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  As time went on, whenever Miles would leave The City for a day or so for one reason or another, he would return with a creeping, growing, building sense of dread. Driving toward that beautiful skyline on I-95 or the 1 & 9, he would look at the skyscrapers and think, "Is this the day?"

  He stuck with The City. It was his home. But to excise the paranoia, he spent his spare time writing the beginnings of this story: Loss Of Reason . . .

  Until one night some homeless person stabbed a ballerina to death only a block away from his apartment on the street behind. It was a small, solitary death in the scope of the thousands who die in The City every year, but he took it as a sign. He never knew her, but the attack felt close and personal. He knew it was time to get out.

  So he moved west. Out to the Rockies, to the desert, where he no longer felt trapped by the masses. Where he could see the horizon on any given day simply by walking outside. Where the sky was open and the air was clear. It took six months to recover as the paranoia slowly left him.

  Was it truly paranoia? He watched TV that terrible day, like all Americans, with a horror that would have been sheer terror had he stayed, as the Twin Towers rumbled down. Not as a pinnacle of terrorism in The City, but as the beginning of things much worse to come.

  The State Of Reason Mystery was not created quickly, but carefully. Plotted, crafted and edited — over not weeks or months — but a period of fifteen years. A friend once told me "Great Books aren't written, they're re-written."

  With that in mind, once I became financially independent, I spent nearly every waking moment (and a lot of dreaming moments as well) for more than fifteen years, working full time on writing these stories, the people who inhabit them — Franklin, Everon, Cynthia, Victoria and all the others (some not yet Revealed) — the places they go, the things they do. Studying languages, religions of the world, economics, history, philosophy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, aviation and psychology.

  The books of the State Of Reason Mystery are my magnum opus, my masterpiece. Every bit of understanding, empathy, focus, wisdom and appreciation for life is going into these books. I truly hope you enjoy the two that are available now, with more to come.

  Out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Miles A. Maxwell is an IFR certified private pilot, speaks bits and pieces of ten languages, surfs, skis, sails and scuba dives.

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