with Jay B. Gaskill
We are delighted to welcome novelist Jay B. Gaskill to Omnimystery News today.
Jay's new novel is Gabriel's Stand (Central Avenue Publishing; May 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and his publisher has made available to us both a background for the author as well as his inspiration for the book.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Jay B. Gaskill
A New Author to Follow …
Jay Gaskill is a well-known California trial lawyer who gave up his "life of crime" to write stories and essays about the human condition. Gaskill's legal career (with the exception of a restorative period as a "country lawyer" in Idaho) was spent as an urban public defender, inhabiting jails and appearing in courtrooms throughout Alameda County, one of the nation's most diverse and crime-ridden jurisdictions. It was a rich source of insights into the human condition. As Gaskill put it, "I learned much more than the craft of a defense lawyer over those years because I was so intensely curious about the riddle of moral failure.".
Gabriel's Stand takes place in a near-future America in which a powerful and dangerous group of extremists, posing as traditional environmentalists, implement a well-funded plan to seize power by exploiting a "back door" embedded in the US constitution. These over-the-top cultists secretly believe that the earth, Gaia, is a living being that has been infected by the human pathogen: They will be Gaia's antibodies.
The novel's two puzzles (that such lunatics could realistically hope to succeed; and that a single US senator could reasonably hope to hope stop them) are gripping and persuasively answered. But these puzzles are trumped by the novel's core mystery: How the general public could sleep though its fatal disarmament. As Louise Berker, the Gaia cult's leader, said: "We will take away humanity's medical defenses and let the plagues do Gaia's work."
Terrible crimes remain officially unsolved: a firebombing with a thousand casualties, a covert kidnapping, and a few assassinations. But these were just stepping stones to the end game: mass murders in the service of a radical depopulation agenda achieved through natural means. Before the sleeping public stirs, the criminals have become the government. In the last section of the novel, a popular physician will face federal felony charges for his crimes — having used and sold forbidden technologies to heal his fellow human beings.
This is Gaskill's third work of fiction, with all three released by Central Avenue Publishing of British Columbia.
Germs of a Thriller …
As a law student during UC Berkeley's student protest days, Gaskill witnessed movement politics from the inside, and he saw the faces hidden behind the public veneer. These were the true-believer ideologues, the inner circle camouflaged by moderate and respectable types. The blithely unaware innocents formed the "front," the people Lenin had called the "useful idiots" of the revolution. In those turbulent protest days, a latent ideological strain was germinating almost unnoticed. Its acolytes would include the "Earth First" activists who were to take up the cause of eco-terrorism. Their slogan, "Earth First!" actually meant "Humans last!" The germs that would later ripen in Gabriel's Stand were first planted in Berkeley California.
After working "in the pits" as a public defender trial lawyer, the author served for a decade as the 7th chief Public Defender of Alameda county, where he supervised 100 lawyers in a diverse jurisdiction about the same size as New York City's five boroughs. After finally leaving public service, Gaskill was asked to serve as a moot court judge in an international law contest. His research revealed that the Treaty Clause of the US Constitution is a back door that can be exploited to enable a stealth coup d'état. The setting for Gabriel's Stand was complete.
The author has conducted confidential interviews with more than 10,000 criminals over his decades of public service. He has written extensively about crime, punishment, and criminal justice, and he has appeared as a criminal trial commentator on CBS 48 Hours. He is currently working on a new novel, When Angel's Died, a crime thriller with a disturbing psychological theme, set in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Jay Gaskill served for ten years as the 7th Chief Public Defender for Alameda County, before finally leaving his "life of crime" to attend to writing projects. Having face-to-face meetings with more than 10,000 criminals over the decades of his public service, Gaskill came away with a sharp sense of "reality's underbelly." He has published articles on crime, punishment, criminal justice and the human condition and has appeared on CBS 48 Hours. His research into extreme mass movements, and first-hand knowledge of the "infallible gullibility" of their naïve followers (from his days a law student in Berkeley during the riotous period), inform his writing.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at JayGaskill.com.
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Gabriel's Stand
Jay B. Gaskill
A Thriller
