Phil Bookman Author

It’s the food that nourishes tech startups. O-P-M. Other People’s Money. To many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it’s known irreverently as opium, because once you get on it, it’s hard to kick the habit. Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold start a new company with opium from billionaire tech icon Barry Samson. But when Samson is found murdered, and Gold’s friends start disappearing, the FBI targets him as a suspect. To protect his family, his reputation, and his freedom, Mike has to unravel a puzzle involving his best friends, buried events from his childhood, mysterious women, and retired mobsters.

When Hollywood science celebrity Abe Wiezman invites Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold to become CEO of his biotech company, Mike is captivated by Abe’s messianic belief that the company can save the world from pollution and maybe even from global warming. Mike soon discovers some of the downsides of running an organization built around a charismatic personality. But these problems fade into the background when Abe starts receiving death threats. Then those threats escalate into violence, and Mike has to face down his own demons or forfeit not only Abe’s life, but that of his own son.

When Mike Gold’s plans for an IPO falter, his old buddy Stew King calls out of the blue with an offer to buy Mike’s company. When they meet at Mike’s Napa Valley winery to negotiate the deal, Mike soon discovers that the White House is behind it, the Chinese want to scuttle it, and the ecology of a million square miles of ocean may be at stake. Then Mike is arrested for murder. When he gets too close discovering who framed him and why, his beloved wife Lisa is kidnapped to lure him to a life or death showdown with ruthless killers. 

Zack Zander's Silicon Vaelly startup, MySlice, is an ingenious marriage of a pizza chain with social media. But when Zack and three senior executives are savagely murdered aboard his yacht,  Mike Gold is asked to take over as MySlice CEO. The murders don't stop, and as the body count climbs, Mike wonders who he can trust and who is killing MySlice executives. And is he next?

2003: The invasion of Baghdad is imminent. Saddam Hussein withdraws over a billion dollars in cash from the Iraqi Central Bank. The U.S. Army recovers most of the loot. But not all of it.
2004: A U.S. Army intelligence investigator is assigned to probe reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Army guards at Abu Ghraib prison.
A decade later: Lisa Gold is shot trying to prevent a murder in a Napa Valley vineyard. This triggers a series of events that expose a shocking connection between Saddam’s missing millions and the Abu Ghraib scandal, and snare Lisa and Mike Gold in a deadly web of villainy and deceit. 

1944: French Resistance operatives Doris Cohen and Pierre Dufort implement an audacious plan to weaken Nazi forces in Normandy on D-Day. 

2016: Mike and Lisa Gold visit dying French billionaire Pierre Dufort and learn that Dufort is his real grandfather and his sweet little Jewish Grandma Doris from Brooklyn was in the Resistance and had a French lover. Over the course of three perilous days, murder engulfs Mike’s newfound French family, and he and Lisa must unravel deadly plots of greed and duplicity. 

Silicon Valley billionaire Mike Gold has an audacious idea: Provide everyone on Earth cheap, clean energy by beaming solar power from the Moon. On the other side of the world, the ruling council of the Saudi Royal Family, decrees that Mike is the most dangerous man in the world. They instruct the man they call Scorpion, to  launch the Gold Jihad and annihilate Mike and his blasphemous idea.

A week before Internet pioneer Hunter York, founder of Yippee, died in an auto accident, he gave his old friend Mike Gold an envelope. “Just something I’d like you to open when I die.” Inside, Mike finds an enigmatic letter stating that Hunter had uncovered serious wrongdoing at Yippee and was concerned about how long he had to live.  Mike soon uncovers evidence that Hunter York was murdered. And the killing has just begun.

Silicon Valley billionaire Mike Gold’s company, Global Lunar Electrical Energy, has established the first permanent settlement on the Moon, and its lunar solar farms have started beaming power to Earth. Then the body of a long-dead man in a spacesuit is discovered on the Moon. A terrorist attack destroys the first GLEE power station on Earth. A GLEE spaceship is sabotaged, killing all on board. And the Russian Tsar threatens Mike and his family.

In 2025, what had been Mike Gold’s audacious dream has become a reality. Global Lunar Electrical Energy is supplying 80% of the world’s population with electricity, beamed to Earth from solar farms on the Moon. But, as sinister forces on the Earth and Moon threaten GLEE, Mike finds himself in a desperate race against time to unravel a murderous conspiracy of greed, intrigue and evil.

Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico. Wildfire destroys wide swaths of Northern California Wine Country. Against this tragic backdrop, two deadly predators independently close in for the kill. One, a psychopathic woman Mike Gold thought was his friend. The other, a rogue foreign agent still pursuing the supposedly defunct Gold Jihad. And billionaire tech CEO Mike Gold is their prey. 

Silicon Valley billionaire Mike Gold has an audacious idea: Provide everyone on Earth cheap, clean energy by beaming solar power from the Moon. The GLEE Trilogy tells the story of how that dream became a reality. It is a story of deadly conflict on Earth and on the Moon, with the future of our planet and our species at stake. Now available in one bound volume, the novels in the GLEE Trilogy-Gold Jihad, Gold Moonshot and Santa's Village-may be read separately from the other books in the series.