What is Claire O’Dell reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Claire O’Dell, author of The Hound of Justice: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’m doing a lot of re-reading these days—mostly because I need to read stories I can depend upon. They help me disconnect from my own writing and let me return with a new perspective. Among the others I’ve been devouring of late:

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

What a grim and uncompromising novel. And yet, at the same time, it’s a novel about surviving, about hope, about the future of mankind.

Lauren Olamina is a young woman living in California, in a United States wracked by climate change and corporate greed. Water costs more than gasoline. Gasoline is only used by drug addicts to set fire. The only safe communities are those with walls and armed sentries, and even that safety is precarious. Lauren herself has given up on God and has invented her own religion called Earthseed. When drug-crazed hordes attack her community, she escapes and travels north, hoping to establish a new community based on Earthseed.

Butler’s book sounds all too plausible these days, even though...[read on]

About The Hound of Justice, from the publisher:

It’s been two months since Dr. Janet Watson accepted an offer from Georgetown University Hospital. The training for her new high-tech arm is taking longer than expected, however, leaving her in limbo. Meanwhile, her brilliant friend and compatriot, Sara Holmes, has been placed on leave—punishment for going rogue during their previous adventure.

After an extremist faction called the Brotherhood of Redemption launches a failed assassination attempt on the president that causes mass destruction, Holmes, who is now operating in the shadows, takes on the task of investigating the Brotherhood. Holmes is making progress when she abruptly disappears.

When Watson receives a mysterious message from Holmes’s cousin Micha that indicates that Sara Holmes’s disappearance might be connected to the Brotherhood and to Adler Industries, Watson and Micha go on a high-stakes mission to reunite with Holmes once more.

Together, Watson, Holmes, and Micha embark on a thrilling, action-packed journey through the deep South to clear Holmes’s name, thwart the Brotherhood’s next move, and most important, bring their nemesis to justice for the atrocities she’s committed in the New Civil War.

Visit Claire O’Dell's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Study in Honor.

Writers Read: Claire O’Dell.

--Marshal Zeringue