One Hot January

My name is January. Joe January. I was a private investigator from the South Bronx, circa 1940. Was once described as an indignant Humphrey Bogart. Who am I to argue? The difference between Bogie and me is that I was the real McCoy. Where he took the scripts that Hollywood wrote for him, I took on the tough cases nobody else would. Unlike Bogie’s, my bumps and bruises were the real deal, not makeup. Although in retrospect I can see that this could be construed as one of those Hollywood type scripts that Bogie might have been interested in bringing to the screen were he alive today.

In truth, I’m no Joseph Conrad, but I wrote every word on these pages. This is my story, but make no mistake, it’s anything but make believe. I know. You’ll say it reads like science fiction, spanning two centuries and dealing with time travel and alternate realities. Some might find a less than satisfactory denouement, while still others will accuse me of arrogance in my self-depiction, creating a sort of comic book superhero; but in truth, in youth we often view ourselves as invincible. It isn’t until later in life that we come to realize how fragile life really is; furthermore, that we come to see the repercussions of our actions. Yet given the chance to live life over again, avoiding the mistakes made during the first go-around, would you turn your back on the chance? Hence the real meat of my story is about missed opportunities, how, through my own foolishness, I lost the one woman who meant the most to me, not once but twice.

And so begins the saga of Joe January, the character first introduced in January’s Paradigm. In One Hot January, January, a fast-talking wise guy private investigator from the South Bronx, unwittingly uncovers a seemingly impossible plot of time travel and an alternate reality in which Germany has won World War II, by grudgingly agreeing to help a pretty young woman locate her missing father — a Professor of Archeology from Columbia College who must prevent the secret of Hitler’s location from falling into the wrong hands… January gets more than he bargained for in terms of mystery and intrigue, action and romance. One Hot January is literary science fiction on a grand scale.

I’m seeking representation or a publisher willing to support and promote my second novel as well as my nearly completed third novel, January’s Thaw, the final book in the January series.

My first novel, January’s Paradigm, was published in 1998 by Minerva Press, London, England.