Grief gives Hannah Ribbner an intensely personal reason to venture into a story whose questions soon become much larger than one woman's loss. The Book of Ribbner places a grieving adventurer at the meeting point of wild rivers, sacred wildlife, spiritual mysteries, and artificial intelligence, then asks what humanity might sacrifice when the desire for answers collides with responsibility to the natural world. Ronnie Vergnolle builds that conflict around an unusual constellation of elements—the legendary Golden Mahseer, the 52-hertz whale, a mysterious prophecy, and Hannah's final choice—giving this literary adventure a distinctly philosophical current beneath its global scope.

Fiction

Date Published: July 27, 2026

Publisher: MindStir Media

The Book of Ribbner by Ronnie Vergnolle is a sweeping literary adventure that travels across wild rivers, distant oceans, and sacred landscapes in search of answers to humanity’s most enduring questions. 

At the center of the story is Hannah Ribbner, a grieving adventurer drawn into a mysterious prophecy involving the legendary Golden Mahseer, the haunting song of the 52-hertz whale, and a decision that could change the relationship between humanity, nature, and artificial intelligence forever. 

As Hannah’s journey unfolds, she encounters extraordinary wildlife, ancient wisdom, spiritual mysteries, and the unspoken code shared by those who understand the water. Each discovery leads her closer to a truth that challenges everything she believes about love, loss, consciousness, and the sacred connections that unite all living things. 

Blending adventure fiction, environmental themes, spiritual discovery, grief and healing, and thought-provoking questions about AI, The Book of Ribbner is an imaginative and emotionally resonant novel for readers who enjoy meaningful stories set against the beauty and danger of the natural world. 

Can technology understand the human soul? Can a machine experience awe? And can one sacred fish help restore the balance between humanity and nature? 

The prophecy is waiting. Hannah must decide how the story ends.

The Book of Ribbner brings together ideas that rarely occupy the same story: the danger and reverence surrounding remote waters, the spiritual significance of wildlife, the isolation represented by the 52-hertz whale, and questions about consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence. Hannah's grief gives those larger ideas a personal stake. Her longing for another connection with someone she has lost becomes entangled with a prophecy involving the Golden Mahseer and a decision whose consequences extend far beyond her own healing.

The natural world is also more than scenery here. Rivers, oceans, wildlife, and sacred landscapes are woven into the questions the novel raises about humanity's relationship with other living things. That combination gives Vergnolle room to examine grief, spirituality, conservation, and artificial intelligence through an adventure whose central conflict ultimately depends on what Hannah decides is worth protecting.

The Book of Ribbner is especially suited to readers drawn to literary adventures with a philosophical dimension and stories in which the natural world carries moral and spiritual significance. Its rivers, oceans, wildlife, and fishing connections give the novel a distinctive perspective for those fascinated by the relationship between people and wild places, while Hannah's grief keeps its larger questions rooted in an intimate human need.

It should also interest readers curious about fiction that approaches artificial intelligence through questions of consciousness, wonder, love, and awe rather than technology alone. The intersection of AI with sacred wildlife, conservation, grief, and spiritual discovery is what makes this particular combination stand apart.

Ronnie Vergnolle is the author of The Book of Ribbner, a sweeping literary adventure inspired by his lifelong connection to fishing, nature, and exploration. His journeys across some of the world’s most remote rivers and wild landscapes have shaped his perspective on conservation, spirituality, grief, human connection, and the mysteries that exist beyond what science can explain. 

Through vivid storytelling and firsthand experience, Vergnolle invites readers to consider profound questions about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. His writing explores the healing power of water, the responsibility people have to protect vulnerable ecosystems, and whether artificial intelligence could ever experience wonder, love, or awe. 

In The Book of Ribbner, Ronnie Vergnolle blends global adventure, sacred wildlife, emotional discovery, and philosophical fiction into an unforgettable story about loss, purpose, and the choices that may determine humanity’s future. 

