Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

  • Home
  • Mike Scott Thrillers
    • Held Hostage: Search for the Juncal
    • Water Crisis: Day Zero
    • Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters
    • The 3rd Key: Sharks in the Water
    • Oil and Water: Crash in Curacao
    • Return to Cayman: Paradise Held Hostage
    • Heart of the Maya: Murder for the Gods
    • Wreck of the Huron: Cuban Secrets
    • Guardians’ Keep: Mystery below the Adriatic
    • Flooding Hollywood: Fanatics at the Dam
    • Cayman Cowboys: Reefs Under Pressure
  • Withrow Key
    • Lyin’ Fish
    • Tales from Withrow Key
  • Agent AJ West
  • About the Author
    • Publicity and Interviews
  • Nonfiction
    • For Cheap Lobster
    • Heart Survivor: Recovery After Heart Surgery
    • Oral History
      • Batter Up!
      • Memories of the Valley
      • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
      • Capturing Memories: How to Record Oral Histories
    • Dive-abled: The Leo Morales Story
    • Keep on, Keepin’ On: A Breast Cancer Story
    • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
    • Russia: The New Age
    • Scuba Diving Safety
  • Free Short Fiction
  • Other Fiction
    • Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories
    • River Town
You are here: Home / Archives for Mike Scott thrillers

On Substack: Problems with freshwater

September 28, 2024 By Eric Douglas

You can find this post on Substack as well.

This week we’ve finally gotten appreciable rain where I live. It’s been months. Fortunately we avoided the flooding rains that people not that far to the south of me have endured. According to the National Weather Service, we’ve been in “exceptional” drought. The grass hasn’t grown. Trees have been dropping their leaves since late July or early August. The last time I cut my grass was June. 

We normally have lots of birds in our yard. I feed them all winter and provide a fallow area where they live and build nests. On a typical evening, I can identify 10 or more species of birds. 

But not this summer. There are a few, but most seem to have moved on in search of water. The Elk River is a couple miles away. The ground is too hard for them to find worms. There aren’t as many bugs crawling around or flying through the air. 

I’ve watched the news all summer and marveled at our dry air and heat while other parts of the country have been slammed with floods. (Everyone has been hot.) 

As the planet continues to warm, weather patterns are set to change. Some places we live now will become unlivable and temperate areas will be hotter and drier. 

Many of my novels involve current events, history and science. I might make up places and people, but the science is all real. I don’t write science fiction, but scifi is often about extrapolation — taking what we have and wondering what it will look like in the future. Think about Dick Tracy’s watch or tricorders and tablets on Star Trek.  

The major theme of Water Crisis: Day Zero is, obviously, water. I wrote this book a few years ago, inspired by a situation in Cape Town, South Africa where the city of more than 4.5 million people was within just a few days of running out of fresh water — its Day Zero. Researching deeper, I found that wasn’t an unusual scenario and civil wars have even started over fresh water resources. 

That’s where water refugees move to cities to get access to fresh water, putting strains on city services, leading to uprisings. The civil war in Syria is an example of this. 

But it’s not just in desert climates. Fifteen plus years ago, I was living in Durham, North Carolina when the local water reservoir was within a couple weeks of running out of water. A tropical storm hit the Carolina coast and in one weekend, everything was back to normal. 

About two weeks ago, a small community in West Virginia — Richwood — was within a few days of running out of freshwater. The Cherry River was down because of the drought. The city managers were even contemplating using water in a fracking well — if the radioactive levels in the water tested low enough. 

This week, suddenly, we got more rain than was even forecast, even before Helene slammed into Florida hard enough that it brought heavy rain to the southern Appalachian mountains. Everything is back to normal.

Water out west is a prime commodity. The Colorado River doesn’t make it to the ocean any more. I saw a photo recently showing an area in the San Joaquin Valley in California where the official elevation had dropped dozens of feet because the water table below ground has been pumped out for agriculture.

The point of all this is, some people don’t believe in sea level rise or even climate change. But it’s hard to ignore things like running out of water when it is right in front of your face. 

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Drought, Freshwater, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack, Water, Water Crisis

Travel around the world without leaving home with Mike Scott

April 19, 2024 By Eric Douglas

Summer is on its way in the northern hemisphere, but I’m sure some of my friends in the southern hemisphere are happy it is almost over. The heat has been alarming and is leading to severe coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. 

At home, though, it’s almost time to get 60 feet underwater here in West Virginia. Which means I have to get my tanks inspected and refilled. Last year, I ended up waiting until nearly the end of the season to go diving. A whole lot of life things got in the way, but that won’t happen this year. 

I know I’ve been saying this for months, but I am also finally getting back to writing. For real. I’m about a third of the way into what will be the next Mike Scott thriller novel. It’s a good one and a cool story. But I got myself stuck. I finally figured out it was the location. I was trying to put it someplace I didn’t know very well. Once I realized that, the logjam started to open back up. 

Right now, I am reading back through what I’ve written and identifying the places I need to adjust. And getting some new ideas on how to move it forward. Stay tuned. 

