Mindbender

Harlem, 1961. John is a gifted young jazz musician with a secret he can barely understand himself. He is an uncanny remote viewer with the power to mentally perceive what a person is thinking or looking at. He doesn't read your mind. He sees your thoughts. He can also bend wills with simple telepathic suggestions. But in an America still rigidly divided by Jim Crow, being a Black man with such powers makes him a target for the tendrils of a nebulous government agency that is turning such individuals into weapons. Weapons and spies. When John is arrested for a murder he doesn't remember committing in the Deep South, he faces the living nightmare of a brutal Southern correctional facility surrounded by alligator-infested swampland. His rescue comes at the hands of an ultra-secret branch of the CIA that has been watching him. Faced with a choice that is really no choice at all-prison or service-John surrenders his old life and identity to become John Henry, the government's most valuable and invisible weapon. The world he enters is the Cold War at it enters its most dangerous phase. As Fidel Castro tightens his grip on Cuba, the Berlin Wall rises, and thermonuclear annihilation looms, John is thrust into a clandestine race between superpowers. It's not an arms race or a space race. It's a race to acquire psychic spy assets and put them on the playing field behind the Iron Curtain. The project that puts John through grueling training is given the codename Mindbender. And now that they know one hundred percenters-telepaths who are correct one hundred percent of the time-exist, they search for more candidates to build the program. From the violent birth of the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, where Bull Connor's police dogs tear through peaceful marchers, to the back alleys of Istanbul and aboard the legendary Orient Express, John moves through the secret history of the 1960s. The secret history of the world. He encounters movie stars caught in webs of intrigue, enemy agents who are mirrors of himself, and a beautiful Polish spy who forces him to question everything. All while the United States preaches freedom and democracy abroad while subjugating African Americans at home with the bitter lie: separate but equal. As the world teeters on the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John must navigate a landscape where alliances between comrades and enemies shift like white smoke. In a decade poised to explode, one man with sea-green eyes must decide whether he is patriot, pawn, or something else entirely. Mindbender: From Harlem with Love is the first in an espionage series in the vein of James Bond.

Carlton Kenneth Holder, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, is a produced Hollywood screenwriter and author of the horror graphic novel The Curse of Monte Cristo, acquired by Andrews McMeel Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster. In his present-day incarnation, Holder wanders the world as an expatriate, wordsmith, and filmmaker.