A cyber-ghost story, a thriller based on a real, unexplained and unsolved time glitch that haunted the author's own laptop. That time gap was exactly...
Three minutes.
That is how long it took Julian to cook the perfect soft-boiled egg. It was, by then, the only thing his wife Leigh could eat. Leigh even setup an egg-timer app on her laptop, in large part to torture Julian over his poor sense of time. "Ding, Julian!" On that day, he got it just right. A perfect three minute egg, done just as he heard "Ding, Julian."
It took those same three minutes for Leigh to die. Alone. The one thing she dreaded: Dying alone. Julian almost made it with the perfect egg Leigh would never eat. In her last three minutes, she only had her laptop for company. Probably, the last thing she heard was "Ding Julian" while he was a flight of stairs away, getting it right. And so horribly late.
Julian carried on, if not well, for the next months. Without Leigh, without having been there with her. He couldn't bring himself to turn off her laptop. It helped that its egg-timer and Leigh's suicide-by-meds recipe file had disappeared on their own. Good riddance. He heard "Ding, Julian" enough in his sleep, increasingly as the anniversary approached.
Suddenly, Leigh's laptop inexplicably lost time. Three minutes.
Adequately tech-savvy, Julian knew a routine glitch when he saw one. But as he tried one thing after another to restore those minutes, he came up empty. No fix held. Nothing worked. Then, just as suddenly, with a "Ding, Julian," the cursed egg-timer reappeared. Julian was stunned. Once the recipe file reemerged, Julian began to wonder.
When a previously unknown video popped up - her final message - Julian was sure.
Leigh was giving him an another chance to join her for those Last Three Minutes.
About the Author: Born in 1950, John Nicholas Datesh lived in and around Pittsburgh until 2009. At Brown University, he took writing courses as a justification for doing just that. At Boston University Law School, he learned to insert phrases like It Depends and Hereinafter. In 2009, he moved cats Lila and Lucy Liu to a condo near the east shore of Florida's Naples Bay, leaving behind a Pittsburgh career in law, product development and business in favor of fiction, happy hours and beach chairs, presumably in that order. He began writing fiction with a pencil, publishing on paper and ink, novels: SF/Mystery The Nightmare Machine; Soft-boiled Detective The Janus Murder; and International Suspense The Moscow Tape. Published in Naples are short stories The Pro Station (WWII), The Final Equation (SF) and Reruns ad Infinitum (SF/Fantasy). He concocted a satiric blog at EmptyGlassFull, a collection of which is grandly entitled The Very First Blog Posts of All Time. The author's harrowing, wry Christmas short, You Could Call It a Christmas Story was first published as a post. 2013's epic The Girl in the Coyote Coat burst out of its original Mystery genre and page count. No one would call it a Romance, either. With its real estate and finance backdrop, the novel exposes how love, sex, money, scams, drugs, house-breaking and -shopping and fur coats can affect the lives of intriguing characters and even kill a few. The Girl in the Coyote Coat was rebranded in 2016 as A Need Apart, with identical content and a sedate, more Literary cover, featuring the same model and coyote, to reposition the novel as decidedly literary. November 2016's The Body in the Bog is the first Sunset Noir mystery novel of the planned Death by Condo series, starring prematurely retired lawyer Ian Decker. His 2009 screenplay-turned 2016 novel The Last Three Minutes is a partly true ghost story, written partly on the beach and entirely on Naples East Bay, although it is set in Pittsburgh where its central true incident occurred. All current covers adorning the author's works were designed by the author. The novels are available as ebooks and trade paperbacks, with those covers. The other works, and their covers, are available as ebooks.
