ABOUT US
Welcome to Neon Requiem Books.
We love books—the kind you can hold in your hands, lose yourself in, and occasionally stay awake far too late reading.
Neon Requiem Books is the online home of authors Mike and Diane O’Toole. Diane ventures into the darker reaches of psychological crime, while Mike explores dystopian futures, science fiction, memoir, and the occasional excursion into the real world.
Different genres. Different worlds. One thing in common: stories and ideas designed to make you keep turning the page.
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From serial killers and fractured minds to dystopian futures, ancient mysteries, and escaping to a Greek island, explore the worlds of Neon Requiem Books.
THE BIRTHDAY GIRL KILLER SERIES
Some killers want their victims forgotten. Leonard Fitch wants them remembered.
Meet the Birthday Girl Killer.
Rings of SMOKE
Four girls were taken on their birthdays. Twelve months later, their mothers received a card, and with it, a photograph. An image that will burn into their eyes, forever.
Erin Fallon is number five.
Leonard Fitch is a respected neurosurgeon hiding a terrifying obsession. The British press calls him the Birthday Girl Killer—and if his ritual continues, Erin has only two months left to live.
With forensic science still in its infancy, DS Harris and DC Jones have little evidence, few resources, and a killer who has planned every detail.
Cold Blooded
Cold Blooded continues where Rings of Smoke left off. Serial killer Leonard Fitch faked his death in a massive fire and explosion at his lodge in the English Lake District, but not before nursing his fourth Birthday Girl victim back to health and leaving her safe for the police to find. He left behind a suicide note and a dead body for the police to discover — that of his mother. The body was too badly burned to be identified, so it was assumed to be that of Firtch. Case closed.
But Fitch wasn’t dead, far from it. He had escaped the fire and, with a new identity, was able to travel to America to continue his reign of terror. From Chicago, all along Route 66, he leaves a trail of dead bodies until settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he slips back into his old ways in his secluded lodge in the forest around Lake Tahoe.
Fitch, now Noel Radditch, makes one mistake in his so far unblemished career as a serial killer. A year after releasing his last victim, Erin Fallon, he sends her a birthday card from Boston, signing it Leonard. Alerted to the fact that Fitch might still be alive, the case is reopened, and the two detectives who investigated the original crimes, Harris and Jones, are sent across the pond to investigate.
The Arcanum Legacy
The story begins in 2090, in a world where gleaming corporate citadels tower over crumbling government buildings. The New World Order of the 2020s has surrendered to the iron grip of transnational corporations (TNCs). These giants, whose logos adorn everything from instant meals to rental cars, form “The Dominion,” ruled by the Directorate—twelve pale-faced executives who never appear in public without their signature tailored graphene suits.
Fifty years earlier, the revolution had torn through society like wildfire. Blood-soaked streets witnessed the fall of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. The Western populace, hollow-eyed from endless proxy wars, their faces raw from mandatory masks during the fifth pandemic, finally snapped. The overthrow was swift, but the anarchy that followed was brutal—food shortages, roaming militias, and makeshift tribunals. For a decade, humanity teetered on the brink until the TNCs deployed their private armies, establishing a new order with surveillance drones humming overhead and corporate law enforced by mechanized peacekeepers.
However, the members of the Directorate, despite their wealth and power, are merely puppets. In dark boardrooms with ancient symbols etched into marble floors, they take their orders from the Anunnaki—ancient beings responsible for shaping the human race from Neanderthals into what it is today. Their existence remains the greatest secret, whispered about in underground networks as the Arcanum Legacy—the inherited burden of hidden truths that continue to influence humanity’s destiny.
Book One: The Dissidents
The year is 2090, and the Western world is ruled by a handful of transnational corporations (TNCs) that control everything from the food we eat to the drugs we take. Many people live in Smart Cities where travel and social activities are limited. Although free to go, most remain because the Dominion -the ruling body caters to their needs for all TNCs.
Governed by an unelected group of leaders from the most powerful corporations, known as the Directorate, society is strictly hierarchical, with lower-caste workers at the bottom. The middle caste comprises skilled workers and engineers—the critical thinkers who have become the most disillusioned. Many have left the Smart Cities to start their own society of dissidents.
