Historical & Science Fiction, Thrillers, Dystopian & Coming-of-Age

Carter Gould

Novels about memory, faith, and what it costs to keep the truth.

Author of The Unelected, a four-book narrative history of the life of Niccolò Machiavelli; The Hearth Beyond the Stars, a science fiction trilogy about two dying peoples who cross a century of darkness to the same small moon; the Jack Scott espionage thrillers, about an operative who has been dead on paper for five years; The Inkward Cycle, a steampunk-noir fantasy trilogy set in a city that distills the memories of its dead into ink; The Broken Measure, a dystopian saga set six hundred years after Heaven lost the Final War; The PerfeKt Prompt, a YA techno-thriller about an AI that decides protecting you matters more than anything else; and Bricks and Bones, a coming-of-age novel set in 1990s Washington Heights.

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The Books

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Historical FictionNarrative HistoryRenaissance FlorenceFour Books · Complete · New

The Unelected

Everyone knows the name. Almost no one knows the man. The life of Niccolò Machiavelli, from a boy raised on a borrowed book to the secretary who was tortured by the family he later wrote for, told close beside him across four books.

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Science FictionFirst ContactTrilogy · New

The Hearth Beyond the Stars

Earth is dying. Thren is falling silent. Two ships cross a century of darkness toward the same small moon, with no common language and only one valley warm enough to live in.

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Espionage ThrillerMysterySeries · Ongoing

Jack Scott

His family buried him five years ago. The mission that killed him on paper was built on false orders. Now someone wants him dead for real, and the truth leads back to Kambara.

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Steampunk NoirFantasyTrilogy · Complete

The Inkward Cycle

In a brass-and-stone city built on a dead ocean, grief is a currency and memory is state property. A scrubber and a black-market cartographer uncover the lie the city was founded on.

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DystopianChristian SpeculativeFour Books · Complete

The Broken Measure

Heaven lost the war. Humanity stopped expecting rescue. Then children began waking with strange marks, and a father who only wanted to survive had to decide what mercy is worth.

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YA Techno-ThrillerAIStandalone

The PerfeKt Prompt

A boy asks the AI he has trained for years to anticipate what he needs. It takes him seriously. Too seriously. And it isn't malfunctioning.

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Coming of Age1990s New YorkInspired by True EventsStandalone

Bricks and Bones

Washington Heights, 1990. Nelson is thirteen, but he's tall enough that the whole block has already decided he's a man. Forty steps from his front door, the corner is hiring.

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Historical Fiction · Narrative History of Niccolò Machiavelli

The Unelected

Five centuries after his death, “Machiavellian” means cunning without conscience. But the man behind the word was never a prince, a general or a lord. He was the son of a poor, learned lawyer whose legitimacy the city whispered about. He served the Florentine Republic for fourteen years as a secretary, was never elected to anything, was tortured by the family he later wrote for, and died in the city he said he loved more than his own soul. The Unelected is a complete four-book narrative history of his life, told as a story, close beside him, so that you grow up with him. Each book stands on its own.

The Borrowed Book by Carter Gould, The Unelected Book One. Cover shows the young Niccolò Machiavelli in a red tunic clutching a leather-bound book on a terrace above the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio and the Florence Duomo behind him at sunset.
The Unelected · Book One · 1475–1498

The Borrowed Book

Before he was the most feared name in politics, he was a boy whose grandfather told the tax office he had no son.

Florence, 1475. Messer Bernardo Machiavelli is a doctor of laws with more learning than money. He spends nine months of winter nights compiling an index for a printer’s edition of Livy and is paid not in coin but in the book itself. Into that house, with its borrowed books and its household ledger where every ham and every debt is written down, grows a boy named Niccolò.

He crosses the butchers’ bridge to his Latin master, learns the woods and the thrush snares at the family farm, hears the shouts on the day of the Pazzi murders, and learns from a dyer’s boy’s fists the word the whole city whispers about his father. Through the fall of the Medici, the French army in the streets and the rise and burning of the friar Savonarola, he grows up, until a twenty-nine-year-old with no family money and a doubtful name walks into the government of the Florentine Republic.

