It all started about a decade ago, when the Portal suddenly opened up over the stadium right in the middle of a game. Cleveland just hadn't been the same since, what with electronic devices pretty much useless-unless you were willing to spend a fortune in digital protection and redundancy equipment-and all the dragons, elves, gnomes, dwarves, gargoyles, etc. who'd come through the Portal to take up residence within the areas covered by the Portal's magical field.
For Kline Maxwell, City Hall reporter for the Cleveland Press, magic-based Cleveland had long since become the status quo. At least until a fellow reporter named Morgan came down with a case of eyeballs growing all over his body. The diagnosis: stay out of Portal territory and he'd be just fine. But that meant Maxwell and all the other reporters were going to have to take up the slack. And Maxwell hated the thought of doing "fuzzy gnome" stories. Still, he took his job seriously, and when he was assigned to cover a dragon's death by crash-landing into the Cuyahoga, he headed over to the accident site with only a modest number of curses. But what should have been a simple accident report soon led Maxwell in search of a much bigger story-one that would see him kidnapped by elves, framed for murder, holding secret meetings with dragons, and fleeing not only from the cops but from pretty much everyone....
About the Author:
Steven Krane and S. Andrew Swann are pseudonyms for Steven Swiniarski. He is a full-time novelist who has written science-fiction, horror, and suspense professionally since leaving the mechanical engineering program at Cleveland State University. His roots are in the East Side Heights area of Cleveland, where he's resided for about a quarter century. Much of his work, at least in part, is set in Cleveland. These include his first novel, Forests of the Night, along with God's Dice, Raven, The Flesh, the Blood, and the Fire and Teek.
He is also a member of a local writer's workshop--the Cajun Sushi Hamsters From Hell-- which has critiqued most of his novels, either whole or in part.
Reviews
Cleveland author S. Andrew Swann's newest book involved elves, dragons and magic. Best of all, THE DRAGONS OF THE CUYAHOGA takes place in Cleveland.
Swann's tale centers around an investigative journalist and the murder of a dragon, an act that involved greed, graft, and a lot of very heavy magic. It's a good energetic mystery, with a complicated plot and lots of chasing-down-leads action. But the Cleveland setting, and the idea that this is a place of powerful juju, is what makes it fun.
-Cleveland Plain Dealer
Swann's latest hard-hitting mystery is a fantasy, set in a Cleveland, Ohio that has been drastically changed by the opening of a gateway to a magical dimension, and the resulting leakage of magic. The murder victim is a dragon; the detective is a political reporter who really resents being forced to cover a "fuzzy gnome" story about a dead dragon.... Though the death of a dragon provides the impetus, the novel's really about the way this transformed world works, with elves, wizards, scrambled electronics-and an ailing city revived thanks to an influx of magic-seeking tourists. It's a provocative world of deadly enchantment in which the dirty game of politics remains the biggest theme of all.
-Locus
