Magnolia Kanaranzi, a woman with a mysterious past, is elected to the U.S. Senate, but, before she can take office she becomes the first elected U.S. Senator to be charged with murder. Kanaranzi adamantly maintains her innocence but facts point to her guilt, and her attorney, nationally prominent criminal defense lawyer, Napoleon Taft, seeks to have her declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.

With the threat of the death penalty hanging over her head, Kanaranzi reluctantly agrees to be examined by forensic psychologist Bishop Pollock. Multiple psychoanalytic sessions reveal that Kanaranzi’s darkest and most bizarre secrets, leading Kanaranzi to question her own claims of innocence. Fearing that she could end up in a mental institution for the rest of her life, or worse, she struggles with an instinctual desire to see her son, whom she abandoned as a child, one last time

Through it all her son, Hamilton Blethen, struggles with his own desire to reconcile with his mother. Individually grappling with their own demons, mother and son set in motion a series of events where perception and reality collide, and Kanaranzi discovers that, for her, there is only one path to redemption.

Judgment Day is the final book of the Chimera Chronicles trilogy that began with The Reaper (2019) and continued with The Sower (2021). In The Reaper, the disappearance of a famous painting at the end of the 1937 Paris world’s fair leads to a murder in a rural Minnesota town in 2009. In The Sower, a transgender private investigator seeks to solve that murder, now a cold case, only to become the target of people whom, without her knowledge, her investigation has disturbed. Judgment Day brings the story to completion, beginning with the arrest of Senator Kanaranzi.

Born in the wine country of California; grew up in a beautiful Mississippi River town in Wisconsin; educated in the Minnesota State University system and Harvard Law School, Rob Jung now lives the writer's life in St. Paul, Minnesota.

A life-long student of history, geography and religion, Jung has traveled in every continent except Antarctica, and his books often find their origin in historical events discovered in his travels.

His most recent novel, Judgment Day, is the third and final novel of the Chimera Chronicles, a trilogy that started with The Reaper and the disappearance 75 years ago of a famous painting by Spanish artist, Joan Miro. The story continues in The Sower, psychological/political thriller featuring a struggling painter, his powerful, estranged mother, and a transgender private detective in a race to solve a cold case murder, all revolving around that still lost painting. The final installment, Judgment Day, brings the story to a cataclysmic conclusion as all that seems right is wrong, and the painting, the painter and the estranged mother, now an elected U.S. Senator, are brought to account.

Jung is a member of The Loft Literary Society, Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, and is the founder and producer of Minnesota Mystery Night. In addition to writing, Jung is a gourmet chef, inventor, entrepreneur, story-teller, gardener, fisherman, baseball fan, lover of classic cars and manhattans.

Jung can be found: at (i) his website: www.robjungwriter.com; (ii) his monthly newsletter, The View from Middle Spunk Creek; and (iii) on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Brian Lutterman is the author of Downfall, which launched the Pen Wilkinson series and is described by Mystery Gazette as “. . .an exhilarating action-packed financial thriller . . .”  His other books include Windfall, Freefall, Nightfall, and Deadfall, the highly-praised sequels to Downfall, and Bound to Die, a Minnesota Book Award runner-up. Nightfall was named 2019 runner-up for Minnesota’s best indie adult novel in the Minnesota Library Association’s annual competition. Lutterman, a former trial and corporate attorney, lives with his family in the Twin Cities. Visit his website at: www.brianlutterman.com.

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