Ninety-Five

Lisa Towles is an innovative and inventive author from California who writes thrillers which share a common characteristic – each takes a well-worn plot-line or narrative within the genre, and gives it a distinctive twist.

CHOKE (2017)

Screen Shot 2023-07-09 at 09.15.17 Kerry Stine’s plan to rebuild her life goes into freefall when a patient vanishes from San Francisco General Hospital on her watch, thrusting her down a rabbit hole that leads to a past from which she can no longer escape. Out of work, terrified and running from the police, she trust no one and every step pushes her further away from logic and reality. 3000 miles away scientist Adrian Calhoun has developed a cigarette that cures lung cancer and he’s hellbent or distributing his miracle cure before the nig pharma mafia gets to him first. Kidnapped by his pursuers he is held prisoner in exchange for the chemical formula to his invention. His path crosses that of Kerry, and when the threads finally knit together Kerry discovers that what she and Adrian Calhoun have in common will return to her pieces of her past she never knew she’d lost.

THE UNSEEN (2019)

Ancient scrolls discovered by Rachel Careski threaten the power of the church. Descendants, of Pope Theopolis sworn to protect Christianity, believe Soren Careski took possession of them after Rachel disappeared, but he is dead. 40 years later Soren’s son Alex Careski receives an email from a dead man, he is fired from his job, shot at, his car is rammed and his wife Simone is kidnapped. In London meanwhile, two rare books go missing from the British Museum. The director of antiquities disappears, her colleague is murdered and her would-be lover is caught up in the intrigue. Soren left boxes of diaries in Alex’s cell: will they help unravel the truth about the disappearances of Alex’s wife father and aunt? Desperate for answers, he travels to Italy where he is kidnapped along with an enterprising young woman who is also embroiled in the deadly mysteries of the ancient scrolls.

NINETY-FIVE (2021)

Troubled University of Chicago student Zak Skinner accidentally uncovers evidence of an on-campus organised crime scam involving drugging students, getting them to commit crimes on camera and blackmailing them to continue their misdeeds under the threat of expulsion. Digging deeper, Zak discovers that the university scam is just the tip of the iceberg as it’s connected to a broader ring of crimes, themselves linked to a darkweb underworld. Following clues, Zak is led to a compound within Chicago’s abandoned Steelworker Park only to discover that he is being hunted. While trying to find his way out alive, Zak discovers that there is something much more personal he has been running from – his past. And now he has nowhere to hide.

HOT HOUSE (2021)

Former CIA operative and private investigator Mari Ellwyn teams up with seasoned investigator and former detective Derek Abernathy to look into the wrongful death of Sophie Michaud, a mentally ill college student whose murder is linked to Mari’s missing father. Two journalists – one dead, one missing – were writing a story on the dead college student with allegations about her connection to a federal judge. The two investigators must uncover the truth about Sophie Michaud before her killer makes them the next target. More importantly, Mari needs to find her missing father and reconcile her broken past and family.

THE RIDDERS (2022)

Screen Shot 2023-07-09 at 09.21.05 Brock “BJ” Janoff and his older brother Jonas run a private investigation firm in Venice California. BJ is randomly approached by a stranger on the street with a proposition he cannot refuse – $1 million to deliver a single envelope to a hotel lobby. They pay him upfront which sounds good on the surface, but now BJ’s life is in danger if he he doesn’t deliver the envelope in time. Obsessed with the envelope’s contents, BJ follows clues to investigate the people behind what he believes is an organised crime scam. When an act of brilliance changes the balance of power, the safety of everyone he loves is in jeopardy. The more he digs, the closer he gets to truths he cannot bear to face about the elusive Biderberg Group, his missing father and about the fate of his friends and family.

