About The Book

Most people take comfort knowing their family and friends will remember them after they die. For Susan Shepherd, “remembering” is bullshit. She wants an eternal shrine to her sacrifice: a book that never goes out of print.

Shepherd served her country in the Gulf War, got shot while serving her community as a cop, raised an ungrateful daughter by herself — and for what? A diagnosis of terminal cancer and she isn’t even fifty. If you were in her shoes, you might agree that nothing short of national perpetual acknowledgement will do.

She’s glad you feel that way; she just wrote a memoir and sent a flurry of query letters, hoping a publisher will memorialise her with a best-seller. After hitting Send, she waits not-at-all patiently for an editor to decide if her story will sell enough copies — that is if her life really mattered.

Dan Klefstad

Buy your copy here ~ Amazon UK

Review By Guest Blogger J A Warnock 

If Shepherd is writing to a potential publisher with immortality in her mind, I suspect Klefstad is writing to a potential director or producer with the film rights in his foremost thoughts. There is a visual quality to this book which readers will either find compelling and appealing or deeply irritating. Cue Tarantino split screen; action, move on. It is quick. The novel reads with a level of fast-paced disjointedness that should be accompanied by a flashing images warning. It is short, sharp and straight to the point. The reader is expected to think, assemble the pieces and reach their own conclusions which is not necessarily a bad thing but does take a little getting used to.

The language is, I hesitate to use the word real but certainly, functional; it is correct for the time and place and seems so natural to the writer and characters that the reader can be easily swept along however unfamiliar it may be to them. The characters exist in a cynical and apathetic world which is, somewhat depressingly, not dissimilar to our own. This is a place I do not want to be but vaguely recognise; the benevolent and optimistic facets of my soul, still screaming, are running for cover I know not where. Fleeting references to politics, religion, banking, crime and modern malaise can be read as a latticework of implied cause and effect or interpreted as easy ammunition to hijack and drive the plot. Again, your interpretation will likely depend on your response to this scatter gun writing style.