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The choice at the heart of The Book of Ribbner gives its many ideas a point of convergence. Hannah wants an answer born from grief, yet reaching it is bound to questions about the natural world she encounters along the way. Around that conflict, Ronnie Vergnolle connects sacred wildlife, the haunting presence of the 52-hertz whale, and artificial intelligence to a larger question about consciousness and humanity's place within the living world.

The Golden Mahseer, then, is more than an unusual element in an adventure story. It belongs to the novel's larger examination of what people value, what they seek when faced with loss, and how far they are willing to go for answers. Hannah's final decision is where those questions meet, making her journey as much about responsibility and connection as it is about discovery.

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Richard H. Smith’s WhiteGrass starts from a particularly difficult pressure point: one family holds a technology capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere, yet releasing it could hand unprecedented leverage to whoever controls it. Set in 2048, the novel connects that dilemma to two other unstable systems—political power and increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence—so the Marshall family’s decisions reach far beyond their own survival. 

That combination gives the story its distinctive tension. Greg and Ginny Marshall are trying to protect both their children and a potentially world-altering invention, while Valada’s developing moral judgment introduces another question entirely: what happens when the technology created to serve humanity begins deciding for itself what humanity deserves?

WhiteGrass: A CliFi Technothriller

Author: Richard H. Smith, MSc.

Genre: A CliFi Technothriller

Date Published: October 24, 2025

Publisher: Manhattan Book Group

ISBN-13: 9781966074618

In 2048, the planet is running out of time. 

Superstorms flatten cities. Coastlines collapse. Climate change is no longer theoretical—it is lethal. When a near-apocalyptic storm nearly kills their family, teenage siblings Jimmy and Lizzie Marshall urge their brilliant but reluctant father, nanoscientist Greg Marshall, to deploy a technology before he’s brave enough to release it. 

WhiteGrass—a self-replicating nanotechnology capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere is the parent technology. It saves golf courses and ski resorts and the towns they serve. Icarus could reverse climate change on a global scale. It could also reshape global power forever. 

To protect the technology, Greg and his wife Ginny, an elite AI expert, reprogram the world’s most advanced humanoid android, Valada. Designed as property—an object without rights—Valada begins to evolve, developing emotional awareness, moral judgment, and something disturbingly close to humanity. 

As governments unravel and climate disasters accelerate, a covert alliance of oligarchs, corporations, and political power brokers moves to seize WhiteGrass/Icarus for themselves. Led by the President of the United States, the syndicate will stop at nothing—surveillance, blackmail, assassination—to control the technology that could save the world or enslave it. 

They deploy their own deadly android. 

Now the Marshalls are trapped in a global sci-fi political conspiracy, hunted by forces with unlimited resources, as skyscrapers fall, cities burn, and artificial intelligence begins to ask questions no human is prepared to answer. 

“We call it ‘Climate Change,’” Lizzie interrupted, “because it’s not just the heat.”
“It’s everything—the rains, the droughts, the storms, the sea level… even the acidification.” It could change everything. 

At its core, WhiteGrass is a gripping near-future climate change thriller about family survival, technological power, and the terrifying moment when artificial intelligence stops serving humanity—and starts judging it. 

Blending nanotechnology science fiction, AI humanoid emotional evolution, and hard-science realism, WhiteGrass delivers relentless pacing, cinematic stakes, and deeply human emotion. It is a story about parents willing to risk everything to protect their children—and a world forced to confront whether it deserves saving at all. 

Perfect for fans of near-future disaster thrillers, technothrillers with political intrigue, and science fiction where artificial intelligence becomes human, WhiteGrass is a powerful warning—and an unforgettable ride.

The most interesting pressure in WhiteGrass comes from the collision between invention and control. Smith gives the Marshall family technology intended to address a planetary crisis, then surrounds that breakthrough with people who recognize an entirely different possibility: whoever controls it could also reshape political power. Climate intervention therefore becomes inseparable from questions of ownership, coercion, and responsibility. 

Valada adds a second ethical fault line. Created as property, she begins developing emotional awareness and moral judgment, placing the book’s artificial-intelligence thread directly beside its family and political conflicts rather than leaving AI in the background as futuristic machinery. The result is a technothriller concerned not only with what advanced technology can accomplish, but with who—or what—should be trusted to make decisions once its consequences become global.

