Will iconic images recorded in the grooves of an ancient vase unite the Holy Land or rip it further apart?

THE VASE

A novel by Mark M. DeRobertis

Muhsin Muhabi is a Palestinian potter, descended from a long line of potters. His business is run from the same shop owned by his ancestors since the day his forebears moved to Nazareth. The region's conflict saw the death of his oldest son, and rogue terrorists are in the process of recruiting his youngest in their plot to assassinate the Pope and Israeli prime minister.

Professor Hiram Weiss is an art historian at Nazareth’s Bethel University. He is also a Shin Bet operative on special assignment. With the help of fellow agent, Captain Benny Mathias, he plans to destroy the gang responsible for the death of his wife and only child. He puts a bomb in the ancient vase he takes on loan from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.

Mary Levin, the charming assistant to the director of Shin Bet, has lost a husband and most of her extended family to recurring wars and never-ending terrorism. She dedicates her life to the preservation of Israel, but to whom will she dedicate her heart? The brilliant professor from Bethel University? Or the gallant captain who now leads Kidon?

Harvey Holmes, the Sherlock of Haunted Houses, is a Hollywood TV host whose reality show just flopped. When a Lebanese restaurant owner requests his ghost-hunting services, he believes the opportunity will resurrect his career. All he has to do is exorcise the ghosts that are haunting the restaurant. It happens to be located right across the street from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.




Sunday, September 3, 2017

Aberrant Wave of Horrible Heat

I used that phrase, "aberrant wave of horrible heat" in my book, The Vase. It was published some years ago, but it's now unpublished due to the publisher going out of business. I'm hoping to find another publisher, this time one of the Big Five, even.

But speaking of aberrant waves of horrible heat, that's what I'm experiencing right now in the Bay Area. Heat in the triple digits in early September, I'm hearing is record setting heat, and I used that phrase often in The Vase too.

In the story in The Vase, the people in Nazareth, Israel were experiencing their own aberrant waves of horrible heat, and as I explain in the book it was due to unusual geomagnetic storms in the earth's atmosphere, which were caused by solar winds generated by solar flares erupting on the surface of the sun.

Yeah, that's a lot of solar activity for one day, but it's not just one day in which it occurs. It occurs over several months, even years, and it's an eleven year cycle called solar maximum. You learn that through research, and it's all in the book. You see, ultra concentrations of electromagnetic radiation also are spewed forth from the sun which makes its way into the earth's atmosphere, and seeing as how its this type of radiation that powers the audio/video recordings and playbacks of recent technologies, it's all fitting for the holograms that are projected from the ancient vases in a Palestinian potter's ceramic shop.

Throughout the story line the heat is atrocious, and I'm finding out for myself just what it feels like to live through that kind of heat. Friday, it was 107 degrees and Saturday it was 108. Let's see how hot it gets today. I think maybe I'll join the thousands at Santa Cruz. Just for some relief.

But it got me to thinking about The Vase. I'm still hoping an agent will pick it up, and shop it to the Big Five. Fingers crossed on that. We'll see.

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