Book one in this series of four tells the story of Lena Ashcroft, a surveillance officer who watches over the lower and middle castes and reports to the Directorate. Her life is good until one day, she intercepts a memo from higher up the chain telling her of a secret plan to release a pathogen to control the minds of the middle castes and make them more compliant.
Lena flees the city to find the dissident encampment, where their leader, known simply as the Oracle, will advise her on what to do. Jonas Pierce, a high-ranking enforcer for the Dominion, is tasked with tracking down Lena and returning her to the city. Will he succeed in stopping the Dissidents, or will the Dominion crumble in the wake of rebellion?
Book Two: The Evangelists
The Dominion has fallen, and the world has become a democracy once again. The President of the new Union is Maxim Falk, AKA The Oracle, brother of Joshua Falk, the former leader of the Dominion.
A group of religious people known as the Evangelists arrive, preaching the word of God and promising salvation against the impending doom to those who believe in Jesus as the son of God. However, they have a hidden agenda, which is to reintroduce Dominion ideology and overthrow the government.
Jonas and Lena join forces to keep the city safe from Dominion intervention, Jonas bringing in other religious leaders to reduce the Evangelists’ influence over an increasingly frustrated populace. Many of the former lower caste see no improvement in their lives despite now being free of any caste labels. As manual laborers, they are more important than ever to society, but they remain the poorest. The unrest in the city reaches boiling point when a representative of the workers, Francesca Jamerson, is seriously injured in a riot.
The Evangelists have close ties with a terrorist organization that has lain dormant for years—the TransNational Liberation Front (TNLF). This highly militarized group is funded by the transnationals involved in armaments and defense, specifically Blake Buckley, through one of his subsidiaries, Pantheon. The Evangelist leader, known simply as the Preacher, is also a past Grand Master of the Order of the Sons of Ra, a cult-like brotherhood that meets in secret every two months in locations known only to its members. Together, these two factions become the biggest threat to humanity that the world has ever known.
Book Three: The Order
The Order of the Sons of Ra is a secret society, a brotherhood dating back to the ancient Egyptians, and its center is the Sun God, Ra. Its former members include royalty and the richest dynasties in modern history. These people historically claim to have direct lineage to the original sons of Ra—the pharaohs and kings of ancient Egypt.
It becomes apparent that the true sons of Ra were not what they thought, but rather descendants of an alien race—the Anunnaki, who came to Earth from a doomed planet and, through genetic engineering, created the first human beings from Neanderthal Man.
The ties between the Order, the Evangelists, and the transnational corporations become so intertwined it is almost impossible to separate them, but President Falk is determined to do so. With Francesca’s newfound ability to get into people’s minds, the president has his own secret weapon.
In this third book, we see the beginnings of a democracy reminiscent of the old days. The newly formed Union of Nations celebrates Christmas and holds its first Presidential Election, neither of which sits well with the Evangelists and the TNCs, and terrorism returns to the world after decades of comparative peace.
Freedom always has a price.
Book Four: The Anunnaki
An artefact that disappeared in a plane crash in 1969 turns up in the Sierra Nevada desert one hundred twenty-five years later. It attracts attention from all corners of the world, in particular, two strangers to the town of Lone Pine. A man and a woman whose names appear on the manifest of the downed airplane, but whose bodies were never found.
The artefact is a solid-gold statue about twelve inches tall, inlaid with emeralds, shaped like an Egyptian Ankh, a symbol of everlasting life. It was discovered by friends of Mateo Martinez, one of the government’s Counter-Intelligence team, and is now with him for safekeeping until the origin and actual owners can be established.
Mateo, having carried out extensive tests on the Ankh, makes a chilling discovery that, if made public, would turn science and religion upside down.
In book four, we encounter those who really are in control of the world. Not a secret society or a powerful transnat, but the Anunnaki. The Gods from the Sky, as the ancient Egyptians called them, but they’re not gods. They are an advanced race who managed to escape their planet, Anunigin, just hours before a cataclysmic collision with a giant asteroid that knocked it into an elliptical orbit billions of miles from the Sun.
