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Descriptions of my Fiction Novels ...But first, a fair warning ...The 'thriller' novels described below are fairly gory and violent. The crime scenes are as realistic as I could make them without deliberately trying to trigger the reader's gag reflex. There's a significantly high body count amongst the good-guy characters as well as the bad, which has generated more than a few quizzical looks and muttered comments from my cop and agent buddies. And I try not to make the forensic scientists any more heroic than is absolutely necessary. You can expect to find animals taking a significant part (and having a significant impact) in all of the books. The lurking shark in BALEFIRE. The numerous snakes and the mouse in THE ALCHEMIST. The irrepressible ferret and the ever-protective German Shepherd in DIGGER/CHEATER. The grizzly bear in PREY. The rare Cat Island turtle in WILDFIRE. And in DOUBLE BLIND ... well, the best I can say for DOUBLE BLIND is that the animal situation there got completely out of control. All of which, I suppose, may explain the appearance of the ultimate in invasive species in FIRST EVIDENCE and OUTER PERIMETER. However, least the gentle-hearted of my readers be concerned, there are some 'sensuous and romantic moments' throughout the stories. At least I think they're sensuous and romantic. My dear wife's cheerful comments in this regard are perhaps best left for some other home page. Much better that you see (and read) for yourself. BALEFIRE ...
So when a real, honest-to-god professional terrorist named Thanatos shows up along the shoreline of Huntington Beach, California, intent on destroying the scenic beach city as a demonstration against the 1984 Olympic games, the local cops have no idea what's happening, and therefore don't stand much of a chance. Which puts them in a terrible situation when they're forced to chose between defending their city, their families ... and themselves. A kind review from
Playboy: From John Saul: And Publisher's Weekly: "A real heart-attack of a climax!"
Check here to read the first chapter of BALEFIRE
THE ALCHEMIST ...
Hiding behind his underworld identity as the elusive Alchemist, Isaac, the creator of the wondrous sex-enhancing analogs code-named Power-Rainbow and Rainbow-Vision, finds himself being sought by the Mob and a retired U.S. Army 'General' turned drug dealer, and protected by a terribly dangerous drug kingpin named Jimmy Pilgrim and his psychotic, knife-freak enforcer named Rainbow. Increasingly paranoid as he falls prey to his own increasingly powerful chemical creations, Isaac has no idea that his life will ultimately hinge on the actions of a hapless street kid named Eugene Bylighter, a beautiful young hooker named Skylight, a pair of terrifying snakes, and a timid and frightened kangaroo rat named Mini-Cooper. The heroes: DEA special agents Ben Koda and Charlie Shannon, and DEA tech agent Sandy Mudd, a mis-matched team of covert investigators fiercely determined to find this fabled Alchemist, hunt down the General, Pilgrim and Rainbow, and avenge the horrible deaths of two of their fellow agents. But to pull it all off, they will ultimately have to do something that is unthinkably dangerous: make a one-pound buy off Jimmy Pilgrim. Oh, and just to make things interesting, I added a young and naive forensic scientist who --- knowing nothing of the General, Pilgrim, Rainbow, or the Mob --- agrees to pose as an underground chemist in order to help a local narcotics sergeant find the lab source of this terribly dangerous and enticing new analog. But not knowing how to make drugs, she seeks out her ex-professor of organic chemistry who, she hopes, will teach her some believable magic tricks. Where did I get the idea for this book? Well, you see, some time after I'd joined the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, and at the suggestion of the Vice/narcotics detail, I went to see my ex-organic chemistry professor at UCR .... "Tense ... fast
.... violent ... entirely plausible, According to the
Tacoma News Tribune: "The meanest, dirtiest, knock-them-down, Or, as Publisher's
Weekly put it: Well, that's probably overstating the situation just a bit, but I did try.
Howsoever, if you're just a wee bit curious about what a New England raised mother would just as soon you didn't read, you can always rummage around the used book stores for the old Bantam version ... or your can ask your friendly bookstore owner to order the Tor/Forge re-issued paperback version on the left.
Click here to read the first chapter of THE ALCHEMIST. DIGGER ...
But just to throw things off a bit, you'll find a genuine CIA hero in the mix. The trick is to figure out who ... and why. And in the process, try not to think too much about the crawl space scene.
PREY ...
