Category: Press & Video

Top it Like it’s Hot: The Eighth Day Tears Up the Barnes and Noble 100

The Eighth DayI’m proud to announce the first installment of the Bill Hiccock Thrilogy has crested the 50th percentile to reach #53 on the Barnes and Noble Top 100. This coincides with the start of summer reading season.

Ah, summer.

It means barbecues and tapped out kegs, but there is one cohort that is conspicuously missing. No scientists participate in this defiant disregard for the earth’s actual position around the sun because they know that summer does not actually start until the interval of time between June 201/4 June 213/4. So scientists everywhere will be abstaining from hot dogs, hamburgers and presumably beer.

QED.

Avitabile - Science vs BeerOf course the author in me can’t help but view Memorial Day as the official start of summer beach reading. This magical season has always been a time of mixed emotions for authors and publishers, who pray that people will buy their books and sit on the sands with the dust jackets on –  so everyone can see who’s reading what. It’s quite a thing in the publishing world.

Not being immune the trends of the industry, my elite marketing department has put together a Father’s Day promotion. Scientific dads will love Presidential Science Advisor Bill Hiccock – just like his dad does – even though Father’s Day falls on June 16th this year.

From June 2nd to the 16th, The Eighth Day will be available for $.99! If that doesn’t satiate your appetite and you need more Bill Hiccock, The Hammer of God is available for just $7.99. The perfect summer read and the perfect gifts for dad…for under $10.  

You might even see some of my ads around town – the ladies up in marketing will be doing their best to make sure I won’t be able to afford any parties until after Labor Day.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this selection of posts from my blog!

Summertime People Watching Tip: In this disputed summertime limbo, it will be easy to spot the scientists in any crowd as those not wearing white pants.

Avitabile
Tom Avitabile
https://tomavitabile.com/
tom@spadvertising.com

To Err Is Human

“To Err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer.”
–General James Hardtack – USAF

Tom Avitabile | To Err is HumanIf you don’t recognize the above quote, or can’t Google it, don’t hit your computer on the side of the monitor, it’s from a character in one of my (many) almost-produced screenplays. But once again, the theme of this blog being, It’s Only Fiction ‘Til It Happens, is in full force with this tasty headline from the DenverPost.com, “Supercomputers could generate warnings for stock crashes.”

Feel better now? Now that supercomputers are on the watch? Well, not to pop your thought bubble but in my book, The Eighth Day, the entire Stock Market is locked up and frozen by a piece of freeware, distributed to all the online day traders.

The shareware application was called ‘Pocket Protector’; it protected the money in your pocket, your stocks, actually.  It employed algorithms originally used in terrain avoidance software for supersonic F-22 Raptor fighter jets. It read the market and countered any moves instantly by making minute or major buy or sell decisions faster than a blink of a human eye.

Its purported goal was to avoid having your portfolio crash by maintaining the value. Since everybody downloaded it and put it into play, all those little ‘trade-bots’ would eventually absorb any shock and flatten out any activity until a balance is achieved. At that point, the individual trader has a problem, because the Artificial Intelligence acts like a Rottweiler, whose jaws are locked on their wallet. As soon as they let go or try to trade anything, the investor would lose everything.

So nobody unplugged ‘Pocket Protector’ out of fear of losing all their assets as everybody else’s apps would gobble up their money in a nanosecond.

Now for the part that isn’t a plot in my book, but the Denver Post article: Enter Edison, a supercomputer that can crunch 2 quadrillion operations a second. That’s 2,000,000,000,000,000! The feds, or somebody, are planning to plug this super puppy into the existing stock trading system and it will act as an early warning system that somehow will allow authorities to shut down the system before the various stock trading computer programs, that now rule the roost, do any real damage.  What could possibly go wrong? See CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: “Best Intentions” in The Eighth Day!

Tom Avitabile’s Gluck Radio Interview

Episode 3: What does a modern day Renaissance man think about? Meet Tom Avitabile.

