises in my mind: viscera. I convulse.
And my story ends.
Or not.
Project HALFSHEEP
The lords of a dying planet send Piyat, a terrified “volunteer,” on a voyage across the universe. The reluctant alien crashes in the fear-washed landscape of Cold War America near the site of the nation’s first nuclear test. Captured by the Army and stolen by the CIA, she falls into the hands of a guilt-ridden ex-operative, a psychiatrist with a lust for pharmacology, and an Agency golden boy gone wrong. They turn her into the centerpiece of Project HALFSHEEP, a Top Secret program to test mind control drugs. But Piyat is not so easy to control.
PROJECT HALFSHEEP is a darkly funny blend of science fiction and political satire informed by the real-life excesses of the CIA in its earliest years. [ Available for purchase from Amazon.com. ]
Excerpt from Project HALFSHEEP:
If I were to indulge in the periwinkle prose, I’d say I fell from the depths of the universe and landed in a nest of spies. But only one of them, Lloyd, fit the traditional definition of a spy, and he wasn’t a good one, according to his own account. Avery was a covert operator, or “loose cannon” in the common tongue, and Lee a psychiatrist. They gave me spy fiction to read, but I found it silly. My favorite books were the first I ever read on earth: Alice in Wonderland and Webster’s dictionary. I venerated Alice and Webster. If I could choose my own name, it would be Alice Webster. Unfortunately, the many names I’ve had—some quite rude—were chosen for me by others.
It is accurate to say I fell from the depths of the universe. I hail from Utorb, a planet smaller and more crowded than Earth. On Utorb, my life was blissfully dull and lacking in sudden shocks and inexplicable developments. It was also a big obese lie, but I was fond of it.
Intelligence
Branded an intelligence failure after the last devastating attack, CIA counterterrorism analyst Maddie James vows not to let tragedy strike again. Believing that a dormant terrorist cell is plotting a mass-casualty assault, Maddie warns the Administration. Unfortunately, her words are off-message in an election year, when the President claims the US is winning the war on terror.
Hell-bent on making them listen, Maddie pulls together an elite team of eccentrics—a disgruntled senior analyst, a bioterrorism specialist with hypochondria, and a horn-dog chemical weapons expert. They wage a fight against the extremists plotting the attack and the officials anxious to please their higher-ups.
Susan Hasler’s first novel Intelligence is a dark, sardonic, funny, literary thriller that will appeal to fans of Homeland and Catch-22. [ Available for purchase from Amazon.com. ]
Excerpt from Intelligence:
We, the disgruntled, are legion in the mines. We inhabit forgotten side shafts, hidden pocks, the underside of dislodged stones. By our own stubbornness, audacity, or foul luck, we’ve condemned ourselves in perpetuity to scuttle laterally through the vast intelligence bureaucracy, kept away from the controversial accounts, from the glass-walled upper reaches of management. We wallow in supposed moral superiority and thumb our noses at the eager climbers, glib accommodators, ass-licking yes men and women who pass us on the stairs. We’re bitter, wise, and irreverent. We know where the bodies are buried and have the don’t-give-a-damn gall to joke about it. They never let us brief the Esteemed Legislative Body. They would fire us, but we might write books.
Audio excerpt from Intelligence available on Audible.com:
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0042R3AKE