How generous of S. A. Crow to invite me to post as a guest author on her blog. We have both published new novels within less than two months of each other. It is a strange coincidence that hers, Into the Fire (The Fire Series, #1), a contemporary suspense novel, features a stalker – as does my second novel, Dangerous Conjectures.
Dangerous Conjectures makes use of a number of genres. Set in the opening three months of 2020, it is partly a political thriller. It makes reference to that year’s early primaries, which get increasingly violent, inviting a violent response from the White House. It is also a pandemic novel, as it describes the early spread of the coronavirus, which first surfaced in America in Northern California, the location of my novel. Simultaneously, it describes the dangerous spread of misinformation generated by conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which is implicitly endorsed by the president.
Dangerous Conjectures is primarily a psychological thriller centered on a professional couple in their thirties, Adam and Julia, and their nine-year-old daughter Liz, who live in Oakland. Adam is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, Julia, an investigator for the ACLU in San Francisco. Being a scientist, Adam cannot believe that QAnon has so many followers, seeing that it believes in the secret existence of a Satanic cult of pedophiles (largely Democrats) who constitute the so-called deep state that is said to surreptitiously rule the country. QAnon’s followers are waiting for the current president to arrest the cult’s members and send them to Guantanamo Bay. Baffled by its popularity, Adam decides to infiltrate a local group of believers who turn out to have secret links to the White House.
Meantime Julia has become terrified of the risk of catching the virus and dying. This leads her to seize on to every crackpot conspiracy theory she comes across. Adam exposes the falsity of each theory by referring her to the facts available online. But her sense of fear only intensifies. It leads her to agree to an encounter with Dave, an old flame who is still obsessed with her. After this fails to satisfy him, she finds him stalking her and her family. Dave is an incel (an involuntary celibate) with a propensity for violence. This leads Julia to turn to opioids to alleviate her acute anxiety.
So much for the plot summary. I hope I’ve told you enough to arouse your interest. The novel starts off reproducing actual news headlines (Adam and Julia obsessively look at the latest news, as we all did at that time). I wrote this book while in lockdown from the pandemic, making each consecutive day between January 24 and March 13 a separate section. It is only in the second half of the novel that the political events begin to depart from what was historically happening at that time.
Many of my readers have commented on how this technique has brought back to them the stress and fear of that time. I believe that narratives of our time need to be set within a wider political and social context, to give significance to the actions of the lead characters. My previous novel, Money Matters, was set during the midterm election of 2010 when immigration was a major issue among the candidates and in my novel. One of its characters is running for governor and, like Meg Whitman at the time, is outed for employing an undocumented immigrant. And my major character falls for the director of an immigrant rights organization.
In the same way, Dangerous Conjectures features the spread of both the coronavirus and misinformation across America, both of which terrify Julia, which in turn infuriates Adam. A major theme of the novel is the opposition between those who trust in scientific evidence and facts and those who follow their gut instincts regardless of the truth. One thing Adam has to learn is that facts are not as potent as emotions when they come into conflict.
Another parallel is established in the novel between the violence encouraged and manipulated by the White House during the primaries and the violence embodied in the increasingly threatening actions of Dave. If it wasn’t for the smart responses of Liz, the novel could well have ended up a tragedy. Innocence proves a potent response to adult violence, although the outcome is different at the national level. Does that mean that we can only hope to counter the malevolence of our age in our personal lives?
That sense of an age that is out of joint brings me to one more aspect of this book. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Horatio advises the Queen that Ophelia’s wild behavior “may strew / Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.” Isn’t this precisely what Adam fears QAnon will do in 2020? America at that time felt remarkably similar to the rotten state of Denmark in the play. Both appeared to suffer from corruption flowing from the head of state, who in both cases hid behind a series of lies and deceptions.
But Adam is no Hamlet, however much he identifies with him after he and Julia attend a production of Hamlet at the Berkeley Rep. Julia identifies with Ophelia, oppressed by the men in her life, as Julia is by Dave. Their state might well be rotten, but they cannot even agree on who is the cause of it. And what chance does Adam have to affect the machinations of a devious and dangerous government?
You’ll have to read the novel to learn how their disagreement is resolved.
You can buy a copy of Dangerous Conjectures on Amazon in one of three formats, e-book, paperback, or audiobook, at:
You can also read about me and my other books, including Money Matters, at www.bhfinney.com
My social media links are:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/brianfinneywriter/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/brianfinneywri1
BIO
Brian Finney has won awards for his biography of Christopher Isherwood and for his debut suspense novel, Money Matters. His writings have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The LA Weekly, The Irish Times, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and numerous other journals and anthologies. He has published seven nonfiction books and two novels. Money Matters (2019), his first novel, was a finalist for the American Fiction Awards in the Best New Fiction category. Dangerous Conjectures (2021) features a couple living in the Bay Area whose lives are threatened by the spread of the coronavirus and the rise of conspiracy theories. In his former life he was a literature professor in London University and several universities in Southern California. He is a Professor Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach. He now calls Venice, California home.
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