We pass through the world, our daily lives, or we read it.

No other choice.

We pass through it deaf and blind or we give a reading.

We pass unconsciously through experiences or we frame and sample them,

Or we throw off the old frameworks and examples and shift to new readings.

Learning our way, we pass through the world or we read it.

Teachers—I was one—try to convince us to read the world:

Others—persuaders of all kinds—are all too ready to impose their readings:

But a good read is not always predictable. Take the FRAMESHIFTS series of ebooks, for example.

We pick up a mystery to escape from the airport, the humdrum, or the memory of the cubicle where we just spent 13 hours.

But what if the mystery turns into a portal into a different world, as if before one had set sail one had plotted a course in error. A few degrees off at the beginning of your trip leaves you far off course, putting you in a strange world, your frame of reference shifted.

As the mystery develops, another story emerges—a larger narrative in the background.

This background narrative becomes clearer as one reads. Several readers have compared the Northern Virginia world of FRAMESHIFTS to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County because of its focus on the localities of Wando, Holburn, Fairall, and other imaginary areas of the Northern Region.

One reader, after finishing the first mystery, was shocked to find the second book was not a mystery. It was completely different—a strange military adventure—not in the Tom Clancy mode, but involving some of the characters from the first story. And the third story, about how the suicide of a young gay teacher leaves friends and enemies in a tangle of betrayals, also involved some of the same characters in a novella.

Each story is framed differently. The genre shifts from story to story. At this point, the reader told me, she knew that the book was giving her a problem to work out.

“Work?” I said. I was alarmed. Does the reader who goes to a book for escape want to work? “Why did you keep reading?” I asked.

“Because that’s what readers do,” she replied. “They want to work out where the author is going.”

Exactly. Those are the readers I want to find:

Readers who enjoy being lost in a strange new territory. Readers who are open to a path that twists from mysteries to philosophy, suspense, poetry, history, adventure, military escapades, dramatic dialogues, letters, lectures, fictional memoirs, science fiction, dystopia, and political intrigue.

Tired of reading the same formulas? Try an ebook in the FRAMESHIFTS series by Richard L. Rose, a series written for readers who like to be lost in a strange new territory. Once inside the world of FRAMESHIFTS, you will begin to sense the larger story and vision of the series. AND EACH EBOOK ONLY COSTS 99 CENTS.

FRAMESHIFTS is about people who learn their way out of their dilemmas.

The first e-book in the series, soon to be released by Telemachus Press, is Death Wears A Tricorn. A city councilman in the Northern Virginia community of Holburn makes a quiet deal with unsuspected lethal consequences. Retired journalist Harry Pettiford, forced back into the workforce because of his wife’s high medical bills, manages the councilman’s successful campaign only to find his boss murdered in campaign headquarters. As Harry’s investigation makes him another target for the murderer, the perceptive reader discovers that another story has emerged, a story of a strange theocratic community withdrawing from the frenzied political scene of the D.C. region to await the floods of the Last Days in a guarded compound in rural Virginia. Harry, who is only trying to care for his wife, searches for an easy exit but, as if in a dream, only becomes more involved with politicians, terrorists, and reporter June Brightman, who has a dream of her own.

Like daily life, it’s a strange territory—if you only know how to read it.