ROBERT MASELLO is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and the author of many previous novels and nonfiction books. His most recent novel, Blood and Ice, was published to great acclaim in the United States and in nine foreign languages.
His other books include Vigil, a USA Today bestseller, and Writer Tells All, which appeared on the Los Angeles Times trade paperback bestseller list. His guide to the writing life, Robert’s Rules of Writing, has become a staple in many high school and college classrooms.
Robert’s television credits include such popular shows as Charmed, Sliders, Early Edition, and Poltergeist: The Legacy.
He has also contributed articles and essays to a wide range of publications, including The Washington Post, New York magazine, Newsday, Town and Country, Travel and Leisure, Elle, Redbook, People, Parade, Glamour, Westways, Harper’s Bazaar, The Wilson Quarterly, and many more.
A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the noted authors Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton University, and later taught or lectured at several other colleges and institutions, including the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the New York University Publishing Program, UCLA Extension, and Claremont McKenna College, where he served for six years as the visiting lecturer in literature. He now lives in Santa Monica, California.
If you loved The Medusa Amulet,
be sure not to miss
the next thrilling novel from Robert Masello.
As the Alaskan permafrost melts,
uncovering the graves of a colony wiped out
by the Spanish flu in 1918,
an epidemiologist must prevent a recurrence of
the world’s deadliest disease, and might also solve
one of history’s most enduring mysteries
in the process….
THE ROMANOV CROSS
by
Robert Masello Available Fall 2012.
Here’s a special preview.
THE BERING STRAITS
1918
“Sergei, do not die,” the girl said, turning around in the open boat. “I forbid you to die.” She had hoped, in vain, that her voice would not falter.
When she tried to reach out to him, he pulled away, still holding on to the tiller with dead-white fingers.
“No, no,” he said, drawing back in horror. “Don’t touch me.” His eyes were wild, the stubble on his pale young cheeks was flecked with blood and foam. “You have to sail there,” he said, as he pointed with one trembling finger over the prow of the boat. “There!” he said, demanding that Ana—a willful young woman, who had never been responsible for anything more than picking a frock—turn, and do what he, a Siberian peasant, was ordering.
Reluctantly she looked back, the ragged sail crackling above her head, and saw in the distance, beyond a cloud of fog, the indistinct outline of an island, dark and forbidding, rising from the sea. From the boat it looked like a clenched fist, encircled by a misty gray bracelet. Ana had never seen a more unwelcoming sight.
“Look for the fires. They will light fires.”
“But I can’t sail the boat alone,” she pleaded. “You have to do it.”
Sergei shook his head and coughed so hard the blood ran between his fingers. The sail snapped in the blistering wind. He glanced down at his soiled hand, his eyes glazed, and whispered, “May God protect you now.” And then, as calmly as if he were turning in bed, he rolled over the side of the boat and into the icy waters of the strait.
“Sergei!” she screamed, plunging to the side of the boat so abruptly she threatened to capsize it.
But he was already gone, floating off the stern with his sealskin coat billowing out around him like the spread wings of a bat. For a few more seconds, he bobbed on the surface, riding the waves until the weight of his body and his boots and his clothes dragged him down. All that remained was a single wilted and frozen blue cornflower floating on the water.
The sight of it made her want to weep.
She was alone in the boat—alone in the world—and the tiller was already lurching wildly from one side to the other, screeching louder than the gulls swooping in and out of the fog. The hollow place in her heart, the place where she had already stored so many deaths, would have to find room for Sergei’s, too.
But how many more could she possibly be expected to hold there?