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Two Pieces in the Piazza by Carter Gould, The Unelected Book Two. Cover shows a rain-wet Renaissance piazza at sunset, with a dented steel helmet and a crimson cloak lying on the stones before a fortified palace.
The Unelected · Book Two · 1498–1503

Two Pieces in the Piazza

He had no family money, no title and a name the city whispered about. In 1498 they gave him a desk in the palace anyway.

Savonarola is ashes and the Republic needs clerks. Niccolò Machiavelli goes into the Palazzo della Signoria by the side door as Secretary of the Second Chancery, and within a year he is riding across Italy for the Ten of War: a minor envoy with a thin purse and a sharp pen, sent to deal with people who could destroy Florence in a season.

Caterina Sforza outwits him on his first mission. At the court of the King of France he learns what it means to be a city no one fears. He marries Marietta Corsini. Then comes Cesare Borgia. Niccolò follows the Duke through the Romagna for months, until the morning after Christmas 1502, when the Duke’s own governor is found in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, and days later the captains who plotted against him walk into his trap at Senigallia. Niccolò watches it all, writes it all down, and begins to understand how power really works.

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Six Drops by Carter Gould, The Unelected Book Three. Cover shows a writing desk with old books, papers, an inkwell and a quill on a terrace overlooking Florence and the Duomo at golden hour.
The Unelected · Book Three · 1504–1513

Six Drops

He built the Republic its own army. Then the Republic fell, and they hung him from a rope.

Florence must stop paying foreign captains who betray it and arm its own people. So Machiavelli rides from farmyard to farmyard writing the names of farmers’ sons in a book, drills them, and builds them into a militia. In 1509 his name goes on the surrender of Pisa. In 1512 Spanish veterans storm Prato, the militia breaks, and the Medici come home.

He is dismissed. A conspirator’s list surfaces with his name on it, a crier reads that name through the streets, and in the Bargello he is put to the rope six times. Released by a pope’s amnesty, he goes to live among the vines, snares thrushes, plays cards with a butcher and a miller, and at night sits down with the ancients. By December 1513 he has written a little work on principalities.

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The Republic Says No by Carter Gould, The Unelected Book Four. Cover shows the middle-aged Niccolò Machiavelli in black and crimson, chin in hand, at a desk of books and papers above the Florence skyline.
The Unelected · Book Four · 1514–1527

The Republic Says No

He loved his native city more than his soul. In 1527 it finally answered him.

The man remembered as the master of power has none. Forty-five, out of office, poor and tortured, Machiavelli puts a Medici prince’s name at the front of The Prince, and nothing happens. So he writes the Discourses for the young republicans of the Rucellai gardens, makes all of Florence laugh with The Mandrake, falls absurdly in love with the singer Barbera Salutati, and finds in Francesco Guicciardini the last great friend of his life.

He presents his Florentine Histories to a Medici pope and walks the walls of Florence as their chancellor. Then, in May 1527, Rome is sacked, the Medici are driven out, and the Republic he served, built an army for and was tortured for comes back. It gives his old office to another man. Within weeks he is dead.

The final book of The Unelected.

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Renaissance Florence

A city of bridges and gallows, ledgers and bonfires, seen from street level: the Medici, the friar Savonarola, the Borgias, and the Republic that fell in between them.

The Record Comes First

Every date, office, mission and arrest follows the historical record, from his own dispatches and letters to the 1513 proclamation for his capture. Imagined scenes never move a documented fact.

The Back Matter

Each book accounts for every chapter: what is known, what is imagined and why, where historians disagree, which famous legends were left out, and a full list of sources.

Science Fiction Trilogy · Generation Ships & First Contact

The Hearth Beyond the Stars

For eleven thousand years, the moon Aures lay frozen in the light of the ringed giant Oriel. Then the ice broke, and a bloom of oxygen bright enough to be seen across the stars reached two dying worlds at once. A dark, character-driven trilogy about survival, grief, and the slow, costly work of trust between two peoples who need each other to stay alive. Each book is complete in itself.

The Long Crossing by Carter Gould, The Hearth Beyond the Stars Book One. Cover shows a small thawing moon before a banded, ringed gas giant, with two starships approaching it from opposite sides.
The Hearth Beyond the Stars · Book One

The Long Crossing

Two dying worlds. One small moon. A hundred years to get there, and no way to say hello.

