The Assistants by Camille Perri
I picked up this title because it looked interesting, covering a topic most people can relate to. So glad I did; it was an enjoyable and funny read about a young woman who gets pulled into a dishonest situation that almost wrecks her life.
The protagonist, thirty-year-old Tina Fontana, is an assistant to multi-media-CEO Robert Barlow, a very wealthy and powerful man. However, as his assistant, managing Barlow’s exorbitant lifestyle and business accounts, didn’t mean Tina made a good living. It was just the opposite; she barely made $40,000 a year and struggled to pay rent and her student loans.
A technical error purchasing airline tickets for her boss presents her with the opportunity to pay off her student loan balance. Now, Tina points out that with e-deposits and e-transfers at your fingertips, how tempting it is to take an amount ‘just this one time’ (We can all relate). But after that one time, someone noticed and that’s when Tina’s troubles began – Tina free falls into an embezzlement scheme with other employees at the firm; she wasn’t the only female assistant at work in debt.
Guilt and the fear of getting caught tortured Tina as more and more wanted in to pay off their debts. But along the way of this really funny, nail bitingly, interesting tale, Tina develops lasting friendships and what started off as inappropriate and criminal, grows into a movement that truly helped others. This title, The Assistants by Camille Perri, was a really cool read!
The Black Arrival by Paul E Cooley
This fast-paced, sci-fi thriller opens on an offshore oil rig platform, called Leaguer, discovering a deposit of exceptional grade crude oil in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench and a company helicopter comes to pick up a sample to confirm the findings at an offshore lab, Houston Analytic Inc.
The Leaguer’s chief engineer’s geologist reported that the crude quality was pristine, meaning a low cost to refine. However, the geologist also found a substance in the crude that might be biological, making the crude contaminated. The rig chief did not agree and wanted operations and drilling to begin without delay – there was a lot of money to be made. They, the oil company, wanted to start drilling and make revenue projections and they saw this analysis as just standard, ceremonial procedure.
Once in the lab and conducting tests, the results from the sample looked very strange to the chemist team. The crude’s American Petroleum Institute gravity, or API gravity, a measurement of the density of the crude or how heavy or light it is compared to water, was very high, meaning the oil was very light in weight. However, its water measurement indicated that there was no water content in the sample at all, which baffled the chemists. The sample also kept moving on its own – very strange. What exactly was this chemical sample? Was it contaminated in some way? The chemist team had never come across anything like it before. Maybe it wasn’t crude oil at all – they decided more analysis had to be done.
Unbeknownst to the team, the chemist that hooked up the sample for testing cut herself on the sample barrel during the process and this would become a problem for her and her team. She would have to be transported to a medical facility, the CDC would be notified, and the lab placed under quarantine.
Further tests revealed that this substance contained no carbon or hydrogen atoms and did have a make-up of very heavy atoms, but with a high API, this did not make sense – it didn’t obey the laws of science. The team discovered that the substance seemed to feed on organic matter. First classified as a sample of crude, then an unknown substance, to then an organism, that behaved like a hydrocarbon but was capable of absorbing anything organic. It was also growing in size as it fed.
The chemical lab personnel were now quarantined within the building with this thing from the depths and they had to find a way to survive and destroy it. This sci-fi was extremely interesting the way the author exposed us to chemical analysis of crude oil and the inner workings of a chemical lab – the lab’s engineering controls that protected them and hindered them, very interesting and one great pulsing read – The Black Arrival by Paul E Cooley.
I also discovered while reading (that’s why it’s beneficial to read a book cover-to-cover) that this is book 2 in a series of 4. The first book, The Black, covers what went on at the rig in the Pacific, the third, The Black: Outbreak, covers what went down at the medical facility and the fourth, The Black: Evolution, covers what happens after the three events of books 1-3 (without giving away what happens at the end of Black Arrival) I plan on reading the series – Excellent sci-fi! I highly recommend!