 

He’s as close to Da Vinci as we’re going to get. He lent his mind to Congress, he directed Hollywood stars, he wrote a crime trilogy, he has white-collar success… oh, and he plays in a band. Welcome to this man’s mind.

 

Don’t Forget to Wash Your Hands

“It looks like it’s shaping up to be a bad flu season, but only time will tell.”

– Dr. Thomas Frieden, National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Tom Avitabile | The Hammer of GodIn The Hammer of God, the inciting incident of the book is a flu vaccine shortage which is caused by nefarious forces overseas, resulting in half the number of vaccinations necessary to guard the public.

That is step one of a two-step biological attack; take away the first line of defense – which would be the flu vaccine. Then the second part of the attack was to unleash a really nasty airborne bug on the public. So the bad guys weren’t contaminating the flu vaccine to be their vehicle to do harm. They contaminated the supply to take it off the market.

This created a situation, in my book, where during the onset of the attack, people had symptoms that mimicked the flu – and no one suspects anything is awry. The airborne bug’s dormant stage lasts five to six days, taking the world by surprise when the infected take an extreme turn for the worse and people start to die.

It seems like we should be very cognizant of foreign suppliers producing this and other vaccines because their production and distribution lines might be interrupted more easily.

Of course, this being a book about my hero, he thwarts the attack. The mastermind is arrested and becomes a bargaining chip in the escalated terror plot to follow. But the groundwork is there in the story; this is a weak pressure point in the threat matrix aimed at this country.

I am confident in the safeguards that had somebody tried to manipulate or add something nasty to the flu vaccine, it would set off alarm bells and triggers. The far greater insidious plot device is simply to render us unprotected and willing to accept high numbers of infections as the new normal – when in fact it’s anything but. It is the start of an attack.

Remember: wash your hand often.

Blogscript

ABC has decided to cancel my absolute, all-time favorite show: The Last Resort.

When you read The God Particle you’ll see one of my main characters is the USS Tom Avitabile | The God ParticleNebraska – a trillion dollar missile boat (luckily on our side). That’s why I am so distraught over the cancelling of this series, whose main star is the USS Colorado, the sister ship of the Nebraska.

Besides I looove the dialogue…to the point where I say “Damn, I wish I would have written that!”

Please take a moment and email ABC. Tell them to keep the Last Resort afloat.

My interview on The G-ZONE

Listen to
internet radio with GelatisScoop on Blog Talk Radio

2 NetGalley reviews of Hammer of God

Definitely a Page Turner of Major Proportions!

Bill Hiccock is a man of science that works for the President of the United States. He created a network of scientists that bounce information off each other anonymously over the Internet, gleaning answers through virtual brainstorming. Information from his group starts him down the road to intercept a group of terrorists that have links to the neighborhood of his youth and childhood friends. The Islamic Jihadists put together a plot filled with twists to prevent detection, leading Hiccock and his team across the world.

The book is filled with military and scientific terminology giving the information a tensely realistic feeling. The plot races from action to action, leaving the reader breathless. The author paints such realistic pictures that the reader rides on the belief that the descriptions of Washington, defense, and the battle against terror are entirely accurate. Best thriller I have read in a long time. I missed the first in this series, but I will definitely go find it ASAP. I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys tense, military, political thrillers.

Richard Rachey added:

This was one of the best books I have every read. It was one of those books that you do not want to put down. It was very well written, exciting, realistic and believable. The characters were very well setup and their lives and feeling brought out. It was very easy to put yourself in their places as the story progressed. The plot was great, the the author should receive KUDO’s for a great novel. I would love to read the rest of his books in the series.

Crystal Book Reviews: Hammer of God

On April 22, 2012, Crystal Book Reviews posted a blog review of my book Hammer of God. Here’s an excerpt, with a link to the whole review:

The Hammer of God is a tightly plotted, fear-filled and all-too-realistic thriller that is finely written, in fact the best this reviewer has read in a long time. It should be a best seller and will make the reader anxiously awaiting the third and final novel in this thriller trilogy!

Read the full review…