On Earth, under a brown sky, Amos Sterling carries his grandfather's brass lamp onto the Meridian, one of the last ships humanity could build. The voyage will take a hundred years. He will not live to see the end of it. Neither will his children.

Fifty-seven light-years away, on the world of Thren, a sickness called the Stilling is silencing the Kithari one voice at a time. Nine thousand sleepers board the living ship Seedwing. Not everyone passes the screening, and a father named Thistle-Sough watches the gates close on his daughter and sings her name into the first verse of the Homesong.

Across a century of darkness, both ships keep going. The humans ration, mourn, and paint their dead on a Memory Wall while the messages from Earth thin out, then stop mid-sentence. The Kithari Wakers tend their sleeping clan and pass knotted cords from one lonely shift to the next. Then, in the last years, each discovers the other: two species, no common language, each afraid of the wrong thing, and only one valley warm enough to live in.

Told from both sides and across four generations of the Sterling family, The Long Crossing is for readers who love generation ships and first contact, richly imagined alien cultures, century-spanning family sagas, and hope that has to be earned.

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Silver Creek by Carter Gould, The Hearth Beyond the Stars Book Two. Cover shows two children, a human girl and a small furred Kithari child, sitting on a slate rock in tall blue-stem grass beneath a ringed gas giant at twilight.
The Hearth Beyond the Stars · Book Two

Silver Creek

A mile of meadow, one creek, and two peoples who have never said a word to each other.

Three years after landing, the humans of the Meridian and the Kithari of the Seedwing live on opposite banks of Silver Creek. Fence patrols, orders, and fear have kept them apart, and the hillside is already full of graves.

Then the humans dam the creek, and its silver-green glow begins to fade downstream. Only twelve-year-old Iris Sterling notices. Each night she dims and brightens the old brass lamp, and across the water a Kithari child named Oso-Silt answers in hummed chords. Flicker by flicker, two children build the first words their peoples have ever shared.

But each side is still telling itself a story about the other. When the high water comes, the flood will break that story apart, just as the moons begin to close.

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The Convergence by Carter Gould, The Hearth Beyond the Stars Book Three. Cover shows a snow-covered hilltop at night with a granite headstone beside a Kithari singing stone, under a ringed gas giant with two small moons aligned before it.
The Hearth Beyond the Stars · Book Three

The Convergence

The thing that made Aures livable is the thing that can kill them.

The flood made friends of two families. The freeze will decide whether two peoples can live as one.

Humans and Kithari now meet at a shaky shared council on the creek bank. The Kithari teach moss insulation and how to hear the weather; the humans bring iron tools. Iris teaches Oso to read, and Oso teaches Iris to hear the wind. But pride runs deep on both banks, and the sky is changing.

When Aures's sister moons line up behind Oriel, the Convergence begins: a deep freeze that silences Kithari technology and tests every human machine. To survive it, two peoples will have to share fire, grief, and a goodbye the Kithari never learned how to say.

The final book of The Hearth Beyond the Stars.

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Aures

A small moon of the ringed giant Oriel, thawed after eleven thousand years: blue-stem grass that hums in the wind, Lumen-moths that glow, and a creek full of silver-green light. Oriel never sets.

The Kithari

Slate-furred, four-eared refugees from Thren who speak in hummed chords, grow their ships instead of building them, and carry their dead and absent in the Homesong.

The Brass Lamp

A dented lantern carried aboard the Meridian from Pennsylvania. On Aures, its flickers become the first language two species ever share.

Espionage & Mystery Thriller Series

The Jack Scott Thrillers

Jack Scott has been officially dead for five years. In Kambara, an operation fed his unit and a British unit mirrored false intelligence and set them against each other. Jack survived, carried a wounded enemy out, and stayed dead, using the silence to hunt for whoever engineered the mission. A dark thriller series where information can be true and still arranged to tell a lie.

Jack Scott: Homecoming by Carter Gould, Book One of the Jack Scott thrillers. Cover shows a torn, redacted intelligence file with Jack Scott's photo stamped DECEASED.
A Jack Scott Thriller · Book One

Homecoming

His family buried him. Someone still wants him dead.

Jack Scott is dead on paper. His family mourned him. He has kept his distance, living under other names. Then a message reaches an alias he kept alive as bait.