Anyway, Henry is one of those aggressively-instinctive cops who doesn't necessarily play by all of the rules. As the story begins, he is up in Anchorage, Alaska, working undercover (out of his jurisdiction, naturally) in order to track down the leader of a malicious biker gang who assaulted his partner. Unbeknownst to Henry, he has been spotted , and subsequently monitored, by a very professional team of covert federal wildlife agents who are working against the very same gang for very different reasons. After observing Henry for a while, they come to the conclusion that he is exactly the kind of covert investigator---reckless, tough, fearless, and totally unpredictable---that they need to round out their team. In effect, a very useful 'wild-card.' Henry is quickly and efficiently recruited into the Service [basically, the agents give him up to the bikers, and then thoughtfully proceed to save his butt at the last minute], whereupon my understandably skeptical and suspicious new federal agent and his partners find themselves confronted---and ultimately hunted down---by a team of terribly dangerous international terrorists who have been hired to destroy the environmental movement using a deadly series of CIA-type tricks. A very kind review: And: "Only the
fish are neutral in Goddard's bloody, I have a feeling my mother was starting to get seriously worried about me at this point. I assured her that all of this had nothing to do with my upbringing. Just the influence of my cop & agent buddies, and the other interesting folks I tend to associate with these days. PREY is currently available as a Tor/Forge paperback, and the cover looks just like the hardcover so I didn't see any point in repeating things. Same goes for WILDFIRE and CHEATER. Click here to read the first chapter of PREY WILDFIRE ...
As a result, Henry Lightstone and his fellow federal wildlife agents find themselves confronting not only their old nemesis, ICER, but also an extra-lethally-armed bad-guy named Riser, and a questionably evil woman. Mom and my dear wife raised their eyebrows at this last part, but I assured them that she was nothing more than a sensuous figment of my over-active imagination. After all, what possible interest could I have in a questionably evil woman? [ :)]. Evil or not, she is interesting ... and the action ultimately takes place in and around the Bahamas where, among other things, it's definitely not safe to be in or on the water. According to yet
another set of kind reviewers: And: For some reason, Mom found that last comment reassuring, although I'm not at all sure why. Click here to read the first chapter of WILDFIRE CHEATER ...
I hasten to add here that I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that the CIA is actually doing any such thing. And the fact that I'm still around to write novels, construct home pages, and shoo cows back and forth across my pasture is probably as good an indicator as any that they aren't. One can only hope. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that the idea for DIGGER/CHEATER came about several years ago when I had to work a crawl-space scene on a homicide case (some real-life idiot was killing people and burying their bodies under the crawl spaces of creepy old houses). Among other cheerful aspects, I had to tape my wrists, ankles and neck to keep the spiders from getting into my clothing while I was under the house. Figured that as long as I was going to have nightmares about those 2.5 hours for the rest of my life, I might as well share them with my dear readers. Another kind take from
Krikus Reviews: NOTE: CHEATER is also available as a Forge paperback. Click here to read the first chapter of CHEATER DOUBLE BLIND ...
Now you see why I don't worry too much about random CIA plots. Fact of the matter is, if real life in the Fish & Wildlife Service was anything like my fiction, I'd be afraid to leave the house. From the Library
Journal:
Click here to
read the prologue of DOUBLE BLIND
The
Rules are simple: FIRST EVIDENCE .....So what inspired me to start digging around for extraterrestrial evidence? Well, to give you a hint, back in 1997, I was invited to be a guest on the Art Bell Talk Radio show. [For those of you who haven't listened to the Art Bell show, I heartily recommend that you tune in some night. It is --- at the very least --- an educational experience. Art was on live across the U.S. from 10:00P.M. (Pacific Time Zone) until about 4:00A.M.] Although, in truth, I'm really guessing about the 4:00A.M. part. I had to work the next day, so I only lasted until about 3:30. But during that time, Art and I and several attentive callers discussed, at considerable length, a topic apparently dear to the hearts of his fans, namely: "why doesn't anybody believe us when we try to tell them about our contacts with extraterrestrial beings?" Which led to a second question: how can we (properly) document and collect the evidence necessary to prove to everyone that these contacts actually happened? And a third: since your lab (The National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Laboratory) deals with 'non-human' materials, would evidence of extraterrestrial contact normally be sent to your lab? [Important note to extraterrestrial investigators: sorry, but evidence submitted to our lab must be accompanied by a law enforcement agency case number & evidence tag ... and, as far as I am aware, the Endangered Species Act does not protect Bigfoot or extraterrestrials. We do, of course, live in dread of a legislator with a malicious sense of humor ... but, so far, we've been spared.]. As you might expect, the second question was the reason I was offered a chance to 'sit in' on the Art Bell show. He wanted a forensic scientist's and a crime scene investigator's point of view. But I'm not sure all his listeners really wanted to hear what I had to say. Because, from my point of view, it is really a very simple and straight-forward situation. These people who are so intent on collecting their own evidence (to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their extraterrestrial encounters) are advocates, which is to say: fervent believers. And no one --- especially the media types, not to mention the cops or the courts --- is going to trust a fervent believer not to alter or fake their presented evidence. What these people really needed, I explained at some early hour in the morning, was a professional crime scene investigator. Someone like myself. Someone who really didn't care, one way or the other, whether aliens really have been visiting us over these past 50 years. Which set off a whole new discussion about what I would do if I actually found evidence of extraterrestrial contact at a crime scene. And something of apparent equal concern: how would the government respond? Would they shut me up? Brand me a crackpot? Send me to Guam with my CSI kit to deal with the alien brown snake situation? I assured them that the federal government was nowhere near as devious and malicious as they (we) are portrayed on the X-Files; and that, in any case, no one would ever prevent me from testifying honestly and accurately about the collection of evidence. I'm not sure I was all that convincing, but their questions did get me to thinking. Okay, what would I do if I found evidence of extraterrestrial contact at a crime scene? It was an interesting question ... and a cold beer made it seem even more interesting. A couple hours later, I was back at my computer, humming to myself as I began working on the first chapter of FIRST EVIDENCE. Twenty pages later, the creaking of our log home was starting to get noticeable, and I was giving some serious thought to locking the doors and loading the shotgun. That was back in March of 1997. 13 months later, I sent the finished manuscript off to my Anne Groell, my editor at Bantam. It was fun book to write, but it turned out to be a much more chilling and edgy story than I expected. FIRST EVIDENCE is being published by Bantam Books, and it's out on the shelves now. Hope you enjoy it.
