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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town, A Marshall James Thriller (Chapter 25 through 27)
Marshall James: Chapters Twenty-Five Through Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Five finds Marshall waking up in Leland’s apartment the morning after a drug-fueled night he remembers all too clearly. Filled with regret, he dresses, slips out, and returns to Trent Stoffer’s Upper East Side apartment — where he finds the place ransacked and Trent dead, bound and tortured in his bedroom. Knowing the police will eventually trace him to the scene, Marshall grabs a hidden computer disk from his suitcase and disappears into the New York morning — just as Carlton the doorman picks up the phone.
Chapter Twenty-Six steps out of the thriller’s timeline for a quieter moment, as Marshall and Boo walk the streets of Lambertville, taking in Bridge Street, the Brightside Diner, and the unhurried pace of small-town life. For the first time in a long time, Marshall feels something loosen. He begins to think Lambertville might be exactly the change he needs.
Chapter Twenty-Seven brings us back to the immediate crisis. With nowhere to go and the clock ticking, Marshall makes his way to the Big Cup coffee shop in Chelsea, where he encounters Colin — a young, sharp-eyed escort with a gift for reading people. Out of options and running on fumes, Marshall accepts Colin’s offer of a couch and a few hours of sleep, knowing he’s going to have to tell someone the truth very soon.
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A Book Reading with Authors Mark McNease and Kim Cook, Lambertville, May 3 (Video Excerpt)
On May 3rd, 2026, in Lambertville, New Jersey, two authors came together for an afternoon of storytelling, craft, and memoir. Mark McNease shared excerpts from Blank Page to Bookshelf: From First Sentence to First Sale — his guide to fiction writing, character creation, and self-publishing — and Kim Cook shared from her powerful memoir, I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness. Keep watching for a video excerpt from that event.
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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: The Black Dahlia
True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Black Dahlia
Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays. I’ll be sharing a true crime story every Tuesday on Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Narration is provided by my own Wondervox. Fasten your headphones for one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime – or is it American madness?
They found her on the morning of January 15th, 1947.
A woman walking with her daughter through a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She thought at first that what she was seeing was a discarded department store mannequin. A broken one, in two pieces.
It wasn’t a mannequin.
The body had been completely severed at the waist. Drained of blood. Cleaned. Posed with a precision that suggested not rage — but ritual. Her face had been slashed at the corners of the mouth, cutting what investigators would describe as a grotesque grin from ear to ear.
She was twenty-two years old. Her name was Elizabeth Short.
The press would call her the Black Dahlia — a name she never knew in life, but one that would outlast everything else about her.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’ by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 11 – 13)
Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.
Today we continue our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction’s most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, another three chapters of Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room.’
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Audiobook Sample for Kim Cook’s ‘I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness’
This audiobook sample is intended for promotional purposes only. You can purchase the audiobook on Audible and Amazon. Narration provided by Kelly L’Heureux. Introduction and outro narration provided by Wondervox.
I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness
In every life, there are moments that shimmer just beneath the surface of memory—encounters, decisions, and turning points that, at the time, felt ordinary but would come to shape the very fabric of who we are. This book is a journey into such moments: the recollections of a daughter navigating the joys and sorrows of family, the unpredictability of change, and the search for belonging across places and decades.
Woven through these pages are the voices of those I have loved and learned from, especially my father, whose gentle wisdom guided me through the tumult and beauty of growing up. As I open these doors to my past, I invite you to step inside, to witness the laughter and grief, the certainty and doubt, and perhaps find echoes of your own story along the way.
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‘The Gospel According to God’ from ‘5 of a Kind: Short Fiction’ by Mark McNease (AUDIO)
CLICK THE PLAYER OR HERE TO LISTEN
I’ll be sharing one story at a time in audio version from my collection ‘5 of a Kind: Short Fiction.’
“The Gospel According to God”, narrated by my own Wondervox, is the first story the collection. Spanning human history from primordial silence to a chance encounter on a Central Park bench, the story traces what happens when people mistake the infinite for a brick and the boundless for a rulebook — including Eric, a pre-literate mystic who discovers the divine lives inside every person and is killed for saying so.
