Books in the The Swiftpad Trilogy series

Digging Around the Pandemic: The SwiftPad Extinction, the riveting and concluding volume of the SwiftPad Trilogy, follows the last months of an election in a country that balances precariously on the knife edge of Civil War. After the Insurgency''s defeat of the Incumbent''s storm troopers in Portland, a desperate international struggle plays out behind the scenes and in plain sight on the ubiquitous social media platform SwiftPad. Follow the Insurgents as they retaliate against the Incumbent''s reprisals, while fighting for the hearts and minds of an increasingly fragmented electorate. Meanwhile Kip Rehain, SwiftPad founder, seeks his former lover and business partner GG, by slowly making his way into the heart of the Leviathan, where nature conspires with mega-hackers and a mysterious disease to bring all of us into the next stage of existence.

Today business is about eyeballs on the screen. Narcissism is the shiny object that always attracts, and today it drives the bottom line. You have to be the star in your own show, and now, with the Internet social media sensation SwiftPad, there are new episodes about you each time you connect! A new girl in the Rose City has a plan to capture the whole world''s attention. She hooks up with a local pothead/Lothario to create SwiftPad, a renegade social media app that promises to convert the world''s fascination with itself into billions in cash for the crew and their backers. But when a sadistic killer''s handiwork is uncovered, new clues to an old crime point to Portland''s IT community. He is out there, using his high-tech talent to mock efforts to catch him. More than a Tech-Thriller, Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover is also a raffish, satiric account of how we are coping with the sweeping changes of recent decades.

The SwiftPad Insurgency, the second book in the SwiftPad trilogy, follows the founders and original crew of the Portland-based social media application SwiftPad. Nate Schuette, who wrote a sensational novel thirty years earlier (see Barckmann''s novel Farewell the Dragon), shows up in Portland with Paula Flayer, his promiscuous seventy-five-year-old girlfriend who has not physically aged since her late twenties. But Ben Cadez, former Nixon operative and Paula''s one-time lover, also wields the power of the youth-preserving Golden Fungus and is now a Republican candidate for President. They are all in the crosshairs of a deranged and corrupt President, and Portland must decide whether to co-opt or fight.