The Acid Rain Series

The Acid Rain Series

Buddy Keisler's novels are bestsellers in Clockworks City.   The Acid Rain series... Acid Rain itself, Acid Drip, A Clean Kill in Clockworks... are devoured by readers desperate to understand their own city's power structures through thinly-veiled spy fiction.   The problem: Buddy Keisler is not just a novelist.   He is a freelance assassin.   He "retires" political and religious leaders. He has done this work for years, across Clockworks, with the kind of success that would be impressive if it were not so efficiently brutal.   So when he publishes a novel about a character eliminating a government official, Clockworks does what any reasonable person would do: it panics.   Which eliminations in his books are real?   Which leaders described as dead in his plots are actually dead?   Are certain government officials reading codes in his novels... messages about their own vulnerability?   The conspiracy theories reproduce like infection.   Scholars write treatises attempting to match plot deaths to public records. Readers compare chapters to current events. Amateur cryptographers insist that Buddy encodes his real contracts in his fiction... that the books are confession and advertisement combined.   Buddy, naturally, refuses to clarify.   He will discuss his novels as literature.   He will discuss his work as an independent contractor.   But he will not draw the line between them, which means the line does not exist in the minds of Clockworks residents.   Every word becomes suspect.   Every assassination plot becomes a Rorschach test for the city's paranoia.   What makes this phenomenon unique to Clockworks is that Clockworks is where the assassinations actually happen. Outside the city, Buddy Keisler is a minor bestselling author.   In Clockworks, he is a Cassandra speaking prophecy through the medium of paperback thrillers, and no one can decide if he is joking or confessing or both.   The merchants worry.   The religious authorities worry.   The government faction worries.   Everyone reads his books looking for their own name, their own death, their own elimination foretold in fiction.   Buddy's latest character is a half-gnome/half-Kutollum assassin called "Bookworm" who works in the shadows of Clockworks City. The real Buddy is 100% gnome. But that detail... the deliberate embellishment... only adds to the mystery.   Is he hiding his true heritage?   Is the fiction obscuring a deeper truth?   I have read his novels.   They are actually quite good. Clever plotting. Genuine suspense. Well-researched spy craft that suggests he knows his material... because he does.   But I will not decode them.   That way lies madness.   The genius of Buddy Keisler is that he has made truth and fiction indistinguishable in his home city. Every book he publishes is a Trojan horse of uncertainty.   And Clockworks, unable to resist, keeps reading, keeps searching, keeps building theories on the foundation of his refusal to answer.   He is the only author I know who has weaponized ambiguity and lived to profit from it.   That is the real conspiracy: there is no conspiracy... and also, there absolutely is.