Lately, I’ve been doing some more writing on Substack as well. It’s an interesting place where essayists write on a wide variety of topics. It’s taken me a little while to find my voice there. I wanted to make it informative and based on my personal travels and experiences. Below are my two most recent essays. 

  • PFAS is a major problem for the oceans — and us
  • ‘You should’ve seen this 20 years ago’ becoming more and more real

You can subscribe there to get notified whenever I publish a new essay. 

Audiobooks

All of the Mike Scott novels and novellas are now available as audiobooks. Some are read by a professional voice actor; others are read by an AI voice. I’m satisfied with the AI reads, but obviously, they can never touch a human professional. 

Now that spring and summer road trip season is beginning, if you haven’t listened to any of my audiobooks, I invite you to check them out. 

Take a look at all of them. 

And speaking of road trips, if you want to get away, but can’t find the time right now, all of the Mike Scott stories are located on the ocean, on beaches and on islands. 

Locations in Mike Scott stories include:

  • Cayman Cowboys – Grand Cayman
  • Flooding Hollywood – Catalina Island and Los Angeles
  • Guardians’ Keep – Adriatic coast of Italy
  • Wreck of the Huron – North Carolina and Cuba
  • Heart of the Maya – Riviera Maya, Mexico
  • Return to Cayman – Grand Cayman
  • Oil and Water – Curacao
  • The 3rd Key – Florida Keys
  • Turks and Chaos – liveaboard dive boat in Turks and Caicos
  • Water Crisis – Moscow, The Bahamas and Miami, along with a couple shorter stops.
  • Held Hostage: Search for the Juncal — North Carolina and the coast of Mexico.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: audiobooks, books, diving, Mike Scott thrillers, scuba, thriller novels

Books, diving and everything else with ScubaRadio: Listen now!

March 25, 2024 By Eric Douglas

Over the weekend, Eric had the chance to speak with Greg Holt from ScubaRadio. Eric has been a friend of the show, and Greg’s since nearly the beginning of the show.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted any of these on-air conversations, but this felt like a good clip to post. This segment aired Mach 23, 2024.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: adventure, adventure fiction, books, diving, Mike Scott thrillers, scubaradio

Mystery and intrigue in Italy

March 20, 2024 By Eric Douglas

Much of my fiction is rooted in history and nonfiction. I’m not the kind of writer who spends a lot of time “world-building.” No disrespect to that at all. I cut my teeth as a reader on the Dune series, everything by Asimov and of course Tolkien and high fantasy. 

For me, the history of shipwrecks and ancient civilizations brought forward to today makes a great backdrop for the Mike Scott stories. One of my favorites in that regard is Guardians’ Keep. I was working in Italy along the Adriatic Coast when a friend told me a story about some archeological research Dr. Allesandro Marroni performed on a city that had sunk just off the coast. That sparked my imagination, of course. 

And in a twist, I was able to work in ancient Jewish history and the still-missing Breastplate of Judgment from the Old Testament. It was looted by Roman soldiers during the fall of the temple in about 70 A.D. 

I like to think it is the first book where I blended real history and modern day into one entertaining story. You’ll have to be the judge of that, of course.

Until March 26, Guardians’ Keep is on sale in both the Amazon and Amazon UK stores. The price will go up slowly between now and Tuesday so get it now!

Amazon

Amazon UK

A nonfiction book I co-authored with friend and former coworker Dan Orr is called Scuba Diving Safety. The book was originally intended as an update on an even earlier book on the subject. Ultimately, we completely rewrote it. That was 17 years ago. Just a few months ago, we got the rights to the book back from the original publisher and have been updating the chapters and reorganizing it some as well. I hope to bring you the good news soon that a new publisher has picked it up. We hope to have it ready this fall. 

Audiobooks

Most of my books are now available on Audible Plus where you can listen to as many books as you want. For some reason, Audible is dragging their feet on five of my audiobooks, though. They are still available to download directly, however. You can check them out here. 

Filed Under: Adventure Tagged With: adventure fiction, books, Italy, Mike Scott, Mike Scott thrillers, Substack

You can now listen to the entire Mike Scott series!

January 30, 2024 By Eric Douglas

I’m taking a big chance on technology using Amazon’s new Virtual Voice to create audiobooks for seven Mike Scott novels. 

Four of the Mike Scott stories were already in audiobook format, read by professional voice actor CJ Goodearl. But for various reasons, mostly time and money, we weren’t able to produce the rest of the series. 

I’ve had a couple over-the-road truckers reach out and ask about the rest of the series. They said they enjoyed the books, but didn’t have time to read. I am hopeful this will help them out. 

This is an AI reading, and it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. I’d love to hear back from listeners to see what they think.

You can find direct links on my Amazon Author page here. But they aren’t necessarily in order. 

Or check out the links on my website above. That’s the order they were written from Cayman Cowboys going up. 

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: adventure, audiobooks, books, Mike Scott thrillers

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

Real Thugs: A Cult of Murder — Small groups of travelers have disappeared all over the mid-Atlantic without a trace. When bodies turn up with what appear to be ritual markings, FBI Agent AJ West is on the hunt for what might be a serial killer. Or something even more sinister. It’s a race against […]

View Book

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Substack
  • Threads
  • YouTube
Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2025 ·