Mark T. Sondrini

inspired by the short stories contained in the lyrics of 13 Beatle songs, Mark T. Sondrini weaves a tale of a murder and the search for a killer in the fictional village of Street. The roundabout in the center of Street, at the intersection of Abbey Road and Penny Lane, plays a pivotal role in this story of a smalltown, London suburb.

After meeting a beautiful Burmese girl in a Singapore karaoke bar, Justinian is convinced to help her rescue her two young brothers from a Burmese government labor camp. To obtain funding and support for his venture, he must first engineer the break-out from a Bangkok jail, the grandson of his backer who accused of being a drug mule. No mean feat by itself.Recruiting aid from several old CIA contacts, and with the assistance of a Chinese bodyguard and the girl, they begin their quest. Moving from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Bangkok, Thailand and finally into the jungles of Burma, the team travels by plane, car and eventually on foot.This snapshot of life in Southeast Asia, filled with crisis and intrigue, is contrasted with Kase's "simple" life in Chicago as a PI.

From trained chickens to frustrated postal workers and runaway bears, this collection of short stories dabbles in it all. Science fiction, fantasy, mystery, suspense and mayhem are blended together for a cross section of ideas intended to make you think about the possibilities that exist.Within the framework of a few thousand words, you find yourself immersed in a place in the world (or possibly just outside_ that is different from that place where you are familiar and comfortable. Characters grab your attention and situations make your pulse rate rise as these stories unfold. The familiar can somehow become unfamiliar.Governments plot, aliens and humans explore, forces of nature and the supernatural conspire, in the attempt to twist your imagination from the mundane to something else.

A nearly broke ship's Captain, Jack Asp, manages to convince seven "tourists" to leave Mars Port City on a 10 day cruise of the giant planets in his second-hand ship, the Robert Trout. A gang of space pirates, based in a cave on Ganymede (one of the large moons of Jupiter) have other plans for two of the passengers, the richest man in the Solar System and his wife.Captain Rodger Dodger of the Planetary Patrol gets the call and has to rescue the Robert Trout from these predators with the help of his partner, Cupcake and some deception by both Dodger and Captain Asp.This "realistic" space opera does not rely on gimmicky physics-busting tricks and gadgets to get the job done, but instead relies on upgraded, existing technology to travel across the immense distances involved in a reasonable span of time.

This is a collection of 5 short stories each of which describe a piece of someone's life. The tales are told by a long-time resident of an Alexandria, Virginia cemetery and are "historical" in nature; almost docudramas. Turn of the century figures are met and the main characters move along with them. In "Son, Brother, Patriot" a soldier becomes a spy for Teddy Roosevelt as he searches for oil in the Middle East. An ex-rough rider becomes a ranch hand and then a rodio clown as he searches for his lost love in "Stubborn To The End." A Washington Post reporter searches for the truth about the Japanese Internment camps in "Fit To Print" and he find more than he bargains for on his journey. Our hero of "A Kindred Soul" begins her quest for women's rights while trying to raise her family. In "My Turn" the story is told about how one man met his psychological future.

An aging FBI agent (Harry Watson) from the Phoenix office is sent into a deep cover operation in an adult (55+) community in the Chicago suburbs where it is feared a group of ex-mobsters in the Witness Protection Program have begun to discover each other and "reorganize." As Harry is on his own, when the gangsters he is supposed to be observing begin to die, he reaches out to his friend, Chicago-based Private Investigator Justinian Kase for assistance and technical support. Between them they find unexpected twists as they solve the mystery of the Oldest Don.

Mysteries abound in Fairburn, Georgia, as Spec Bailey and his boy, Peter, pedal around solving crime and saving the day. In "The Case of the Missing Flag," a Civil War relic is taken and the finger of blame is pointing toward the wrong guys. Peter, Spec and Bob, their next door neighbor, have to sort it out before the authorities arrest them. This 4th of July might be the best yet.In "The Case of the Itsy Bitsy Spider," Spec Bailey helps keep the littlest member of the family, Velvet, from having a bad first Halloween. Then he can concentrate on helping solve the crime that is rocking Fairburn: the killing of farm animals for no apparent reason. Peter and Bob get involved, despite warnings from the local police, and save the next victim.

"More Parallel Lines" contains five, science fiction, short stories. Each story explores some facet of our potential future or our possible past.In "It Is About Time" a young boy discovers friendship for an old physics teacher and a love for physics, while the old man learns that things aren't always what they seem."The Juggler" tells us about how our world might have come to be. Truth and lies, love and hate, courage and cowardice all play a role in the political intrigue of four worlds, as they spin in their orbits.An Air Force fighter pilot, forced into retirement, in the bayous of Louisiana, comes to terms with his mortality. In "The Venus Flytrap and the Martian Flyer" he finds something quite unlike anything he has confronted before."Crystals of Life" tells about the fall and rise of a lifeform searching for a new home and finding paradise along the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. The Ri'il find an opportunity as they present mankind with a mysterious problem.In "The Troubadour" a boy and his father find hope in the songs of a space hobo. With Earth in its final battles with pollution and population, they think of heading out to where the grass might actually be green.

These five short Science Fiction stories are related to each other by the conflicts between species, machinery and / or technology. Located on the Earth, the moon, Io and two distant worlds orbiting very different stars, politics, religion, ignorance and greed make them seem all too familiar.In "All the King's Men" a Marine Gunnery Sergeant stationed on an alien world uncovers a conspiracy that could take not only her life and the lives of her men, but could change the complexion of the rest of the known galaxy.Torn from the pages of the news, "Dog Tags" describes a new technology becoming abusive. Instead of freeing mankind from the fear of kidnapping, the need to carry money or personal information, it is being used to control lives.What is the common link between a volcano in the green jungles of South America and its namesake on the sulfur-yellow plains of Io? In "Tapan Patera" a man discovers that chants, incantations and sacrifice to appease the gods can still be used today as in the olden days.When foreign objects come crashing down on the heads of unsuspecting, peaceful beings, the stage is set for belligerent rulers to fight back and get more than even. Caution In "Let He Who is Innocent Cast the First Stone", throwing rocks can be detrimental to your health.In "The Pirate, the Queen and the Apprentice" a story is uncovered on a far away, dead planet, about a pirate king braving the wild, bounding sea to wrest a life away from the authority of conflicting religious leaders. He sings songs of lost loves and found hates for the entertainment of his crew.