monarch-casco viejo inner lifeblood

Monarch-Casco Viejo Inner Lifeblood is a raw-edged psychological suspense novel about the infamous femme fatale detective known simply as Monarch, named after the beautiful but highly toxic butterfly. Her tall frame and attractive Scandinavian appearance are famous throughout Casco Viejo, heralded for her street-smart cunning and stubborn independence but feared more for her unforgiving vengeance. 

Monarch has always marched to a different drummer, continually pushing herself with searching thoughts, suspicious of everything and everyone and looking at things from a different perspective. Casco Viejo, the old town of Panama City, Panama, is one of those viewpoints. It’s her inner lifeblood. But she can sometimes be a little too bizarre through her admission – as when she pretends to step back in time. She enjoys gazing upon a street scene within the tatty landmark, perhaps looking down a cobbled alley or peering into an open doorway...then squinting even more as she envisions herself transformed into the late 17th century when the Spaniards still occupied Panama City. She likes those kinds of distractions. They help settle her down and strangely clear her mind. 

Casco Viejo is no longer the polished jewel of its colonial heyday. Instead, it’s caught in a time warp – a notorious crime-ridden diamond-in-the-rough. It remains as it has for many decades, overtaken for the most part by the poorest of society who have nowhere else to live, nowhere else to go...squatters occupying any vacant building, any dilapidated structure. So... this shining image of Spanish invincibility lies silently decaying, more each day, holding its breath, waiting for foreign investors to restore it to its former glory. 

Monarch was still groggy, looking for her first cup of coffee when an informant told her of the mutilation. She knew she only had a few minutes before she had to leave the decayed Casco Viejo building before the military police arrived. Even though the horrific scene would be indelibly branded in her memory, she quickly documented what remained intact of the corpse and the strewn surgically severed body parts with her cell phone camera. It was an obvious crime of passion – designed to be a very slow, agonizing death. Monarch knew she had tread too far and was being watched, but there was no turning back. 

Monarch is a series of psychological suspense mysteries.

Rob Kircher is a consistent 5-star reviewed psychological suspense author.

Copyright Robert W. Kircher 2024. All rights reserved.

 And Nobody Gives A Damn is a factual account of the times and events of an American military survivor of the infamous 60 miles Bataan Death March; an event so unimaginable that it shocked the world by its sheer brutality, butchery, and senseless murders. 

The incident and documented atrocities occurred in the early days of World War II on Luzon Island in the Philippines. It was preceded by four months of fierce battles between the defending American and Filipino forces and the invading troops of the Japanese Imperial Army. On March 11, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur escaped to Australia and the President of the Philippines and an entourage of officers, giving false hope to his desperate troops left behind that help was on its way.

On April 6th, 1942, Major General Edward King capitulated to the enemy, resulting in the largest surrender of a military force in American history; over 79,500 Filipino and American troops. Their physical and emotional trauma, devastating loss of pride, dignity and complete and utter sense of abandonment was best summoned up by Frank Hewlett, the only American journalist left in the islands:

We are the battling bastards of Bataan,

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces.

No pills, no lanes, no military pieces.

And nobody gives a damn.

This unbiased chronicle will support and contradict existing documents, testaments, and points of view. But it is the way it was by writer Rob Kircher.

 Rob Kircher is a consistent 5-Star reviewed psychological suspense author of upcoming novels such as Curiosities-A New York Sideshow and the currently published Villa Lipari-A Naples Love Story. 

Copyright Robert W. Kircher 2024. All rights reserved.

The Legend of Afton House by writer Rob Kircher...opens wide the eyes and imaginations of three high school teenagers who are enthralled by the spell bounding revelations of Captain Thatcher, a frighteningly disfigured old shipbuilder and skipper of wooden merchant vessels who lapses continuously between reality and lunacy.

It is a shocking story that plays out across the protected landscape of an isolated hamlet on the southern shore of Lake Ontario...a place where time seems to have stood still and intruding, strangers are unwelcome. It is where Captain Thatcher reveals the story of Isabel Afton, a beautiful young woman who leaped to her death from the balcony of the hamlet’s meeting hall during a hell, fire, and brimstone sermon in 1841. “Some folks say she had an epileptic fit, while others that the devil possessed her,” Captain Thatcher informed the three teenagers. “But all present that fateful Sunday morning attested to hearing her frightful scream and witnessing her violent convulsions before she dove headlong onto the crowded pews below.”

The Legend of Afton House explores the disoriented mind of Captain Thatcher and the teenager’s search for the mesmerizing truth of a long-shrouded myth lost somewhere in his wavering memory...a time, a place known as Lake Watch. What transpires is a treacherous and puzzling trail of secrecy entwined with the hamlet’s history with the Underground Railroad and a race for life from an unsuspecting, devious killer.

Rob Kircher is a consistent 5-Star reviewed psychological suspense author of upcoming novels such as Curiosities-A New York Sideshow and the currently published Villa Lipari-A Naples Love Story. 

Copyright Robert W. Kircher 2024. All rights reserved.