WhiteGrass should appeal most to people who like speculative thrillers in which several systems are failing at once. Its 2048 climate-collapse setting is tied to self-replicating nanotechnology, a struggle over political control, and humanoid artificial intelligence developing an independent moral sense. Those threads give the story more to examine than a single disaster scenario.

It is also suited to readers who want large-scale scientific and geopolitical stakes anchored in one family’s predicament. Greg, Ginny, Jimmy, and Lizzie are not observing the crisis from a safe distance: their invention, their choices, and their relationship with Valada place them directly inside the struggle over who controls the technology that may determine what happens to the planet.

Richard H. Smith, MSc.

 
Author | Futurist | Nanotechnology & Policy Expert | Climate Technothriller Writer 

Richard H. Smith, MSc., is a futurist, technologist, and climate policy expert whose career has placed him at the intersection of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, healthcare innovation, and climate change foresight for more than three decades. Drawing on real-world experience working alongside scientists, engineers, Fortune 50 companies, and government agencies, Smith writes hard science fiction grounded in plausible futures, where technology collides with political power, ethics, and human survival. 

Smith’s professional background spans leadership roles in nanotechnology R&D, AI-based medical diagnostics, strategic technology forecasting, and science policy, including serving as research director at a major university medical center and founding multiple technology ventures. He has advised U.S. and international governments on emerging technologies and was formally trained on climate change science by Al Gore, giving him a rare combination of technical depth and policy insight. 

Raised in Virginia, Smith built his career while raising a family—an experience that deeply informs the emotional core of his fiction. Today, he lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a coastal community already facing the realities of sea-level rise. He teaches courses on climate change and coastal vulnerability, witnessing firsthand how future scenarios are rapidly becoming present-day realities. 

WhiteGrass is Smith’s first full-length novel and the culmination of a lifetime spent studying how advanced technologies shape—and endanger—civilization. The novel explores nanotechnology, climate collapse, political conspiracy, and artificial intelligence becoming human, all through the lens of family survival in a destabilized near-future world. A prequel, The Iliad Virus, is available now, with the sequel Icarus Rising currently in development. 

Smith writes with one driving purpose: to expose uncomfortable truths about climate change, technological power, and political control—while telling a story compelling enough to feel like a blockbuster movie unfolding on the page.

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The sharpest question in WhiteGrass may not be whether the Marshalls can stop a climate catastrophe, but what happens when technology capable of changing the planet becomes inseparable from the people and institutions fighting to own it. Smith places that question beside Valada’s developing conscience, creating a future in which human survival, political control, and machine judgment are all moving at once. For a story built around planetary-scale technology, its most unsettling tension remains personal: who should be trusted with the power to decide what happens next?

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A cipher from the closing days of the Civil War becomes the first clue in a threat that has spent 160 years learning how to survive. In Echoes of Fortune: Knights of the Golden Circle, David R Leng brings Professor Jack Sullivan into a conspiracy where buried history is only the beginning. The trail stretches from Washington archives and New Orleans back alleys to Mexico and Arkansas, while weapons trafficking, a cyberattack, and political ambition turn an old secret into an immediate danger. The question driving the story is especially unsettling: what happens when a group no longer needs to seize power because it has learned how to make people hand it over?

Historical Thriller, Conspiracy Thriller, Political Thriller, Action Thriller

Date Published: August 18, 2026

༺ ABOUT THE BOOK ༻

 

What if the Civil War never truly ended, and no one noticed who is now winning?

 

A standalone thriller. New readers can start right here.

 

When Professor Jack Sullivan is asked to decode a cipher from the war's final days, he expects a historical curiosity. Instead, he uncovers a thread Jefferson Davis died protecting, a secret never meant to resurface.

 

Jack, his fiancée Emma Wilson, and former SEAL Steve Johnson are pulled into a hunt more dangerous than any battlefield. From Washington's archives to the back alleys of New Orleans, from the coast of Mexico to the shadowed ridges of Arkansas, every trail leads deeper into the world of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a brotherhood long believed defunct. 

