Overworld, Underworld

A NEW YORK LIBRARY DETECTIVE NOVEL.

REVIEW:

Simcoe resident and author David Richard Beasley has numerous published books to his credit. His latest work published earlier this year is a fast-paced 190-page whodunit mystery that takes place in a New York City Library. 

There is realism about the characters and places because the author was employed in a New York library for many years and his story rings true . . . . A retired detective is called in to solve a cold case murder that exposes him (and the reader) to numerous suspects. Author Beasley brings substantive writing to the words enabling readers to savor the intrigue in the pages of 'Overworld/Underworld' . 

With the author's writing skill and an intriguing plot the reader is introduced to investigations into big banking, Israeli secret service and the United Nations as detective Rudyard Mack and his girl friend uncover all sorts of criminal activity in a quest for justice. —The Maple Leaf, Port Dover

A reader wrote: I can’t really comment on the genre.

SNOWDEN’S REVELATIONS VERIFY 

THE NARRATIVE OF OVERWORLD/UNDERWORLD

From a marketing perspective yes the timing is right for Overworld/Underworld. I found that depicting crime in both realms—and the links between the two to be a great concept and it parallels what's happening in real life.—Jim

Yes, I do think your Overworld/Underworld book has relevance since it points out that there is a huge discrepancy between what we think are democratic processes and the real underhanded, undemocratic dealings and it is the latter that actually affect us. It is like there is one picture for us gullible minions and another picture that is the real one. Overworld/Underworld is a good story that shows that and since you were active in the setting described in the book, you certainly had close contact with that phenomenon. 

Presently, our problem is how to make believable sense of what the media and the official figures on the surface tell us. It takes quite a bit of investigating and thinking to understand that a great portion of what is official and which is boomed/beamed out to us via the media are half-truths or even lies, often skillfully crafted ones. The economic figures, for example, must be taken with a big lump of salt and not "a grain of salt", which is the proverbial saying. The NSA story is the same and its proponents, the former Dir. of the NSA (Hayden on Charlie Rose) and the present one (Gen. Alexander Keith at the Black Hat security/hacker meeting yesterday), do their very best to continue pulling the wool over our eyes. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/nsa-director-defends-surveillance_n_3684755.html )   Gen. Keith was heckled very publicly at that meeting by the hackers. Manning, Snowden and Assange, all relatively young people, have made it their tasks to expose all this. Maybe their methods are not all that smart, but it is encouraging to see someone doing something. Not only do I find that there is a necessity for nations to try to use electronic means to find out what the opponents are doing militarily, but I also find it to be a necessity to consider the damage to relations that drone strikes, internal spying on citizens and commercial spying using those electronic means does. Thus, Manning, Snowden and Assange have done something that from certain points of view is positive. 

The book has a good message, David!—Per

FROM the New York Review of Books :

They Know Much More Than You Think

AUGUST 15, 2013

James Bamford

 Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. . . .

One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Church sounds as if he had absorbed the lessons of 1984. From the recent evidence, they are still to be learned.

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