Now, they need our help getting back as Anunigin passes through the solar system once again. But first, they must return the Ankh to its rightful place, and Francesca senses there is more to the golden artefact than eternal life. She senses the death of the human race.
Non-Fiction
The Hot Tub Bible
Diane and Mike installed a hot tub in their humble home in the UK in 2005. It was nothing special, just a basic plug ‘n’ play. Nobody else in their neighbourhood had one; none of their friends would even dream of owning one, but they did.
Having toured America extensively along both coasts, they realised how essential this was to their happiness and well-being. They broke all the rules, stayed in way too long, and drank alcohol, but they survived.
Later in life, Mike began writing articles for a Texas company on various aspects of owning and maintaining a hot tub, which led him to research topics such as chemicals to use, keeping the water balanced, and energy usage. This book is the product of all that research, plus some practical experience thrown in.
Here are the topics covered in this essential guide:
- Alkalinity and Acidity
- Sanitization
- Ozone and Saltwater
- Regular Maintenance
- Removing the water
- Cleaning the Tub
- Heating the Water
- Hot Tub Electrics
- Common Problems and Their Solutions
- Types of Hot Tub
- Where to Position your Hot Tub
- Bugs, Rats, and Snakes
The Corfu Diaries
Follow the journey of two people who followed their dream and left the UK to start a new life on a beautiful Greek island. Many talk about it, some even look into it, but only a few actually do it.
This couple sold their house in England, packed everything into a storage unit, and drove across Europe with just a few belongings packed into their car. Initially titled One Way Ticket, because once leaving home, there was no going back, this is a true story with only names and places changed to protect those involved.
The journey starts with a trip to the laundrette, and ends in Villa Faros, Mike and Diane’s new home in the sun – and rain – on this beautiful Greek island. The road trip itself is an epic adventure. When they arrive on Corfu, they find that the adventure has only just begun. Building a home from an ancient olive press, a stone building, possibly over a hundred years old, used to store and crush olives for oil, was never going to be easy. Aside from the physical aspect of making the place habitable, there was the bureaucracy. The Greeks love paperwork; it keeps people in jobs, and our hapless couple thought they were keeping half of Corfu employed at one point.
This book will appeal to those who want to emigrate to Greece and to those who have already done so. It is, at times, hilarious, but, like all true stories, it also contains sadness and disaster as the couple copes with car problems, lockdowns, floods, and sickness.
Was it all worth it? You’ll have to buy the book to find out.
The World’s Gone Mad
We are living under a New World Order, and this book tells us how we got there, from the Pan-European Union to the World Economic Forum. Through pandemics and climate emergencies, we find ourselves being ruled by faceless, unelected organisations forcing us to live in 15-minute cities and eat bugs.
This book is aimed at those who want to understand the truth and learn how to unravel the web of deceit spun by our leaders. The world has gone mad, but there’s hope. The lunatics may well have taken over the asylum, but so long as we hold the keys, the human race will survive. We are the many, they are the few.
Here are the main topics covered:
- The New World Order From Kalergi to Schwab
- The WEF, the UN, and the WHO
- The Impending Food Crisis
- COVID-19 and the Vaccines
- The Climate Emergency
New Addition
Behind Blue Eyes
What if you witnessed every murder… through the killer’s eyes?
Ronald Brody is plagued by nightmares so vivid they leave him shaken to his core. Each one begins the same way—with him watching a terrified young woman take her final breath.
When those nightmares start appearing in newspaper headlines, Ronald can no longer dismiss them as dreams.
Hundreds of miles away, Detective Mike Burnside is hunting a serial killer whose crimes grow more brutal with every victim. The evidence points in one direction, but Ronald’s impossible visions suggest something far darker.
As their lives become inexorably entwined, Ronald is forced to question everything he believes about himself. Is he witnessing the murders… or somehow helping to commit them?
With time running out and another victim already being chosen, Ronald must uncover the truth before an innocent woman dies.
Or before he becomes the killer everyone is searching for.
Behind Blue Eyes is a chilling psychological thriller about identity, obsession, and the terrifying possibility that the greatest evil can wear the face you trust most.
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