Thursday, July 11, 2019

A Dark and Stormy Day (The Adventures of Sonny Knight, Book 3) by Charon Dunn

Release date: May 18, 2019
Subgenre: YA Science Fiction

About A Dark and Stormy Day

 

3748 crashes to a halt as Sonny Knight visits Times Square to ring in the New Year.

He’s a little sad because his girlfriend – one of the terrorist clones holding his family prisoner (but she’s one of the nicer ones) – has dumped him. Or maybe she’s being held prisoner by a different band of terrorists, and would appreciate being rescued?

Sonny’s going to have to pull himself together if he’s going to help her. He needs to deal with his grief issues, residual anxiety from everything that happened to him in the last two books, and a blossoming substance problem. Then there’s his fresh anxiety from all the new and exciting dangers that befall him in this one.

Which include more pliosaurs, explosions, avalanches, crowds, true love, assault, battery … the usual.

This is the conclusion of the Adventures of Sonny Knight trilogy. 

 

Excerpt:

 

The screen shifted, showing a chubby-cheeked girl with pink hair, then a little old man in a fedora, grooving to the beat. Random spectators, Sonny realized, right before his own face appeared, reacting to the flapping camera drone. A warm buzz of laughter bubbled up from the crowd. Sonny’s cheeks went bright red. He could tell people around him were checking him out. For a moment he lost sight of Quicksilver, and the idea of being alone in a crowd this size, with his face projected across multi-story screens, was just too horrible to bear. Then he spotted Quicksilver’s trim gray shoulders, in line at yet another drink cart and having an animated conversation with another patron as a robot with bunny ears blended ice together with colorful liquids.
Sonny headed into a nearby parklet, where he sagged against a statue of a surly-looking bird. “In memory,” read a brass placard at its base, “of the New York City pigeon, now extinct.” The bird’s gray wing was smooth against his sweaty forehead. The camera drone followed him, displaying the statue to the crowd before returning to Sonny’s face as he took another gulp of coffee, giving it another chance. It tasted very nice, even though he suspected it would only make him jittery. 
Suddenly he sensed a presence behind him. Technically speaking, there were thousands of people present all around him, but this one was standing way too close.
“Sonny Knight?” he asked, in a low-pitched voice close to Sonny’s ear. It wasn’t a Qoro voice, which was the main kind of voice that had threatened him in the past. He gave a very small and subtle nod. His mouth was still
“Look over your right shoulder, slowly. About twenty meters up you’ll see an advertisement for neon shinpads, with a trash can in front of it.”
Sonny slowly moved his head, past the large screen where his face was still amusing the crowd, finding the sign, in which three models were frozen halfway through a mid-air leap, shinpads flashing brightly. Just as he focused, the trash can in front exploded into a compact orange fireball.
Sonny spewed his mouthful of coffee toward the camera drone. Every single person in Times Square laughed at him.
Except for the people who had seen the explosion; they screamed. Then, people who didn’t see it but had heard screams screamed. The screams spread outward, like flower petals scattering from the bright blossom that had made black spots dance across Sonny’s retinas. He wondered if they were burned, or if he’d live long enough to find out.
“I’ve got a bomb like that in my pocket that’ll kill you, me, and the fifty people standing closest to us at the moment. Don’t give me a reason to detonate it.”

 

Amazon

 

About the Series

 

About Charon Dunn:

Charon Dunn originated in Maui, lives in San Francisco, and is leaping into self-published science fiction authorhood with a series of YA adventure novels set in a far-future, asteroid-reconfigured earth. She does nerd stuff for trial lawyers in the daytime, and she loves tandoori chicken, video games and her thirty pound cat, not necessarily in that order.
 

 

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