Tuesday's Title, The Criminal Streak, A First Contact/Science Fiction novel

The overwhelming crime of one planet leads to a penal colony being started on another planet and results in huge changes taking place in the lives of the innocent inhabitants.

Title: The Criminal Streak (Silence of the Innocent/Cry of the Guilty Book 1)

Author: Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

Genre: Science Fiction, First Contact

Publisher: BWL Publishing
Buy Links:   Amazon / More Stores

Blurb:

After two pieces of an asteroid hit their planet and knocked it off its axis, the surviving beings have spent centuries rebuilding their society on the edge of disaster. The Leaders made Great Changes and Purges constructing twenty huge cities, called megalopolises, to house their population, cultivating large farms, and purging most of the technology so everyone had a job.

The one problem the Leaders can’t control is crime. They have banished first time criminals to the destroyed former cities, now called Fringes, beside the Megalopolises. The murderers and drug and tobacco sellers are being sent to Orbital Prisons. These are set inside former spaceships orbiting above the planet. But those prisons are being overwhelmed and there is now a quest to find another planet that would support their type of species.

Jawn has just been sent to the Fringe of Megalopolises One for theft. He is lost, scared, and easily robbed of his few belongings. He finds his brother, Georg, who has been in the Fringe for years and is given a quick lesson on the rules of living in the Fringe.

Gwin is an Exploratory Officer who is part of the mission that finds the planet suitable to be used for a penal colony. She is framed for murder and Gwin, Jawn and Georg are among the prisoners on the space ships when they land on that planet. Along with them are a governor, judge, police officers, cooks, and other people who have been sent along to make this colony a success. Some of them made the trip to avoid prosecution at home.

Behind the Scene:

This series began with a sentence in my mind. When I started to flesh it out, I was writing a chapter a week. It eventually ran into about 110,000 words so I broke it into the two novels: The Criminal Streak and Betrayed. I named the series Silence of the Innocent/Cry of the Guilty which will only be understood at the end of Betrayed.

Author Bio:

I was born in New Westminster, B.C. Canada, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. Over the years I worked as a bartender, hotel maid, cashier, bank teller, bookkeeper, printing press operator, meat wrapper, gold prospector, warehouse shipper, house renovator, and nursing attendant.

Since I love change, I have moved over thirty times in my life, living on acreages and farms and in small towns and cities throughout Alberta and B.C. I now live on an acreage on Vancouver Island with my husband and three female cats.

I began my writing career with a short story, progressed to travel and historical articles, and then on to travel books. I called these books my Backroads series and in the seven of them I described what there is to see and do along the back roads of British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska. They were published by Lone Pine Publishing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I then switched to fiction, writing three mystery novels, Illegally Dead, The Only Shadow in the House, and Whistler's Murder. The main character is a travel writer who gets involved in murders every time she heads out to work on an article for a travel magazine. In my stand-alone mystery novel, Gold Fever, I combine mystery with a little romance.

I have also written three Canadian historical novels: West to the Bay, and West to Grande Portage, and Romancing the Klondike.

I write in different genres mainly because I get an idea and write the book and then decide where it fits in the writing world. That is the way I wrote The Criminal Streak and Betrayed. They were my first science fiction novels.

All my fiction is published by BWL Publishing in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada.

For more on Joan and her works, find her on the web at:

Publisher's Website / Goodreads