Split Seconds - Hardcover

Robinson, Kevin

3.75

8 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802757855 ISBN 13: 9780802757852

Publisher: Walker & Co, 1991

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Investigating the murder of NASA computer wizard James Woods, Nick Foster meets Woods' fiancee, Katie, who is certain that Woods' murder had something to do with a software program he had been designing for the space shuttle

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From the Author:

My "Stick Foster" mysteries came out in the early ninties, first in hardback from Walker and Company, and later in paperback from Vivisphere. The three titles were (in order): Split Seconds, Mall Rats, and A Matter of Perspective. The protagonist, Nicholas "Stick" Foster was an Orlando newspaper reporter and a paraplegic, so when he began solving crimes on the side, he had to go about it a little differently than the average sleuth. Mall Rats was requested for consideration by several of the major Hollywood film production companies, including Ron Howard, Steven Spielburg, and Disney, but alas there was already another Mall Rats movie in the works, and mine, I was told, would be "too expensive to produce."

Split Seconds was my first published novel, and I had deliberately attempted to build the pace steadily, and never back off. My theory was that if I could make readers turn the pages fast enough, they wouldn't notice what a newbie I was! With Mall Rats, my editor, Janet Hutchings (currently editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), told me to "slow down and put more heart in it." So, since I'd worked with young people all of my life, I built the plot around the kids I always saw hanging out at Orlando's Fashion Square Mall when I was learning to use my new wheelchair in 1975.

I broke my neck while teaching abused kids, first offenders in the courts, and otherwise "troubled" kids at a west Orlando "children's ranch & boarding school," and so putting Stick Foster in a wheelchair seemed very natural. Eventually, of course, the series went out of print, but I'm hoping to make all three titles available for e-readers in 2013. My next book-length fiction was a contemporary novel called The Ghostwalker File, and it was published in the fall of 2012.

About the Author:

Kevin Robinson is a freelance writer/photographer, a mystery novelist, and a former syndicated columnist for the Detroit Free Press. He holds a BSEd. degree from Geneva College, and was teaching at a Florida boys ranch in 1975 when a dock railing collapsed and left him paralyzed from the chest down, with little or no control of his fingers. Only the ring finger of his left hand was usable enough to type with, but after three mystery novels, hundreds of magazine articles, and a new co-authored self-help book called GETTING REAL: The Road to personal redemption, that fragile resource simply wore out. Robinson currently uses a rubber band to hold his overworked typing finger in place. When he's not writing, or managing No Bull Productions (the Hudson Valley publicity/promotion firm he co-owns), Kevin can be found sitting in on blues harp (harmonica) with the Dallas Fisher Band in and around New York City.

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