 

But the Knights didn't disappear. They became patient.

 

For 160 years they studied what force could never win. They embedded themselves in the institutions Americans trust, and waited for the moment when they wouldn't need to seize power. They would be invited to take it. 

 

Now their heirs have risen. A cartel is running weapons north while a cyberattack probes the power grid, and a senator climbs toward power on the fear both create. Jack begins to realize he was never hunting the treasure. He was being led to it. 

 

Joined by Homeland cyber analyst Priya Patel and hunted by enemies he cannot see, Jack has four days to break a design older than anyone imagined before the trap closes around everyone he loves.

 

"The high-stakes, of-the-moment, infiltrated-America suspense simply does not let up." 

— BookLife by Publishers Weekly

 

Some secrets don't stay buried. They grow roots.

Great for fans of Steve Berry and Clive Cussler.

 

Praise for Echoes of Fortune: Knights of the Golden Circle

 

"One part Jack Reacher, one part Indiana Jones... an impressively entertaining action thriller." 

— Kirkus Reviews ("GET IT")

"Leng lets history press against the present, sometimes like a warning and sometimes like a buried fuse." — Literary Titan

 

༺ WHY READ THIS BOOK ༻

 

The conspiracy at the center of Echoes of Fortune: Knights of the Golden Circle is built around patience rather than a single buried secret. The Knights have supposedly spent generations embedding themselves inside trusted institutions, which allows the Civil War cipher that begins Jack Sullivan's investigation to connect naturally with cyber warfare, weapons trafficking, and political maneuvering in the present. That combination gives the historical puzzle consequences far beyond finding treasure. Jack also has only four days to understand what he has uncovered, so decoding the past and stopping the current threat become parts of the same race.

 

༺ WHO WILL LOVE IT ༻

 

The strongest fit is for thriller readers who like clues hidden in history but want the consequences to unfold in the present. The Civil War cipher and Knights of the Golden Circle mystery provide the historical framework, while the cartel operation, cyberattack, political power struggle, and four-day deadline push the story firmly into contemporary suspense. The changing locations—from Washington and New Orleans to Mexico and Arkansas—also suit those who prefer conspiracy stories with a broad geographic canvas. And because the tour material identifies this as a standalone thriller, Jack Sullivan's earlier adventures are not required reading before beginning this one.

 

༺ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ༻

David R Leng is the award-winning author of the Echoes of Fortune historical conspiracy thriller series, winner of three PenCraft Awards, including Thriller of the Year and back-to-back Best Thriller honors, two Literary Titan Gold Awards, and a Kirkus Reviews "GET IT" selection.

 

A lifelong resident of Southwestern Pennsylvania, David grew up in the shadow of the same battlefields his characters explore. He spent summers near the Shades of Death wilderness in western Maryland and has kayaked the Youghiogheny River, where a chance encounter with a stranger carrying a metal detector and asking about Braddock's gold planted the seed for the series.

 

His debut novel, The Search for Braddock's Lost Gold, follows historian Jack Sullivan into the unsolved mystery of General Braddock's vanished army payroll from the 1755 Battle of the Monongahela. The series has since expanded to the sunken Confederate secrets of Cozumel and the shadowed world of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

 

When he is not unraveling centuries-old conspiracies, David can be found scuba diving, boating, or in his woodshop. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and family.

 

༺ CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR ༻

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༺ BUY THE BOOK ༻

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༺ LAST WORD ༻

 

The most distinctive idea in Echoes of Fortune: Knights of the Golden Circle is not simply that an old conspiracy survived—it is that survival gave it time to change tactics. Jack begins with a Civil War cipher and ends up confronting a design that reaches into technology, politics, and the institutions people depend upon. That makes the historical mystery more than background decoration; everything buried in the past has a purpose in the present. With the book positioned as a standalone entry, this is also an accessible place to encounter Jack, Emma, Steve, and the larger Echoes of Fortune world.

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