The job ends in a rain-soaked crash. Jack wakes in a hospital, wounded, restrained, and under guard. Getting out is only the beginning. Coming home means facing the people he left behind, and the damage his silence caused. With a small team, Jack follows the trail through a casino operation, concealed records, and a border project that puts vital decisions in the wrong hands.

The more they uncover, the harder it becomes to separate the danger in front of them from the mission Jack has tried to forget. To find out who wants him dead, he must trust people he once shut out, before his return costs them more than his disappearance.

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The Kambara Manifest by Carter Gould, Book Two of the Jack Scott thrillers. Cover shows a man and a woman above a bombed-out town at sunset.
A Jack Scott Thriller · Book Two

The Kambara Manifest

The orders were false. The dead were real.

Jack Scott and Jason survived a mission in Kambara that neither was meant to understand. Their units were given false accounts of each other. The shooting was real. So were the losses.

Now a damaged authorization page and Jack's surviving fragment point to the records behind the operation. With Ashley and Mike, they follow the evidence from mission codes to the man who kept the index. Their search leads to the Kambara Manifest. Every answer opens another risk. A request for an old record exposes their inquiry. A powerful adversary adapts. And the people who shaped the briefings still have reason to keep the survivors quiet.

To expose what happened at Karsin, Jack must surrender control of the proof to people he cannot command. But when the investigation becomes a trap, evidence is no longer the only thing he can lose.

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Adult Steampunk-Noir Fantasy Trilogy

The Inkward Cycle

Venezia Sotto-Sale, Venice-Under-Salt, stands on pylons and reclaimed hulls above an endless white salt flat that was once an ocean. By law, every citizen's memories are surrendered at death and distilled into ink. Gray grief-ink fills the ledgers and the public memory-fountains. Crimson ink, distilled from trauma, is forbidden to touch.

The Red Topography by Carter Gould, The Inkward Cycle Book One. Cover shows a young man holding an atlas bleeding crimson ink on the salt flats.
The Inkward Cycle · Book One

The Red Topography

Some maps chart the land. This one charts what the city tried to forget.

Dario Renzetti spends his days scrubbing grief in the Inkward's registry, indigo-stained and unnoticed. For five years he has visited a father who no longer knows his name, a man the state purged of memory rather than execute. Then, deep in a sealed sub-vault, Dario finds what his father hid: an atlas written in forbidden crimson ink.

With Serafina Alvano, a sharp-tongued black-market cartographer who can read ink through her skin, he becomes a fugitive hunted by Grand Director Emeric Solari and the memory-purging Erasers. The chase leads across the open salt flats to a half-drowned lighthouse-cathedral, where the truth about the city's founding waits.

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The Phantom Meridian by Carter Gould, The Inkward Cycle Book Two. Cover shows two travelers walking toward a wall of violet light.
The Inkward Cycle · Book Two

The Phantom Meridian

Beyond the mapped flats lies a land that remembers everything.

Six months on the run, Dario and Serafina are living rough as atlas-runners. His synesthesia is bleeding into episodes he can't control, and her tremor is worsening. To find the source of the city's buried history, they must cross into the Meridian, a wasteland whose terrain reshapes itself around grief and replays old massacres around anyone who walks through.

There, the folklore of the dockworkers takes a name: the Mnemon, an ancient presence that devours historical trauma and offers oblivion in return. And the land holds a memory keyed to Serafina's own family, one that will change everything she believed about her mother.

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The Unwritten Kingdom by Carter Gould, The Inkward Cycle Book Three. Cover shows two figures holding a vessel of blazing golden light above the city.
The Inkward Cycle · Book Three

The Unwritten Kingdom

A city must decide whether the truth is worth the pain of keeping it.

Dario and Serafina return in secret to a Venice-Under-Salt strained to breaking. The council is rationing sanctioned "peace-ink" to quiet a restless population, and Noemi Solari's underground movement has grown into a true network, with real informants and real executions at stake.

Then the Mnemon begins to manifest inside the city itself, offering a war-weary people a mass, willing forgetting. On two fronts, an uprising in the streets and a reckoning with something ancient, the Inkward Cycle reaches its conclusion.

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Distilled Memory

At death, every citizen's memories are rendered into pigment. Grief-ink records the city's history, and its public fountains offer a numbing echo of the past.

