... 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.

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 mismatched 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, because of Goddard's brutal attention to detail and police procedure."
--- The San Diego Union.

According to the Tacoma News Tribune: "The meanest, dirtiest, knock-them-down, pick-them-up and sock-em-again book around."

Or, as Publisher's Weekly put it: "There's enough sex and violence here to stock a miniseries."

Well, that's probably overstating the situation just a bit, but I did try.

... 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.

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.

Note: for reasons that were a bit confusing at the time, my publisher had me re-write DIGGER. The new version is titled CHEATER..

... 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.

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.

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:
"Wildfire has a blow-em-all-to-hell kind of liveliness." ---Publisher's weekly.

And:

"Ken Goddard is the Field & Stream Tom Clancy." ---Kirkus Reviews.

... 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.

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:
"A wealth of violent action, outer-edge plotting, and authentic detail
on what lab guys really look for at a crime scene."

So what inspired me to start digging around for extraterrestrial evidence?

Well, back in 1997, I was invited to be a guest on the Art Bell Talk Radio show.  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.  Hope you enjoy it.

 "A Stunner.  A gritty compelling novel I finished in one night.
Goddard is really good."  ---Earl Emerson

"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 ... 

Well, the federal government didn't fire me or send me to counseling for writing FIRST EVIDENCE, and my editor, Anne Groell, was perfectly willing to see how far I could push the extraterrestrial evidence envelope, so she and I and the other folks at Bantam agreed to a sequel.  Which put me in an interesting dilemma: where could I take the story to give my dear readers a nice, chilling run for their hard-earned bucks?  Ideally, to a place where things are tense, confused, edgy ... and more than a little dangerous, of course, but how to do that?  As it turned out, digging around in the dusty memories of my days as a crime scene investigator provided the answer: out to the very edge of a hot crime scene, the outer perimeter, where the suspects are still lurking ... things frequently do go wrong ... and it's all too easy to make a dangerous and even fatal mistake.

So who came back for a second round?  My ever-stubborn and skeptical crime scene investigator, Detective-Sergeant Colin Cellars, of course ... along with his childhood friends: Bobby Dawson, Jody Catlin and Malcolm Byzor.  But the rules have changed for this intrepid foursome.  Facing their fears and adversaries back-to-back isn't going to work for them this time.  The rapidly accumulating evidence suggests a terrifying possibility: that the retrievers --- the fearsome creatures Allesandra warned about --- are here, and closing in fast.  Bad news for Colin and his friends, especially when they discover their only real chance to survive is to stay apart from each other, and face their worst fears alone ...

Back in April of 2006, my literary agent called and asked if I'd be interested in continuing a series of original novels based on the CBS-TV show CSI Las Vegas and published by Pocket Books.  She knew that I'd been an informal advisor to the show (on wildlife-related evidence) for a few years, but she also knew that I didn't watch the show because actions of the main characters --- in terms of engaging with the suspects --- were pretty unrealistic.

As a crime scene investigator for almost 40 years, I'd done everything I could to avoid the suspects at the scenes.  My job was to work the scene and collect the evidence in an unbiased and unemotional manner, not to confront and/or interrogate the suspects.

But I also had to admit that I liked watching William Pedersen as an actor, and enjoyed his portrayal of Gil Grissom.  It was just too much work trying to 'suspend disbelief' in watching the episodes ... and besides, I didn't have time to watch prime time TV.  I had books to write ... and, admittedly, a ranch to take care of, movies to watch and wine to drink, but those were separate problems.

My literary agent then reminded me that an awful lot of people did watch the show, and --- more importantly from her and my point of view --- bought the related books.

So I talked with Ed Schlesinger, the Pocket Book editor responsible for the CSI/Las Vegas book series, and discussed the idea that if he hired me to continue the series previously written by Max Collins, I'd like to make the characters a tad more realistic.  Ed understood, and promised to do his best to find the proper balance between my concerns, the well-established characters, and the popularity of the TV series.  Even better, he had a great idea for the book title:  IN EXTREMIS.  All I had to do was come up with a couple of vivid crime scenes, an underlying plot, a story arc, and one or two memorable bad guys.  And, to make things a bit easier, he'd send me the DVD sets of episodes so that I could catch up on the developing 'voices' of the characters.

I was busy at the time trying to get scuba certified so that I could be part of an international team tasked with developing CSI techniques to investigate damaged coral reefs; but I managed to put together a detailed treatment before I flew to Cozumel.  A week later, I returned to my Cozumel hotel room after a very memorable (and somewhat scary) cave dive to find a message from Ed: CBS-TV had approved my treatment.  The writing could begin.I

N EXTREMIS turned out to a fun --- and relatively easy --- book to write; but I had to constantly refer to the DVD episodes to keep the 'voices' on track.  And there was a point in the story when Ed advised me that Greg Sanders, one of the younger CSI characters, had to be portrayed a bit more 'hot and sassy.'  Having little-to-no idea what he was talking about, I quickly consulted my daughter and granddaughter ... both of whom, as it turned out, had a very good understanding of the terms and were perfectly happy to help educate father/grandfather.

So Greg became a bit more hot and sassy, and the whole team (that I couldn't actually harm too badly in my story) certainly did their fair share of suffering at the scenes.  The book was released to the bookstores in October, 2007.

Oh, and there's more info on the writing of IN EXTREMIS in the interview I did with Shane Sanders for his TV-CSI-based website ModernDaySherlock.     

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Special Agent Ged Bulatt is headed to Thailand for a Wildlife INTERPOL conference alongside his Thai Colonel friend. Meanwhile, a group of arrogantly wealthy poachers and their merciless guides are discovered by Thai Forest Rangers, resulting in a tragic confrontation: four Rangers are dead, and Ged’s Colonel friend is gravely injured. Fueled by rage, Ged launches a relentless pursuit of the poachers and guides, starting in the wilderness of Thailand and culminating in a dark, isolated forest in Washington State. There, a rogue Russian geneticist has unleashed terrifying creatures resembling long-extinct species, meant to be hunted by affluent clientele. As Ged and the Colonel’s daughter—a fierce Thai warrior/princess—navigate this treacherous landscape, they find themselves targets in a desperate race to gather evidence for the arrest and prosecution of the illegal hunters and their merciless guides.

“His prose is sheer explosive energy.” - Eric Van Lustbader

"Goddard writes circles around many others in his field."
- Dorothy Uhnak