"A
Stunner. A gritty compelling novel I finished in one night. "Goddard nicely combines our instinctive fear of things glimpsed at the corner of the eye with the mind's rational habit of assembling evidence and making logical inferences to lead the reader into unfamiliar and unsettling territory. In FIRST EVIDENCE, he gives the term 'inescapable conclusions' new meaning." ---Thomas Perry "FIRST EVIDENCE has great suspense, creepy atmosphere, and convincing nuts-and-bolts realism. Ken Goddard has created an interesting take on an old problem and presented it with a ricochet writing style and commonsense characters." ---Kevin J. Anderson Yeah, I know. If I pay attention to the nice reviewers, then I really should take the other kind seriously too. Maybe later, after I figure out where they all live ... chick here to read chapter one of FIRST EVIDENCE
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... was my first published novel, and remains my favorite
[although DOUBLE BLIND comes in a close second, and I have to confess a perverse fondness
for THE ALCHEMIST], if only because it's the most frightening book I've written on a
personal level. Why so frightening? Simply because police officers are almost never
trained to deal with professional terrorists, for the perfectly logical reason that it is
highly unlikely that they will ever run across such an individual in their entire careers.
Instead, they're trained to deal with drunk drivers, thoughtless drug dealers, petty
thieves, inept burglars, and the like. 
You may be able to
find a copy of the original Bantam mass market edition
... is the story of Dr. David Isaac, a brilliant young University of
California professor of organic chemistry who came up with the idea of making slight
structural changes in hallucinogenic drugs that would make them perfectly legal to sell,
but didn't anticipate the impact this first-ever designer drug might have on the dealers
making millions from the sale of perfectly illegal drugs.
I suppose I should
also tell you that THE ALCHEMIST is the one book my dear mother would probably just as
soon you didn't read ... and she was undoubtedly quite relieved when the Bantam paperback
version on the right finally went out of print.
... is the story of Henry Culver, an ex-CIA surveillance specialist
who joins the Fairfax County (VA) Police Department as a police officer/criminalist in
order to escape some unpleasant memories from his earlier profession. Unfortunately for
Henry, he never quite manages to escape his past. And his refusal to assist his former
employers in one of their nefarious plots results in his being targeted by a thoroughly
warped and homicidal burglar who goes after his victims through the crawl spaces of their
homes, cuts a trap door in the flooring, installs tiny hinges, razor-cuts through the
carpeting, and then waits for them like a trap-door spider. 
... is the first of my books written around a wildlife law
enforcement theme. The story involves a San Diego police homicide investigator named Henry
Lightstone who, through no intention of his own, ends up becoming a federal wildlife
agent. And to answer what I suppose might be an obvious question, no, I have no idea why I
used the name Henry for two different main characters in two successive books. Probably
something psychological. I suppose I could always ask one of my shrink buddies, but I
figure it's probably better that I don't know. 
... my fifth book, is a sequel to PREY in which the surviving
characters reappear (remember what I said about a high body count), the industrial
conspiracy to destroy the environmental movement reemerges, and a group of radical
environmental activists strike back. Having already trashed the rabid industrialists, I
figured fair was fair.
... is basically a re-write of DIGGER in which I replaced several
crucial paragraphs that had been left out of DIGGER, and added the nice little twist of
the CIA setting up a fake environmental movement in order to manipulate the economies of
countries using the World Trade Organization and the Endangered Species Act ... which,
among many other things, brings a vengeance-seeking French Secret Service agent by the
name of Lt. Colonel L'Que into the picture.
...
the third in the U.S. Fish
& Wildlife Special Agent Henry Lightstone series, involves:
