Final Notice, the Back-story
The spark. Many years ago, I witnessed my father transitioning from a very successful and entrepreneurial businessman to retirement, and it wasn’t pretty. He’d worked hard all his life, enlisted in the WW2 effort, and spent 18 months in a German prison camp after being shot down. After he retired, he felt pushed to the side, irrelevant, and I knew that he wasn’t the only senior who felt that way.
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Enter my imagination, penchant for sports watches, and America’s love affair with guns. What if a watch existed that would tell people when they were going to die and that some of those people, enough of them, would use their guns to get revenge on the people causing them to feel irrelevant? Perhaps, when word of these revenge acts became widespread, people, in general, would begin treating seniors with more respect, initially out of fear but eventually out of custom and habit.
The result.. Introducing FINAL NOTICE. Vijay Patel, the brilliant doctor/mathematician who invented the watch, wanted a device that would give its wearers time to get their affairs in order, say their last goodbyes, or strike off an item on their bucket list. But in several cases, the opportunity to get revenge with impunity – afforded by the knowledge of impending death – leads to some very unanticipated results, especially when the Final Notice recipient has easy access to a gun.
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The disparate stories of Final Notice are woven into the moral dilemmas of several main protagonists, including, Vijay Patel, Zoe Brouet, the young FBI agent who investigates the murders ... Vince and Trudy Fuller, a retired middle-class couple with an ethnically-diverse group of friends and an endearing Corgi.
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Underscoring the book’s message about the lack of effective gun control in the USA, an original song, “Crazy Eddie Got a Gun" (supposedly written by one of the protagonists in the book), is available as a download — for free. The song is performed by Jackie Morris, a popular Pandora Folk/Americana singer/songwriter (and Van’s partner).
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Final Notice is available as a screenplay and is being considered as a movie or streamed series. You can read en excerpt here.
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Want an autographed copy of FINAL NOTICE? Send me an e-mail at van@vanfleisher.com, and I’ll send you an inscribed copy. (USA only.) $15.00, including postage.​
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FINAL NOTICE is also available as an Audible book. If you haven’t tried audiobooks, I’d encourage you to do so. It’s an entertaining way to take a walk or when traveling. And if you use e-books, the audiobook will sync with the e-book, so wherever you stop reading or listening to one, it will pick up with the other! How cool is that? If you buy an Audible version of Final Notice, I’ll send you a free e-book. Just send me an e-mail at van@vanfleisher.com with a copy of your Audible receipt, and I’ll send you an e-book.