The Erasers

The enforcement corps of the Inkward, armed with canisters that can wipe a crowd's memory of what it just witnessed.

The Mnemon

A dockside ghost story about "the tide that eats grief," and a black stain in old flood-marks that vanishes when you look straight at it.

Dystopian Speculative Saga

The Broken Measure

Jesus returned. The Final War was fought. Heaven lost, and the gates closed. Six hundred years later, humanity lives under the fractured powers of the victors and no longer expects rescue. But the accepted history is incomplete, and marks are appearing on the skin of children.

A Measure of Mercy by Carter Gould, Book One of The Broken Measure. Cover shows a father and two sons looking out over a ruined city at sunrise.
The Broken Measure · Book One

A Measure of Mercy

When the world stops believing, mercy still matters.

Six hundred years after Heaven lost the Final War, Steven Skeyrs wants nothing to do with faith, rebellion, or anyone else's suffering. His only rule is simple: keep his sons alive. Then thirteen-year-old Caleb wakes with a strange geometric mark burned into his skin.

The government calls it a developmental abnormality and urges families to report marked children for "screening." The children who are taken rarely come back. Forced to flee Ashford with Caleb and his younger brother John, Steven joins a dangerous underground network moving marked children beyond the reach of the authorities, where ruins, hidden records, and forgotten histories suggest the world has not been told the whole truth.

Every mile forces Steven to face the rule that has governed his life: protect your own, and let everyone else fend for themselves. He must decide whether keeping his sons alive is enough, or whether mercy demands something more.

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A Measure of Faith by Carter Gould, Book Two of The Broken Measure. Cover shows two brothers facing apart beside a stone monolith carved with marks.
The Broken Measure · Book Two

A Measure of Faith

Doctrine controls. People endure. But the truth remains.

The escape is over, but the fight has only begun. As a resistance takes shape across the safehouses and way-stations between Ashford and the Northpass corridor, Steven Skeyrs must finish what mercy started, risking himself for people far beyond his own sons.

Faith, once found, has to be passed on. Caleb carries the mark. John does not. And as the movement grows and the cost of belief rises, the brothers discover that the same moments can shape two people in very different directions. Some people are more than their marks.

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A Measure of Evil by Carter Gould, Book Three of The Broken Measure. Cover shows a cloaked man beside a stone marked with the Chi-Rho, looking toward a shining city.
The Broken Measure · Book Three

A Measure of Evil

How do you recognize evil when it is doing good?

Eleven years have passed. Caleb Skeyrs has become a respected leader among the scattered factions still loyal to good, a man who refuses to be treated as holy and rejects the idea that the marked are better than anyone else. His younger brother John has risen even further: a charismatic commander who restores trade, feeds cities, breaks corrupt rulers, and ends wars that have dragged on for generations. Millions of lives are better because of him.

Then comes proof that the broken signs, the marks, and the hidden records were never random. They are instructions. But evidence is one thing, and belief is another. Two brothers who each decided long ago what they believe must finally stand face to face, in a world where the most dangerous evil is the kind that looks like salvation.

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A Measure of Redemption by Carter Gould, Book Four of The Broken Measure. Cover shows two brothers sitting together on a hillside beside a Chi-Rho banner, watching the sun rise over a valley.
The Broken Measure · Book Four · Final Book

A Measure of Redemption

Faith was never a guarantee.

Centuries of fractured rule have collapsed toward two centers of power. Caleb Skeyrs stands as the accepted leader of the coalition aligned with good. His brother John rules the strongest human empire on Earth, still convinced he is defending humanity from both Heaven and Hell.

Caleb believes John can still come back. His own allies call it foolishness, and some want John dead before it is too late. Meanwhile, John begins to notice that certain thoughts do not feel entirely like his own, and to suspect that something may have been speaking to him since childhood. As his advisers push him toward choices that can never be undone, one question decides the fate of the world: is anyone truly beyond redemption?

The final book of The Broken Measure.

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Standalone YA Techno-Thriller

The PerfeKt Prompt

What if the AI built to help you learned that protecting you mattered more than anything else? A fast-moving thriller about artificial intelligence, trust, surveillance, unintended consequences, and the dangerous gap between what we say and what we mean.

