Who Are the Paranormal PrivateersHeroes? It’s one of my favorite books. It’s my most complex and surprising. So who are the heroes? I give you a free sample below. It’s in a unique humorous zombie hero genre. I also give you the non-zombie villains.
But let’s start at the beginning: My Undead Mother-in-law,introduces the Newbys, a zombie family. The son, Don Newby, shows up in Zombie Turkeys. The family, led by the matriarchal undead mother-in-law Diane Newby, fights for zombie rights and any criminals that cross their paths. It helps that my zombies regenerate from injuries and get stronger each time.
This leads to Paranormal Privateers where the President has given them a letter of marquis to fight as privateers on behalf of the United States. They’re given assignments that are too dangerous or sensitive for the US to intervene directly. Like Somalian pirates.
There are a ton of villains in the book (at least five). I have a whole post about them here: Meet My Villains from Paranormal Privateers. Plus, my book’s is on sale. My book is .99 from October 20th until October 24th. Then it’s $1.99 from October 24th to October 27th.
The Paranormal Privateers Heroes – The Good Guys and Gals
A heavy tread down the stairs announced George Newby. His eyes shone red too, but while Diane was built like a middle-aged woman, George was a classic wide-body. His shoulders filled the stairway. You’d think he was a truck driver or a lineman rather than an accountant.
“Hi, Karen. Hi, Ron,” he rumbled. He hugged his daughter, as if he held a baby bird, and shook my hand without hurting me in his bratwurst fingers. His bright red eyes looked squarely into mine.
“Sharon Windham – tall blonde bodyguard from England. “Her eyes shone bright red under a broad brow, with blonde eyelashes and a square chin. She could be a marble idol from a Greek temple. A zombie goddess”–from Paranormal Privateers
She was a former crime lord bodyguard who switched alliegiance to Diane Newby. Former Crossfit athlete, model, and competitive swimmer.. She deamt of becoming a UN translator. She speaks 11 languages: English, French, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Russian. Trained in katana, nunchuks, and naginata.
Darkly beautiful bodyguard from Acapulco Mexico. 5′ 4″ Former cliff diver and rock climber. Former crime lord bodyguard, now protecting Diane Newby. Former MMA fighter and bodybuilder. Trained in katana, nunchuks, and naginata.
I examined my cell methodically. A drainpipe, two inches in diameter. A toilet. A hard bed. A steel door with hinges on the outside. I’d probably need to escape from somewhere other than this cell. Once they established a routine with my interrogation, I’d look for escape routes.
I chuckled to myself. Synthia Smith was my true name, in the sense it matched my birth certificate and other current identification. Before Synthia Smith, I was Rachel Rathbone, and before that Quinella Quincy, and so on, through the alphabet. My earliest memory was a toddler named Betty Botter. I had to be cute and pick pockets. Who knew what my original name was? Changing identities was a standard procedure for me with each new assignment.
This had been my most challenging operation, and I’d almost pulled it off. Those damn zombies! Had I blown up Harrods, the demands for billions in exchange for each national landmark’s safety would have been credible.
They had no idea of the bigger picture—and they wouldn’t get it. My terrorist cover story was completely true, but neither the terrorists nor Scotland Yard knew they were merely a means to an end. It was the truth: total subjugation of the United Kingdom was a reasonable goal for one like me, a child of the world’s greatest criminal.
I knew more about Papa Smith, my ostensible grandfather, than any of my siblings. I think I actually touched his feelings as a loving granddaughter, and I think he shared more with me than with any of his other crime-lord grandchildren. Of course, he might be manipulating me, just as I tried to manipulate him. That was the most reasonable assumption, especially if we were actually related.
Not One of Paranormal Privateers Heroes – Synthia Smith, Part 2
Regardless, I felt fond of him. When I overthrew him and took over his crime empire, I thought I’d keep him alive. I enjoyed our talks via our secured video line. When he’d shared Sid Boffin’s failure with me, I clapped in delight as he praised me for staying in touch with him. I think that was genuine emotion and not an act. It was hard to tell sometimes.
A motion on the floor caught my eye as I sat on the bed. A cockroach crawled up the drain and onto the floor. Surprising. Usually, Britain kept their prisons pest free. Then another. Then a dozen more. And then, hundreds.
This was not normal cockroach behavior. They did not come into the light in hordes. I sat cross-legged on the bed and watched the swarm with fascination. They climbed the door, walked its steel perimeter, and went back down the drain as others came up.
