Robert Porter is enjoying the fruits of success: a best-selling detective novel featuring a hard-nosed detective circa 1947 named Joe January, and a lucrative contract for the sequel. But his world comes crashing down around him when he witnesses his wife’s infidelity.
As Porter sinks into a morass of grief over her abandonment, only one person can help him regain his self-esteem and dignity. One man alone can help Porter set things right... and that person’s name is Joe January. But he doesn't even exist... or does he?
Why the critics are reading January’s Paradigm:
“J. Conrad Guest has taken the heartbreak of sexual betrayal and turned it into a romance-fantasy… Readers will not be able to put it down.” — Current Entertainment Monthly, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Here is Guest’s sheer mastery of the art: he has created a character who transcends boundaries of reality and fiction, who pops through the shell of the author’s skull and speaks to him…” — Zinta Aistars, LuxEsto, Kalamazoo College alumni magazine and author of three books.
“Prompted by his detective’s instincts and the photograph of a woman who seems strangely familiar, January begins his search for the reasons behind his existence. His quest will take him down numerous and occasionally violent paths: there’s a beast lurking at the periphery of this, Robert Porter’s alternate reality.” — Ellen Tanner Marsh, New York Times best-selling author.
My writing credentials include January’s Paradigm, first published in 1998 by Minerva Press, London, England (see an excerpt in my blog). I've completed One Hot January and January’s Thaw, the second and third books in the January series. I recently completed Backstop: A Baseball Love Story in Nine Innings and Chaotic Theory, a novella that explores the conjecture of how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in South America might result in a tornado in Texas. Several of my short stories and non-fiction pieces have appeared on Internet publications, including Cezanne’s Carrot, Saucy Vox, Riverwalk Journal and Redbridge Review. Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine published Mother’s Day: Coming to Terms with the Cruelty of Parkinson’s, a memoir chronicling my mother’s battle against Parkinson’s. I also provide manuscript evaluation and editorial services, and am cofounder of and the cigar and non-fiction editor for The Smoking Poet.
Edited with GOODFELLA™ CODES