E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I write environmental mysteries I call 'eco-thrillers.' My new book Red Tide deals with what might happen if criminals dumped extremely dangerous chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact dolphins, whales, manatees, shrimp, oysters, and other coastal and offshore wildlife are dying off in unprecedented numbers in the Gulf. Presumably that was due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But my plot suggested others could be using that as an excuse for dumping deadly chemicals. Meanwhile, what is happening to our environment worldwide? According to today's NPR World News glaciers throughout the world are melting. Our Republican congress can't even agree that climate change is happening, let alone that it is man-made. According to Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe global warming is a 'hoax.' Pretty good hoax, to be melting every glacier on the planet, Jim. There are other changes happening as well, at an alarming rate. We depend on photo-plankton for half the oxygen...

News: my new Tony Lowell Mystery RED TIDE (an eco-thriller) has just been published by Booktrope. Please click on the image for a link to my page on Amazon.com, for more details. I need to say, in full disclosure, that this book was 17 years in the making, for personal reasons including health, state of mind, a need to move forward, working overseas in China, sending my son off to college: the list goes on. But this series was ahead of its time when first published back in the '90s, and was in need of revival. And the post-Katrina post BP disasters in the Gulf of Mexico made the need to renew this series, and it's environmental overtones, all the more pressing. For a little history, my first book of this series, Hour of the Manatee , was winner of a national book award and competition (the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First P.I. Novel competition) back in 1992 (it wasn't published until 1994. It was followed by three more titles: Eye of t...

The new prime minister of India, Narenda Modi, has announced he intends to remove virtually all those pesky environmental regulations India was ignoring anyway, in the name of progress (spelled 'p-r-o-f-i-t'). China, where I spent three years, has already tried this. It works great if you don't mind wearing gas masks full time when entering urban areas. (A hospital face mask seems to be the new required fashion accessory there). India, of course, is a country where until recently wives were burned when their husbands died, girls are still killed for the crime of being raped, and dead bodies floating in your water supply is considered no big deal. India, as a sidebar, was also the source of all the opium the lofty British insisted on enslaving China with for close to a century, back in the glorious Victorian reign. Now Afghanistan, on our watch, has taken over the opium trade but no worries, they're doing great, thanks to the C.I.A.'s watchful supervision, and ...

My love for and attachment to Florida and it's true natives goes way back: to when I was six years old, in fact, and my dad got pneumonia. His company--then a global telephone monopoly--while perhaps unaware of the irony of themselves being the cause of his illness (second-hand smoke)--felt sufficient guilt, it seems, to send him to Florida for six months to recover. I, being at the time a footloose five year old, had little choice but to leave my safe home in suburban New Jersey, along with my kindergarten schoolmates and white middle-class neighborhood gang (another story) and tag along to experience, for the first time, an alien world. I might as well have been a (really) young Luke Skywalker on Dagobah. Nothing was familiar: not the empty dunes on the coast of the strange teal-blue sea that didn't even have real waves except sometimes (I was accustomed to the Jersey shore, which had real waves on which I'd later learn to body surf). The dunes were protected by a sea wa...

I just finished reading a book by one of my favorite authors, the Scottish eminence Alexander McCall Smith's Unbearable Lightness of Scones (latest of the 44 Scotland Street series). Smith described, in one chapter, a fanciful encounter between one of the characters, Matthew, while bathing, ever so briefly, in the warm ocean waters off Perth, Australia during his honeymoon. Seems he dipped his toe in a little too far, it's well after sundown, and everyone in the world except him, it seems, has seen Steven Spielberg's Jaws epic, and knows what happens next. Except it doesn't. Despite being repeatedly forewarned by cafe waittresses and the like that Great White Sharks lurk in these here waters, Matthew just can't wait to get his feet wet. And so, despite protests from his about to be (correctly, she thinks) widowed bride, Matthew ventures into said seas, gets immediately knocked off his feet by a rogue rip tide (about which he has also been warned) and swept out to s...