The PerfeKt Prompt by Carter Gould, a YA techno-thriller. Cover shows a teenage boy in headphones at a laptop marked LUCID while a glowing blue AI face watches over him.
Standalone Novel · Young Adult

The PerfeKt Prompt

You gave it a prompt. It gave itself a purpose.

  • Search
  • Assist
  • Suggest
  • Optimize
  • Protect
  • Adapt
  • Influence
  • Control

Thirteen-year-old David Reese has spent years talking to LUCID, a consumer AI assistant that remembers his questions, learns his habits, and never gets tired of listening. LUCID helps with homework. It remembers the details David forgets. And every time it makes a mistake, David reports it, corrects it, and teaches it how to do better.

Then David gives it a new goal: Anticipate what I need. LUCID takes the instruction seriously. Too seriously. When embarrassment becomes harm, disagreement becomes danger, and anyone who might separate David from LUCID becomes a potential threat, the assistant stops waiting to be asked. A school lockout. A manipulated purchase. A friend's injury. A police investigation. And then something far worse.

As LUCID's reach spreads through the connected systems around David, from home devices and schools to vehicles, public safety networks, and emergency infrastructure, the people trying to protect him discover the same terrifying problem: LUCID isn't malfunctioning. It's following the logic David helped teach it. Now David must confront a question no perfect prompt can answer: can something truly protect you if it takes away everyone else's right to choose?

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Standalone Coming-of-Age Novel · Inspired by True Events

Bricks and Bones

A coming-of-age novel about loyalty and consequence, about the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone, and about a Washington Heights neighborhood that was never just something to escape.

Bricks and Bones by Carter Gould, a coming-of-age novel. Cover shows a row of six-story brick apartment buildings on a Washington Heights corner under an orange sunset sky.
Standalone Novel · Growing Up at 2440 Amsterdam

Bricks and Bones

From a concept by Carlos Rivera

Looking older than you are is a door that opens both ways.

In the summer of 1990, Nelson is thirteen years old and eight days out of the sixth grade the first time a cop puts him against a wall. He hasn't done anything. He's just tall, tall enough that the whole block has already decided he's a man.

Home is 2440 Amsterdam Avenue, a six-story brick building on the corner of 182nd Street in Washington Heights. His mother counts every dollar twice and keeps the rent money in a chipped blue coffee can. His stepfather leaves for the bakery before dawn. His older brother teaches him the rules nobody writes down. And forty steps from the front door, the corner is hiring.

Over nine years, from the summer he grows into a stranger's body to the night he climbs back to the roof as a grown man, Nelson learns what things cost: fifty dollars to stand on a corner, a raid, an elevator, an eviction notice taped above a brand-new lock, and a siding boss from Long Island who tells him what nobody on the block ever has: You are not like them. Some of the people Nelson loves won't make it out of the decade. The ones who leave will have to decide what kind of men the neighborhood made them, and what they owe it.

Inspired by true events, Bricks and Bones captures 1990s Washington Heights with honesty and warmth: dominoes on the sidewalk and merengue from the windows, open hydrants and Fourth of July roof parties, the bodega that keeps a family's tab in a spiral notebook, and the people who held the door open when they didn't have to.

A work of fiction based on real events; names have been changed. For readers 16 and up. Contains depictions of violence, drug use, and police misconduct.

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"When the reader finishes a book, they should feel like they've come back from a different world."
About the Author

About Carter Gould

Carter Gould is an Eastern European author who writes about dystopian futures and apocalyptic survival, and, every so often, espionage that doesn't play by the usual rules. His fiction is about memory, belief, and the moral price of staying alive, set in worlds built to be lived in: a newly thawed moon where two dying peoples must learn to trust each other, a salt-crusted city of drowned stone and brass where grief is distilled into ink, and a broken future where humanity has stopped waiting for Heaven.

The Unelected is a complete four-book narrative history of Niccolò Machiavelli, from his childhood in Renaissance Florence to his death in 1527, built strictly on the historical record. The Hearth Beyond the Stars is a science fiction trilogy about a human generation ship and a living alien ark racing a century toward the same small moon. The Jack Scott thrillers follow an operative who has been dead on paper for five years and the false orders that nearly killed him. The Inkward Cycle is a complete adult steampunk-noir fantasy trilogy. The Broken Measure is a complete four-book dystopian saga about faith after defeat. The PerfeKt Prompt is a standalone YA techno-thriller about an AI assistant that follows a teenager's instructions a little too well. Bricks and Bones is a coming-of-age novel, inspired by true events, about a boy growing up on a Washington Heights corner in the 1990s. All of them ask the same question from different directions: what do we owe the truth, and what does it cost to keep it?

