Author of the highest order! As I write in my tweets about his books, John David Dolan is a master of putting words in a magical and most engrossing way. Here are two samples from Part 2 ('Trask') of RESTLESS EARTH - soldier with bruised mind and mangled leg from an angry, brutal combat tour in the Middle East - in consultation with a 'post-war stress' doctor: "Do I any longer have free will?" Sam Trask wondered. "If I am really nothing more than a slave to my unconscious, my imbalanced brain chemistry, my autonomic nervous system, and my skewed, unreliable memory – then what, if anything, am I?" Or, these words in a letter written by a soldier who fought in Afghanistan: "If you want to know how I feel, most of the time I just feel irritated. Like time is being wasted, like things are not happening fast enough. The minute hand on my watch drives me, not the hour hand, certainly not the day of the week or the month. I count seconds in my head in the elevator, going up staircases, on walking journeys from one building to another. I want people to be briefer, to get to the point. I want them to shut up, stop elaborating, give me a 'yes' or a 'no'. I want to finish their sentences for them. I have urges to answer my own questions, then say to them, 'Is that right? Just nod or shake your head. No need to open your mouth'. "If I drank instant coffee, or took sugar I would, like Prufrock, measure out my life in coffee spoons. "When I read a book, I take note of the page numbers and compute the percentage I have covered. My brain is a jumble of geometry and mathematics, angles, perspectives, decimals. Equations and chaotic fractals bubble up constantly into my consciousness. Nothing is ever still. Everything erodes, cascades, reforms, reinvents itself under the ceaseless assaults of mutating arithmetic forms. My world comprises circles, arcs, lines, squares, arrows, Mandelbrot sets and intersections. I see the structure below the surface, the skull beneath the skin. My fingernails and surrounding epidermis are chewed down, ceaselessly ripped by computing teeth. My fingertips tap out multiples of even numbers, countdowns, primes. People appear to me as transparent ciphers, puppets of passions and beliefs – and in consequence I cannot take anyone seriously, not even myself. "I am plagued by many 'whys', but no longer with the big whys. These days I am more drawn to the questions that philosophers would find trivial. Put simply, philosophy no longer interests me, seems to me no more than an exercise in self-indulgence. In truth, some residues of ideas and attitude remain, but these ruined, decayed pillars can no longer support a superstructure of positive belief. "I am like the driver of a runaway train who realizes he has lost control, but no longer cares. I observe the screaming passengers impassively, feel the rushing air on my face and raise my arms to the sky. The event horizon approaches, the ultimate quadratic equation, and the numbers finally resolve themselves into an oblivion of zero; substituting life for death. "At last, it will all make sense." There are four characters who drive John Dolan's narrative, each with his own part in RESTLESS EARTH, and two of them will be familiar to fans of the author. You can read the blurb on RESTLESS EARTH on the Amazon page. I give nothing relative to content away here. I prefer to show you samples of this author's prodigious talent. I can only say, the book will hold you captive from beginning to end with its elements of mystery, suspense, romance, and spellbinding intrigue.