Gary Engler

American Spin Gary Engler

The future of journalism, a potential buyout and asking Americans what they see in Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are top of Waylon Choy's mind as he takes two former Vancouver Sun newsroom colleagues on what he thinks will be a short spin in his restored 1965 AMC Ambassador 990 convertible across the border into the United States. While Choy likes his job as a feature writer, newspapers across North America are shrinking or closing, he has been offered $150,000 to quit and wants to discuss career options with his friends, one of whom now teaches journalism and the other runs a public relations firm. As well as discussing what to do with the last half of his working life and showing off the automotive fruit of three years labour, Choy has promised a small favor to an intriguing woman he just met. But the size and complexity of that favor quickly grows, requiring a team of reporter/investigators to uncover the truth about a very wealthy man who has surrounded himself with violent, right wing, white nationalist militia members, and the supposed suicide of Vancouver's former police chief. A deceptively simple dance step, a short car ride across the border and manipulation of what you think - American Spin is all these. It is also an international mystery and political thriller in which the central character, Vancouver Sun reporter Waylon Choy, risks his life in pursuit of the truth just as the craft of journalism seems to be abandoning the people who practice it and the Republican candidate for President tweets FAKE NEWS about any story he disagrees with. The only good news is that no one in the media thinks Donald Trump can win the election. Praise for the FAKE NEWS series"... bring(s) the Hammett/Chandler tradition up to date in the nightmarish orange glow of the Trump era, telling stories of murder and conspiracy that take into account the punishing realities of class, gender and racial oppression in our times. ... The action is well plotted and propulsive, and readers who love the noir elements of the hard-boiled detective genre will find much to enjoy here."Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun