Man’s Best Friend?

A boy named Jeb finds the half-decomposed carcass of a mysterious animal washed up on a Nantucket beach. Not exactly a dog, not a cat, with the hands of a raccoon, no one's seen anything quite like it before. Until the creatures start turning up, alive and well, in isolated pockets across Massachusetts and upstate New York... adopting some people and slaughtering others.

A tech billionaire forms an alliance with a clandestine government agency to understand their secrets: what are they? Where did they come from? What can they do? To help find out, two young scientists are offered a six-month research assignment, confined to a top-secret lab, for money beyond their dreams. And a bunch of ordinary people are forced to ask themselves: friend or foe?

Strays is a fast-paced, science fiction thriller that explores the queasy side of the owner-pet relationship and poses the question: just how secure is our place as top dog on planet Earth?

Seven years since the “publication” of Snap-Back, you can think of this book as the silver lining of a company reorg that didn’t end well, for me, followed by a pandemic. Strays is here to say: things could be worse.

Other books by Jeffrey Chapman

Is the future aLmost here?

Adam Wilson likes to play Games. And why not? The kind he plays feel more real, and certainly more interesting, than his everyday life. Real-world employment is largely a thing of the past and his physical needs are paid from the proceeds of the Legacy Grant that every American is born into. 

Adam has no complaints until he meets a mysterious woman named Catharine, and his cozy little world starts to fall apart. A malevolent force has entered the Game, certain ingredients suddenly go missing from his lasagna, and he can’t seem to reach his brother or sister. Then the computer that runs it all starts calling itself “Petrus”…

Cold-Snap explores where our obsession with virtual reality is headed, and what happens when that obsession intersects with true artificial intelligence. Snap-Back picks up where Cold-Snap leaves off.

My background? In college, I wrote, illustrated, art-directed, and served as an issue editor for the Harvard Lampoon (while studying forest ecology). My fiction writing mostly ran silent and deep while I got an MBA from Kellogg and then spent 30+ years in the advertising industry. Though, during that time, I did write a half-dozen dark-thriller screenplays before realizing that scripts are supposed to be movies, and there's a lot of money required to get from here to there. Novels in the age of Amazon, on the other hand...

There are actually three more titles in the Cold-Snap series, but the story was done in two, so that's that -barring some unexpected financial incentive. Both books are fast, thought-provoking reads. (Who says there's no upside to spending three decades writing action-oriented, bulletized PowerPoint presentations?)

You can also buy Amazon Kindle versions of Cold-Snap and Snap-Back at: https://www.amazon.com/author/jeffreychapman