Featured Indie Book: Connected: The Call (Michelle Medhat)

Featured Indie Book on Indie Author News: Spy Thriller Connected: The Call by Michelle Medhat.

Connected: The Call is a fast-paced international spy thriller set in the world of international terrorists, political intrigue and government cover-ups, thrilling missions and advanced technologies. Short chapters which follow a live timeline give the reader a feeling of being really in the story. The reader has a true sense of pace, as they fly around the globe, interacting with character after character at breakneck speed!

The Book has been self-published via Lulu and is available as eBook, Paperback, and Hardcover - 290 pages - released in December 2013.

About the Book

Connected: The Call is a very unusual book. Its heart is that of an addictive, exhilarating spy thriller, but its soul is dallying with something more surreal. This mix keeps you hooked. With every turn of the page, a new dimension is revealed, as you go further into a world where traditional powers are failing and a new brand of enemy has the edge.

The central characters are Sam and Ellie Noor; a married couple deeply in love. Only, everything that Sam has told Ellie is a lie, and very soon his world breaks into hers in ways she cannot possible imagine.

For Ellie Noor - an innocent woman who is at the centre of it all - one unexplained moment starts a chain reaction leading to series of events that will change her life forever. But what isn’t she telling? And is it all too late?

Click to Read an Excerpt

The shifting power-play between governments and international terrorists, where double agents, advanced technologies and brutal actions only seek to mask a deeper fight. In the end, it will be down to control, but those who think they have it are just fooling themselves. Control belongs to another. And this is only the beginning.

Connected: The Call is full of people with their own agendas, secrets and lies. From hidden meetings place near Whitehall to the dungeons in Langley, from the high tech laboratories in the Middle East to the winding English country lanes, this book weaves a journey in real-time, with a very real sense of now, although no year is given, the reader is given the notion of it being current, if not set in the future.

Reviews (Excerpts)

- "[...] It moves so fast that you keep going back to check what you forgot to remember! I loved the mathematical precision in the way the events in the USA and the UK are weaved together over a very short space of time, supported by flashbacks that place the story in context. Your challenge is to read the book in a shorter time than the period over which the plot runs. At first it seems frighteningly sci-fi – but then, gradually, you will come to believe it is all possible and you will wonder what Michelle Medhat knows that the rest of us can only imagine." - M J Webster

- "[...] Highly recommended read. Connected: The Call is a gripping, vividly written, modern thriller. You won't want to put it down!" - J M Reilly

- "I love the author's approach to writing this book. The style feels conversational but you get to the end of a plot point and you suddenly realise how thrilled you have been reading it and want to get on to the next page and chapter straight away. Impossible not to be gripped. " - Dan Fox

- "Connected: The Call is a great read, with short, fast moving chapters, interesting characters and a variety of locations. The plot makes you question who you want to come out on top, and most of all why! [...]" - Leslie (Amazon)

About the Author

Author Michelle Medhat

Michelle Medhat has had an exciting career that spans over 24 years in technology, science, education and marketing. Currently, Michelle is Director of Operations and Strategic Development at NEF: The Innovation Institute, an educational charity and professional institute that she co-founded with her husband Professor Sa’ad Medhat in 2004. The Institute has donated millions of pounds to the science, engineering and technology education sector, and has helped to improve the lives of over 500,000 people.

In her time, she has headed up an e-learning company, an events and media company and a management consultancy. She has even created (from scratch) an educational institutional overseas (in Dubai) with her husband based on the UK educational system. Over the years, Michelle has worked with clients from BBC, Channel 4, EDF Energy, GSK and the NHS. Michelle has always tried to stay ahead of her time. A case in point being, back in 1995 she orchestrated the first international conference in the UK on multimedia communications (MediaComm) when the Internet was at its infancy. Backed by leading media and press organisations (BBC, ITN, The Independent, Times Higher) and technology companies (IBM, BT, Philips), the event introduced the public then to an unknown technology called ‘entertainment on demand’.

Michelle has been writing ever since she was old enough to hold a pen. Her first work was written at the tender of four, following her Grandfather’s untimely death. Young Michelle penned the poem ‘Sleep’ after a vivid dream of her Grandfather, and at the time she had not been told he’d passed away:

“When I sleep my beautiful sleep
I see and hear things in my dreams
Of faces I no longer see and voices I no longer hear
In my sweet beautiful sleep”

Through her life Michelle has always written, and has carried a deep love for reading and writing. In between being a serial entrepreneur starting up and running several companies, and more recently a charity and professional institution, Michelle has stayed committed to her first true love.

Back in April 2003, the genesis of a writing project formed that would stay with her for 10 years. Writing Connected: The Call and later Connected: The Shift (out in Spring 2014) became a labor of love. Taking up early mornings, late evenings, weekends, train and plane journeys. Everywhere she could write, Michelle did write. Eventually, between business pressures, her first book Connected: The Call was published.

Michelle tested Connected: The Call on various people she knew before it was published, and nearly all identified a mood that seemed to capture the deep feelings of people today. Michelle had incorporated themes that affect our modern lives: the mistrust of establishment, the fact that the government and its agencies can do almost anything with impunity, and civilians have little redress; the fears of terrorism (in any form) and a general feeling that we’ve all gone too far. The book of course counters these dark themes with a solid hope that things will somehow improve and the balance shift that has occurred can be reversed.

Michelle is aware that the both The Call and The Shift handle some very strong themes, and presents situations that are virtually intractable for the protagonists, although despite this, there is a continuous underlying strength in hope, faith and a belief in love and goodness.

Connected also has a strong, technological feel to it, and all the technology and science that has been included is grounded in the principles of ‘real science’. Over the years being in technology, science and engineering, Michelle has accumulated an array of articles and information relating to these technologies, and together with over 24 years of technical knowledge, Michelle has been able to create devices in the Connected series that have been termed as ‘highly plausible’ and ‘believable’ by those who have read the book.