Threading through the ancient scenes is Melissa, a young theater major from Michigan who arrives in New York City chasing a dream and finds herself ambushed by wonder. Riding subways and navigating the beautiful chaos of the city, she begins to sense something watching back — curious and unhurried.
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The Twist Podcast 326: Luggage Cart Wars, Rick Joins Substack, and An Interview with Angela Luna
Welcome to The Twist, episode 326. We have a packed show for you today. The luggage cart wars are real — we’re talking about the unspoken battlefield of airports and hotels where perfectly reasonable people turn into territorial strangers over a metal cart on wheels. Rick Rose has officially joined Substack, and we’ll get into what drove that decision and what he’s planning to do with it. We also have a terrific interview with Angela Luna that covers some real ground.
Beyond that, it’s a full episode — we get into what’s been bugging us this week, because there is always something. We have our Hit List recommendations, the things we’ve been watching, reading, eating, and generally can’t stop talking about. And Jo stops by with her weekly wisdom, because every episode needs a little Jo.
All of that on episode 326 of The Twist.
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AI and the End of Talent
AI and the End of Talent
By Mark McNease / EditorHaving been given something I know was written by AI and asked what I thought of it, as if the person had written it themself, and responding with “That’s very well written,” I realized that the end of talent – the years of development, the craft, the skill, that unique something that makes a writer a truly good writer – may be upon us. I know a lot of what I read now online is not written by humans, but it’s only recently that I viewed it from the perspective of someone who has been writing for 55 years and who has always enjoyed the thrill of discovering someone who was truly gifted), and realizing that AI is getting so good that it can make talent obsolete.
I’m not a hater. I use Claude, and find it very helpful when I’m stuck on plot, or I need to figure out a transition. But there is a not-so-fine line that, when crossed, makes decades of learning and growing and honing and crafting almost pointless. And that, I think, is the true imposter syndrome: not to believe that we are writers when we’re not, but to believe we are good ones when all we have written are prompts. I started writing at the age of 10 because it was and remains a magical experience, a zone of imagination that requires skill and time and effort and finesse and revision and listening and more revision and the silence of the blank page. To find ourselves approaching a point where “anyone can do that” with ChatGPT or Claude makes it all nearly pointless. I still want to thrill to the discovery of a wordsmith and a talented writer, without wondering if they actually wrote it. Will I stop using AI as a tool? No. Will I let it make me irrelevant? I hope not.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’ by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 1 – 6)
Today we continue our serialized audio journey through one of the great classics of detective fiction: The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux — presented here in the Vivid Press Edition.
First published in 1907, this novel gave the world one of its most enduring puzzles: a woman attacked in a room locked from the inside, with no possible means of escape for her assailant. No hidden doors. No passable windows. No explanation — until a brilliant young reporter named Joseph Rouletabille decides to find one.
If you’ve never read it, you’re in for something special. If you have, welcome back to one of the finest locked-room mysteries ever written.
In today’s episode, we bring you Chapters Seven through Ten.
Sit back, settle in, and enjoy “The Mystery of the Yellow Room” by Gaston Leroux. Narration provided by Wondervox.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 22 -24 w/YouTube)
Welcome back to Fearsome Fiction, and to Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller.
When we last left Marshall, he was finding his footing in a New York City that was as thrilling as it was foreign — a city that moved faster than he did, that asked more of him than he expected, and that seemed to be keeping secrets at every turn.
In tonight’s chapters, those secrets begin to take on weight. Trent hands Marshall a small yellow envelope — a floppy disk he calls “insurance” — and refuses to say more. It’s the kind of thing a man hands off only when he’s afraid of what might happen to it. Or to him.
Marshall puts the envelope away and goes on with his evening, because what else do you do? You put on a borrowed coat, you navigate your first New York City subway ride — tokens and all — and you head to Chelsea for what you tell yourself is just dinner. And maybe something more.
What he finds at Leland’s apartment, though, isn’t dinner. It’s a little white pill and a great deal of persuasion. And with one small word — sure — Marshall James crosses a line he can’t uncross.
Chapters twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four. A disk full of secrets. A train into the dark. And the first of many falls to come.
