In The Dying Time, Bernard Schopen delivers a thrilling and contemplative addition to the Jack Ross series. Jack Ross has settled into his old age as well as anyone can. He jogs. He eats right. He naps. He no longer involves himself with the actions or the people that have developed into a “nasty notoriety.” That is until Alicia, Ross’s ex-wife and sister of Jack’s best and ailing friend, receives a potentially earth-shattering letter. A young woman, Mia Dunn, believes that Randall Barnes, Alicia’s deceased husband, might be her father. Reluctantly agreeing to discover the truth of these claims, Ross soon finds himself embroiled in a plot stretching back decades, and it’s not long before old habits come to the surface. The Dying Time is a poignant observation on the process of aging, astute and insightful as it is suspenseful intrigue. This novel asks how people come to create an identity and if we can ever truly bury the past. Can hurt stay hidden? How about the money? In a wonderful addition to the Jack Ross Series, Bernard Schopen is running on all cylinders as he weaves his plot with the golden thread of truth. In The Dying Time, the power of fiction is manifest. Here is a masterly yarn that keeps you guessing while always touching on something profound and inevitable in us all. Praise for The Iris Deception: “The Iris Deception is one of the best reads I’ve had in this last year. It transcends the genre and earns the title of good literary fiction. As a bonus, you get a darned good mystery.”―Western American Literature Praise for The Last Centurion: "[T]here’s a tone of heightened reality throughout The Last Centurion. It is effective at communicating the surrealism of global politics, as are characters who embody various philosophies without verging into one-dimensional characterizations...The novel raises uncomfortable points, drawing comparisons between the expansion of the ancient Roman empire through physical and cultural violence and the expansion of America’s presence on the global stage. These points are most poignant when it comes to questions of complicity and the ways in which the civilians of empires become soldiers of cultural war. - CONSTANCE AUGUSTA A. ZABER (January/February 2018) (Constance Augusta A. Zaber Foreward Reviews) Bernard Schopen was born and raised in Deadwood, South Dakota. He attended the University of Washington and the University of Nevada, Reno where upon receiving his Ph.D. in English he taught for many years. He is the author of three Jack Ross novels, as well as a study of the novels of Ross McDonald. His last novel, The Last Centurion, was released in 2018. From Chapter One The rising November sun lightened the dawn as I jogged in the foothills of the Sierra. Shadows shortened. Sage and rabbit brush nodded in the chill air. My footfalls thumped, my breathing huffed, my heartbeat regulated the day. The trails I took sometimes climbed out of narrow canyons to offer a panoramic view of the Truckee Meadows. More than half a century before, a boy tramping these paths, I’d looked out onto swaths of green and brown: fields and orchards, marshes, pastures. The arcs and angles of Reno and Sparks, then two small towns, had seemed unobtrusive, accommodated by the land. Now, between the dark mass of the mountains and the pale brown desert ranges, flashes of sunlight on glass accented the gray of growth―rooftops, parking lots, highways and streets, medical complexes and office buildings and warehouses. I missed what had been. But things change. Life goes on. Then it doesn’t.