Title: Star Chamber Brotherhood
Author: Preston Fleming
Publisher: PF Fleming
ISBN: 0982959419
Pages: 370, Paperback
Genre: Historical Fiction
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Synopsis
Boston. 2029. Frank Werner, a Boston businessman arrested for dissident political activity, has survived a brutal government assault on a mutinous corrective labor camp in Kamas, Utah, and a year at hard labor in a remote Yukon tungsten mine. He gains amnesty during a brief political thaw and returns to Boston illegally in search of his only surviving daughter, Marie. No sooner does Werner gain a foothold in Boston as a bootlegger-bartender and move in with a lovely widowed pediatrician than his new life begins to unravel. A former Kamas rebel leader who twice saved his life assigns him a mission by authority of the prisoners' covert Star Committee. The objective: to execute the warden who quelled the Kamas revolt five years before. Werner, now nearly sixty, accepts the assignment reluctantly and recruits four trusted friends for his team. Each has a dark past and a different reason for joining the conspiracy. But the mission goes awry twice. After the second failed attempt on the former warden, who has been reassigned to Boston, each of the other team members is killed or leaves the field. Left alone, Werner resolves to complete the operation on his own. Before he can follow through, however, his missing daughter suddenly reappears. Now, by attacking, he risks any chance he might have of rejoining her. STAR CHAMBER BROTHERHOOD offers unforgettable characters, rapidly mounting suspense and a richly imagined vision of an America gone terribly wrong. With his distinctive understated prose, Preston Fleming manages to evoke strong emotions and force wrenching choices in a new book that more than fulfills the promise of his debut novel, FORTY DAYS AT KAMAS.
About the Author
I wrote Dynamite Fishermen and Bride of a Bygone War to clear my head after eleven years of government service in places like Beirut, Cairo, Tunis, Jeddah, and Amman. I had already decided to write novels at age fourteen, during my first year as a boarding student at Exeter. My English instructor, a World War II combat veteran, advised those of us who wanted to follow the path of Melville, Conrad and Hemingway to first go out and live some adventures so that we would have stories that people might want to read. My adventures started in the Middle East and continued in Washington, Europe, the Russian Far East, Maui, Utah, New York and Boston. Particularly in the Middle East and Russia, I saw failed states and failed societies but was often surprised at how much their people had in common with Americans. This made me think about whether America might someday suffer its own breed of failure. During the 1930’s, Americans watched Germany, Italy and Russia and asked, “Could it happen here?” Today, one might look around and ask the same. After writing Forty Days at Kamas and Star Chamber Brotherhood, my greatest concern has been that the novels gain attention before the events they describe become reality.