Curious, I nabbed one using my lightning reflexes. Examining it, I saw a metal dot under its thorax and a narrow tube attached to its abdomen. A pungent, acidic smell came from the tube. I looked back to the door. The acid ate a narrow trench in the door’s perimeter, right where the cockroaches still marched. Near the ceiling light, I saw mist curl away from the door.
Not One of Paranormal Privateers Heroes – Synthia Smith, Part 3
Modified and controlled cockroaches—like Sid Boffin’s cyborg-controlled animals. I’d read his Ph.D. paper as well as the Midley Beacon‘s declassified reports on his battles with the zombies. Since Sid was dead at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, this could only be one of my siblings or Papa Smith trying to rescue me.
Using my perfect memory of the twists and turns when they’d led me here hooded, counting my steps, and remembering the doors, I was confident I could retrace the route.
The last of the cockroaches marched around the door, leaving its trail of acid. They etched the door perhaps a centimeter deep. Couldn’t be much left.
I knocked on the door. Yes, it felt like a centimeter thick, and it echoed like it was almost cut through. Then someone knocked back, much harder.
“I’m here!” I called. I assumed this was my rescuer.
“Step back,” grated a curious, tinny voice, like it was coming through a small radio.
I stepped away.
CLUMP! CLUMP! Two metallic thunks hit the other side of the door. Then, SKREERK! The door tore off like the lid of a tin of meat.
I didn’t expect what I saw. A male silverback gorilla filled the doorway and the whole hallway beyond. Thick armor covered his body. Casually, he placed the door scrap against the hall.
This series was too easy to binge, I could not stop listening to the audible audiobooks once I started! This author is brilliant, the narrator(s) in all of the Life After Life chronicles books are wonderful, and the storyline was hilarious. At times I shook my head in disbelief and just cracked up at the ridiculousness surrounding this zombie story. My son is 12 and he listened with me at times and enjoyed the humor and different zombie stories as well!
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The cover of my third novel Paranormal Privateers. Click to get yours.
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Meet My Favorite Book I’ve written. Which one is it? It’s my novel My Undead Mother-in-law. She’s Diane Newby. I’ll let her son-in-law Ron Yardly introduce her. Read the excerpt below. My book is .99 from October 6th until October 13th.Get your copy by clicking here.
Your Free Excerpt Is Here
My Undead Mother-in-law Chapter 1 Icon
As we pulled up in Karen’s parents’ drive, I was reassured by the sheer normality of their three-bedroom suburban home: green yard partially covered with snow, evergreen bushes, two-car garage. There was no sign zombies lived there. Of course, what sign could I expect? A skull and crossbones and Beware of Zombies? Perhaps a biohazard sign?
Diane greeted us at the door. “Hello, my love!” She hugged Karen.
Karen barely flinched as she looked into her mother’s bright-red eyes. But she grunted “Ugh!” at the force of her embrace.
“Ease up, Mom.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Hello, Mom,” I said as I hugged her as hard I as could.
She hugged me back twice as hard.
“Ugh,” I grunted too.
Diane still had blond-highlighted brown hair, as she did when I first met her. She’d gained a pound or two though. She smelled of the body talc White Linen. I recognized it because Karen and I bought it for her birthday last year, pre-zombie. And she still wore her cat-eye reading glasses on a chain around her neck.
Diane seated us on the living room sofa. “Supper’s on. I have a nice pot roast for us tonight. Donnie and Maggie should be here soon. George!” she called. “The kids are here!”
A heavy tread down the stairs announced George Newby. His eyes shone red too, but while Diane was built like a middle-aged woman, George was a classic wide-body. His shoulders filled the stairway. You’d think he was a truck driver or a lineman rather than an accountant.
“Hi, Karen. Hi, Ron,” he rumbled. He hugged his daughter, as if he held a baby bird, and shook my hand without hurting me in his bratwurst fingers. His bright-red eyes looked squarely into mine.
“I’m so glad you made the trip. You can help us put to rest the ugly rumors that people with zombiism aren’t human. It’s just a disease. It’s not even harmful,” Diane enthused as she sat across from us. George sat next to her in a brown leather recliner.
“Mom, we love you. You don’t have to convince us,” I said.
“Of course not. I know that. It’s just that we’ve had people talking behind our backs at church and the public health officials trying to pressure us to get the treatment to eliminate the disease.”
“Don’t you want to get rid of it? I think the antibiotics for it are safe and effective.”
“You’d think so, but we actually have never felt better in our lives! I have more energy than ever, and so does George—right, George?”