SALT ISLAND (2023)

The private investigation team of Mari Elwyn and Derek Abernathy are tested to the extreme with two new cases involving high-stakes corporate espionage and eco – terrorism. Someone is trying to sabotage billionaire CEO Jack Darcy’s reputation and – to complicate matters – his glamorous wife has gone missing. THRYVE, Darcy’s high-profile environmental start-up is lauded by investors as one of the best innovations of the decade, but a journalist has learned Darcy’s dirty little secret and is hellbent on exposing it to investors and the world at large. In a separate case Derek heads to the central valley to investigate two suspicious deaths from an explosion on a local farm. The deeper he digs, more questions emerge about what the murdered farm workers may have witnessed – toxic chemical dumping linked to an oil and gas company. A shadow witness is gathering evidence, but disappears before Derek can get to her. As Mari considers her next move in the Darcy case, her partner has gone undercover to find the missing witness and now he’s off grid. Mari must reckon with powerful ghosts from her past – a missing father and the truth about his double identity and secret agenda. She embarks on her own investigation to the British Virgin islands, one of her father’s secret haunts during his time as a CIA man. She uncovered details too painful to bear about her father herself and her future.

Zak Skinner is a pretty unremarkable guy in many ways. He’s bright enough, for sure – that’s why he is studying engineering at the University of Chicago. Why he moved there from NYU, we’re not sure at first, but we suspect that he lacks the essential ingredient of ‘stickability’. Or maybe he is running away from something? He and his old school buddy Riley room together, and Riley is most things that Zak is not. Like steady, reliable, unimaginative and not prone to destructive self analysis.

Zak is slightly in awe of a fellow who lives on the same landing – David Wade is preppy, confident, glib and has an air of natural authority. When Wade takes him off campus to the house of a man called Jane (surname – so no gender crisis) Zak’s nightmare begins. Never one to turn down a toke of anything that might be mind altering he imbibes a concoction made, apparently from several rare species of South American tree bark. Over the next few hours Zak is unsure whether he is on some strange trip, or actually walking around the streets of Chicago with a mysterious woman. What does seems to be real, however, is that he has bought a notebook from an artisan craft store, and has the receipt in his back pocket.

When he finally returns to reality and shuffles back to his accommodation to share his apparent adventures with Riley things begin to go pear-shaped. First, a fellow student mistakenly takes delivery of a pizza ordered by Riley and Zak – and becomes seriously ill; then, Wade disappears, and Zak is hauled in by the campus cops as he was the last person to be seen with him; thirdly – and most bizarrely, someone seems to be in desperate need of the receipt that is sitting harmlessly in Zak’s back pocket.

Long story short – Zak takes the receipt to an obscure department of the university where specialist mathematicians ponder the intricate relationships between series of numbers. When the receipt is placed under a highly refined scanner, it reveals a sequence of numbers invisible to the human eye. Stavros, the head of this arcane department is then involved in a drive-to-kill incident, but Zak escapes the wreckage, but realises he is being followed by a group of sharp-suited men who clearly work for some big corporation.

We learn – via Zak being snatched and taken into what appears to be an alternative world beneath Chicago’s streets – that the heavies work for System D. This organisation operates on the university campus by snaring students – via drugs – into committing crimes, the videos of which are used to blackmail the victims – who are, ipso facto, highly intelligent and capable people – into working for the corporation. System D’s mission statement seems to involve using crypto currencies to arm-twist big pharma companies into providing better healthcare for the vulnerable people in society, but Zak suspects that the true aim of the organisation is something much more sinister.

Lisa Towles has an MBA in Information Technology, and has a ‘day job’ in the tech industry, so the fast paced narrative of Ninety-Five goes from one complex techno concept to the next with sometimes bewildering speed. Towles never allows this journey into the Dark Web to obscure the human element, however, and towards the end of the book she reveals Zak Skinner’s tragic family history and thus we learn, for the first time, just what the young man might have been running away from.

Ninety-Five travels, one might say, at 95 mph, and Lisa Towles breaks up the narrative into sixty seven short chapters, so the pace is relentless. The novel is a dazzling trip into a dystopian techno-nightmare – a place where Alice Through the Looking Glass meets The Matrix, with more than a touch of Twin Peaks. Published by Indies United Publishing House, Ninety Five will be available on 24th November.