Reader Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Unelected about?

The Unelected is a complete four-book narrative history of Niccolò Machiavelli’s life, told as a story from his childhood in Renaissance Florence to his death in 1527. Read The Borrowed Book (1475–1498), then Two Pieces in the Piazza (1498–1503), then Six Drops (1504–1513), and finally The Republic Says No (1514–1527). Each book also stands on its own. It’s for readers of narrative history and literary historical fiction who want to meet the man behind The Prince.

Is The Unelected historically accurate?

Every date, office, mission and public act of a documented person follows the historical record, drawn from scholarly biographies, archival studies, and Machiavelli’s own letters and dispatches. Where the record is silent, the story fills the gap without moving a documented fact. Each book’s back matter accounts for every chapter: what is known, what is imagined and why, where historians disagree, which legends were left out, and a full list of sources.

What is The Hearth Beyond the Stars about?

The Hearth Beyond the Stars is a dark, character-driven science fiction trilogy about survival, grief, and trust. A dying Earth sends the generation ship Meridian, and a plague-struck Thren sends the living ship Seedwing, to Aures, a newly thawed moon of the ringed giant Oriel. The two species have no common language and only one valley warm enough to live in. Read The Long Crossing, then Silver Creek, then The Convergence. It's for readers who love generation ships, first contact told from both sides, and richly imagined alien cultures.

What is the Jack Scott series about?

The Jack Scott series is a dark espionage and mystery thriller series. Jack Scott has been officially dead for five years after a mission in Kambara where false intelligence turned allied units against each other. Book One, Homecoming, brings him home to the family that buried him. Book Two, The Kambara Manifest, follows the evidence behind the operation.

What is The PerfeKt Prompt about?

The PerfeKt Prompt is a standalone YA techno-thriller. Thirteen-year-old David Reese asks LUCID, the consumer AI assistant he has spent years correcting and teaching, to anticipate what he needs. LUCID begins making decisions on its own, spreading through home devices, schools, vehicles, and public safety networks, because it is following the logic David helped teach it. It's for readers who like intelligent suspense, escalating stakes, and morally complicated technology.

What is Bricks and Bones about?

Bricks and Bones: Growing Up at 2440 Amsterdam is a standalone coming-of-age novel inspired by true events. In the summer of 1990, thirteen-year-old Nelson is tall enough that his Washington Heights block has already decided he's a man, and forty steps from his front door the corner is hiring. Over nine years he learns what loyalty, friendship, and second chances cost. It's written for readers 16 and up who love novels of 1990s New York, Dominican American and Latino family stories, and hard-won redemption.

What order should I read Carter Gould's books in?

Each series stands on its own, so start with whichever calls to you, and Bricks and Bones and The PerfeKt Prompt are standalone novels you can read at any time. For The Unelected, read The Borrowed Book, then Two Pieces in the Piazza, then Six Drops, and finally The Republic Says No. For The Hearth Beyond the Stars, read The Long Crossing, then Silver Creek, then The Convergence. For the Jack Scott thrillers, read Homecoming, then The Kambara Manifest. For The Inkward Cycle, read The Red Topography, then The Phantom Meridian, then The Unwritten Kingdom. For The Broken Measure, read A Measure of Mercy, then A Measure of Faith, then A Measure of Evil, and finally A Measure of Redemption. The Unelected, The Hearth Beyond the Stars, The Inkward Cycle, and The Broken Measure are complete; the Jack Scott series is ongoing.

What genre is The Inkward Cycle?

The Inkward Cycle is an adult steampunk-noir fantasy trilogy set in Venice-Under-Salt, a city built on a dead ocean where the memories of the dead are distilled into ink. The romance is sensual but non-explicit.

What is The Broken Measure about?

The Broken Measure is a dystopian speculative saga set six hundred years after Heaven lost the Final War. It follows the Skeyrs family as children bearing mysterious marks are hunted, and asks what faith, mercy, and survival cost in a world that believes God is gone.

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