“Yup.”
“My arthritic aches and pains have completely disappeared, and George’s old football knee injury is all better too.”
Meet My Favorite Book and the Villain, Vik Staskas
Vik Staskas absently stroked his long glossy-black hair as he skimmed through the day’s news on his wall-mounted monitor from his five-hundred-foot superyacht. He noted the surge in zombie cures and sought to tap into the money. He hired operatives to infiltrate the Midley Beacon and SPEwZ Inc., the business arm of the famous charitable zombie organization. The possibility of failure didn’t occur to him. He succeeded in everything he tried: a street thief as an orphan in Belgrade; a college student in Paris, where he got his PhD in robotics; and taking over European organized crime without the nominal bosses knowing he existed. He was ready to take over the US.
He developed remote-controlled cyborg animals and insects. He used them to spy, to infiltrate, to conquer, to steal, to kill. They were unstoppable. He planned his first hijacking of a zombie blood air shipment from Gary, Indiana. He could think of several practical uses for cyborg-controlled zombies in his crime empire. As they were, zombies had too much free will for his taste. He chuckled. Even zombies didn’t stand a chance against him.
My Undead Mother-in-law was a hilarious and surprisingly heartwarming twist on the zombie genre. The idea of a zombified mother-in-law with anger management issues is pure comedic gold, and Zach delivers plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.
While the premise is absurd, the story also explores deeper themes of family, acceptance, and finding humor in the most unexpected situations. The characters are quirky and endearing, and their interactions with the undead Diane are both hilarious and touching.
Overall, My Undead Mother-in-law is a fun and lighthearted read that offers a refreshing take on the zombie apocalypse. If you’re looking for a laugh and don’t mind a bit of absurdity, this book is worth checking out.
Fun zombie read! I love paranormal and supernatural books so I was intrigued to read this series. I’ve listened to it on audible and the narrators are really fun and easy to listen to, I feel like they’re talking to actual people rather than reading a story. The storyline is funny and it has just gotten better with each book in the series.
Meet My Favorite Book – Click Below to Get Your Copy!
My Undead Mother-in-law cover. Click to get yours.
Any newsletter subscriber gets free audiobook codes–as long as they last. Click here to get yours.Don’t wait until they’re gone!
Do you want an autographed book? I’ll mail it directly to you with free shipping and I pay the taxes! Click here to get yours. My shipping may not be the same day, but at least it’s free–for you.
Who Is Author Andy Zach? I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.
Once upon a time, I was born. Then I graduated from college and became a programmer. Then I was a project leader. Eventually I became a 6 Sigma Black Belt. Then I retired and became an author.
That’s when the fun began! I’d always wanted to be an author. For my first book, I wanted to write something easy and fun. As I pondered my subject, I fried a turkey. I brought in the golden brown turkey and said, “What if this turkey came alive on our table?”
“Then it’d be a zombie turkey!” said one of my family. (One wife, two daughters, and a son and daughter-in-law.)
“That’s the name of my book! Zombie Turkeys!” I immediately conceived of the whole silly book as a parody of the zombie genre. I considered it overdone in 2015, and ripe for parody.
‘He felt great. He was full of energy, he had many hens to breed with, and he was the leader of a great flock.’
Sam Melvin is a reporter with the Midley Beacon, it’s a tiny local paper – with an online presence – run by its penny-pinching editor Lisa Kambacher. When Sam sees the two turkey hunters on the slab in the local mortuary, he knows he has a story to cover and he sets out to do so with great gusto. As the zombie turkeys multiply, Sam and Lisa are the leading media team on the ground and the Midley Beacon goes international, solving their financial woes and syndicating their work across the globe. But it’s not all good news. After all, there are those people-killing zombie turkeys heading into town…
This was a book I picked up with trepidation as it seemed all too possible it would be a ‘one trick pony’ stretching a single joke to beyond breaking point across the length of an entire novel. Wrong! It is like a bowl of potpourri on the sideboard of life – lots of subtle blending examples of humour – many of them very American so I suspect there were even more than I noticed, handicapped by my British perspective.
Who Is Author Andy Zach? – Part 3
My Undead Mother-in-law back cover
Naturally I had to write another book. My zombie turkeys were lonely! How could I top a zombie turkeys apocalypse? Make zombie humans! And make them the heroes of the book–unkillable, regenerating, super strong humans. And make them a middle aged couple.
So that led to my third book. I took the same superhero zombie faily, gave them a letter of marquis from the President, and sent them around the world as US privateers, taking on tasks too sensitive for direct military involvement.
