Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder, Volume 1: Break the Bank by A.E.S. O’Neill
Time and place are key elements of any novel and something with which all writers struggle. Get them right, and readers will readily accept your story’s invented reality. But get the time and place wrong, and your story can crash and burn before it even gets started.
And, just when we thought we’d figured out the perfect setting, the perfect time frame, along comes a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. So now what? Where does that leave the fiction scene?
CREATING A PATH FOR “PANDEMIC FICTION”
Recently, I’ve read two novels that addressed the pandemic in diametrically opposed ways. One writer simply made a vague passing reference to the pandemic changing the world and then went on to tell his story. The other used the pandemic and its fallout on society as a key plot driver. Both worked.
In Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder, Volume 1: Break the Bank (AESON Publications), A.E.S. O’Neill has conjured a third path. Set sometime in the mid-2020s, the story takes place in a world that has adjusted to the long-term presence of Covid-19. Masks, smartphone alerts, and even separate entrances for the vaxxed and non-vaxxed, create a dark and depressing overarching presence in this fast-paced romantic thriller.
NOWHERE TO HIDE IN THIS NEW WORLD
Alby O’Brien is running. First, mourning the loss of his mother, and blaming his sister, he heads to Baghdad as a construction contractor. Then, after getting caught up in a questionable anti-terrorist firefight, wounded and wanted, he runs back to New Jersey to live a non-existent off-the-radar life as a small-time construction contractor hiding from terrorist retribution.
But when one of his work crew rips off a mob-owned bank, he’s now faced with a whole new reason to run. Jagger, the mob’s psychotic killer, has been sent to recover the stolen goods and clean up the mess. In the world of thrillers can mean only one thing: Kill everyone.
Meanwhile, Alby has fallen for Ginger, a red-haired, smart-talking, tap-dancing, Zumba instructor who seems as lost as Alby. And to make matters worse, Ginger lives upstairs from Jagger, which qualifies her for inclusion in his homicidal plans.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
A.E.S. O’Neill claims this novel is based on a true story as told to him by his father who worked for the mob. Like they say, “you can’t make this stuff up.” But at least the author put it down on paper for everyone to enjoy in a snappy, fast-paced story.
I guess we’ll have to wait for Volumes 2 and 3, to find out what other dark tidbits of gory information might bloom on the O’Neill family tree.
About A.E.S. O’Neill:
A.E.S. O’Neill grew up going to a private school paid for by a mobster father, rocks out to the Grateful Dead and Beethoven for inspiration, reads comics to never lose his inner child, and disregards most of society’s rules — except for the importance of decency, empathy and humanity. Roll it all up? He gathers and tells stories.
After several decades of film school, professional writing, public speaking, and travel blogging (www.outspokentraveler.com) experience, his debut novel, Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder, a three-volume, romance/thriller that takes place in the mid-2020s, is based on a true story. Told to him by his father years ago, the plot centers on a robbery at a mob-owned bank and the violent consequences that followed.
From a childhood marked by wiretaps, mob dinners, and FBI agents following his father, O’Neill learned to understand the complexities of love, crime, and human behavior that drive right and wrong. Inspired by the snappy patter of 1930s talkies, and the mundane, ever-present danger of the Pandemic Era, he used this story to show what he believes are the major themes in human behavior: the interplay of light and dark, of love and death, of choices made and lived with. Despite all of his own life’s more challenging lessons, O’Neill knows that love will always win.
His audiobook, read by the well-known Sean Pratt, is available on Amazon and other platforms.
Two subsequent volumes in the Even a Pandemic series — Paying the Price and Checking Out — are soon to come.