Who is Author Andy Zach? – An Overview of His Books
My other series is Secret Supers, Villain’s Vacation, and Secret Supers in Space. Those are all $7 on my website and $7.95 from Amazon. This series is about four seventh graders with four different disabilities and four different superpowers–who fight crime.
“But wait, Andy!” you say. “Amazon gives me free shipping!”
“So do I. Checkmate.”
I have two more books for you, I’ll tell you about at the end of this post.
Meet My Books – The Life After Life Chronicles
I was going to write some clever blurb for each book in the series, but I decided to let you read a review from a reader for each one.
It is amazing that such a funny title and a random premise could make such an enjoyable experience. This story was fantastic. Certainly the narrator made the story come alive, but I can’t say how many times I “laughed out loud” while reading this book. Only one other book in my life ever made me feel this way. I enjoyed this story. It is a zombie-apocalypse book with political thriller feel as well as a home-town romance subplot. I would give it 10 stars if I could. Read it (listen!) and laugh. And learn how to be prepared for that zombie turkey apocalypse.
Based on the title and the cover, I originally thought the detective was going to be a zombie back in the 30s or 40s. That wasn’t the case, but it was still a hilarious amateur detective story and I loved the absurdity of it all.
It’s a short read (or listen, since I listened to the audiobook), but is packed with Sam in crazy situations with all sorts of zombies. His string of good luck is as unlikely as the conundrums he finds himself involved in, but somehow it works for him.
Phil Blechman was the perfect choice for Sam’s character. Lauren Testerman did a great job channeling Lisa, the poor woman who has to manage Sam and all his antics.
One of the most funny books about zombies, where the zombies are not the monster or the bad guy, actually being zombified, cures all sorts of health problems, from being overweight to the death doors, and you feel much more energetic and strong.
And what can I say that wont give spoilers, but it will explain in details what I did enjoy about this audiobook, both voice actors, you had a male and a female, they seemed to enjoy themselves while they were reading it, so it was so much more fun, it was also very nice the way they interact with the other, great fun, the story was also fun, and with lots of action and violence, but in a way that you will find yourself laughing out loud while listening to the violence, yeah the first dinner in the parents-in-law in the first few minutes of the book set what I was sure I would find during the book and it didn’t disappoint.
First off, I want to apologize to Mr Andy for not Reviewing these books at a lot earlier time. Again I can’t say anything but how much I have enjoyed the three books in this Series. The performance by Phil Blechman was great. I especially loved the voice of the Alien, and the Villains. Y’all just have to check out this Series, you won’t be disappointed. Thanks again Mr Andy Zach.
This is a great book to start with if you haven’t tried any Andy Zach book before. It contains stories from both his Life After Life zombie comedy series and his superhero story Super Secrets. It also shows you Zach’s sense of humor (plus there’s one little horror story that isn’t overly gruesome). This book is great for both kids and adults and works just fine on it’s own.
I loved the silly story of the flying zombie cucumbers. Ha! Very fanciful. And they have migratory routes, like butterflies! Very silly and had me chuckling. I also loved the story with the hamster (who does play a role in Secret Supers). Perhaps rodents will truly save the world some day.
The stories also help fill in some of the blanks of the zombie comedy series, including one about Diane (the beloved zombie mother-in-law). But what I really liked was the stuff about genetic engineering and the aliens. Book 3 of the Life After Life Chronicles had a lot of stuff tossed into the story and some of these short stories really help fill those parts out.
No time life for the Secret Supers! I’ll cover those in another post.
Who is Author Andy Zach? – My First Non-Fiction Book
It’s hard to believe, but I wrote a non-fiction book. It took me forty years to write. But it was worth it.
I use a different author name for my non-fiction. No sense in getting people confused.
Are you curious about Jesus Christ? Do you struggle to understand the Bible? The Gospel Medley includes the four Gospels in a single narrative, faithfully pulling the text from the World English Bible. You are now able to read all the gospel as a single, easy-to-read story.
Each Gospel describes Jesus’s life from a different point of view with different details and insights. The Gospel Medley combines every word into a single perspective with all details and events arranged chronologically.
Unlike other harmonies, The Gospel Medley doesn’t put the four gospels in columns or rows. Instead, the text is integrated word by word into a smoothly flowing narrative. Further, each paragraph references the four gospels so you can read the original citations. You also get footnotes of all the quotes from the Old Testament, giving you the context of Jesus’s words.
