Alden Globe
Podcast Audio. 12 minutes, 41 seconds - July 2025
Podcast Transcript
Hello Thriller Readers!
I’m author Alden Globe. Today is July 8th, 2025, and I’m in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We’re going to talk for a few minutes about a collection of three novels I call the Maps Private Value thriller series, a female-driven collection that weaves together luxury travel, global adventure, and high-stakes business challenges.
Like most writers, “I write what I know.” Maps Private Value books are based on scenarios and problem-solving approaches I’ve encountered, the themes are very real: AI, climate change, and fentanyl are global forces shaping our world.
My protagonist, Rave Maps, is a kickass female value engineer who began her own private value engineering consulting firm a few years ago. Ex-Colorado rancher, ex-military, and now with business software sales experience, Rave is smart, stylish, socially conscious, and unlike anyone you’ve encountered in the thriller genre. She’s deeply observant everywhere she travels, picking up local customs, exploring food and wine, checking out music, history, recipes, spices, botanical gardens, and traditional folk medicines wherever she winds up.
Rave is thoughtful; she seeks to overcome violence troubling her from her past, blending non-violence, meditation, and luxury travel while working through particularly difficult problems that often start as conventional corporate business issues, but quickly grow into more complex concerns involving AI, climate change, and fake pharmaceuticals laced with illicit fentanyl.
Whether Rave is diving Palau, skiing Steamboat Springs, hiking across Madeira, remodeling an old farmhouse high in the hills above Port de Soller, Mallorca, or consulting with her partner in crime, diplomatic security specialist Mait Orleans in Toronto, her work is a reflection of how value engineers approach problem-solving.
Some might describe this as systems thinking, design thinking, or corporate storytelling. Much of Rave’s work is aimed at keeping the invisible world of logistics that powers our consumer lives running day to day. She’s busy addressing IT issues, including FinTech, cyberthreats, and change management. The books are short, respecting that readers today have less time than ever to consume a book. Each novel is also available as an audiobook, available from Bedside Reading, Audible, and Spotify, narrated by the talented Los Angeles-based actress Elizabeth Schmidt, who is the voice of Rave Maps, and a joy to work with.
When people ask what I do and I answer I’m a value engineer, they often appear puzzled, most have never heard of that. The role is specific to business software sales. In 2021, I realized this puzzlement may be an opportunity to write something to try and raise the profile of the discipline. I’ve spent my career in information technology and software, working to speed access to critical information used by front-line staff, including pilots, call center staff, sales teams, and IT professionals. This is applied knowledge management using technology to improve performance. I’m a value engineer with BMC Software. I work across industries helping large business customers justify investment in technologies that deliver digital business transformation.
To briefly summarize the three books:
Daughter of the Cloud begins with Rave losing an important consulting assignment she’d hoped to launch in Lisbon with an investment firm. The story plays on the term “Digital Twin.” In manufacturing, a “digital twin” refers to the digital model of a physical product containing its specifications, design, and bill of materials. I thought it’d be fun to make it an actual digital twin personality, an AI, built from a sliver of your mind uploaded to the cloud, giving Rave remarkable new abilities to find and share information quickly.
The sequel, Daughter of the Storm, takes on the climate crisis. Rave and her team are hired by the UN to find a way to bring to life a dry, scientific, factual report called the IPCC 6 summary on global climate.
In true value engineering fashion, Rave, Mait, and Canadian intelligence analyst Kate Tong travel to Belize, Steamboat Springs, and Palau, collecting the human stories behind climate change, with the intent of making a film to share their findings. Powerful forces working against the team destroy the film studio, and the attack inspires Rave to repurpose the data they collected, and instead work to construct a groundbreaking interactive multimedia attraction along the Barcelona harborfront that puts visitors into the heart of burning rainforests and flooded villages, in a terrifying way, to try and get their attention.
Book 3, Daughter of Mars is an attempt to use fiction to raise public awareness of the growing threat of fake pharmaceuticals containing illicit opioids.
Rave finds her usual approach to solving business problems proves inadequate in the face of this growing disaster. The death of her young nephew motivates her to learn more. In order to interdict the global drug supply chain, Rave falls back on military skills she thought she’d left in the past. When violence doesn’t work, she has one opportunity to try again to stop the flow of drugs as the danger flows from Earth to the surface of Mars, where humanity’s first mining outpost and tourism spa are under construction.
Reaching Mars also gives Rave a chance to connect once again with her Digital Twin AI, who had retreated to an old NASA Mars rover years earlier, hoping to avoid the reach of conflicted, warring 21st-century humans.
Writing the first two books helped develop the characters, and positive reader feedback gave me the confidence to use that material to try and write meaningfully about fentanyl in Daughter of Mars. Book three was the hardest to write, I had to work my way up to it as it’s based on personal tragedy. Right now, over 100,000 Americans die each year from this scourge, including my beautiful 21-year-old daughter Madeline, a senior at University of Colorado in Boulder in August 2017. Maddy had just returned from semester abroad in Aix-en-Provence. Seeking to ease anxiety as the new school year began, Madz purchased a $5 Xanax from a fellow student. That pill was a fake, it contained toxic amounts of fentanyl, heroin, and alprazolam. Maddy died asleep in her bed. The ensuing police investigation, Grand Jury, and court proceedings took two years to complete. In 2017, fake pharmaceuticals containing illicit fentanyl were a new, misunderstood threat. Today, a poisoning like Maddy’s is referred to as the “One Pill Kill.” You can learn more about that at pillorpoison.org.
I’ve learned a lot about grief, enough to know that we do not ever get over grief, but we can learn to move forward with it. The best way to help yourself is thru helping others. For that reason, my wife Susan and I have been outspoken on fentanyl, sharing Maddy’s story at local high schools, with the media, and with both houses of the Colorado legislature seeking to introduce meaningful legislation to help push back against this darkness.
Maps Private Value thrillers helped me come to grips with loss while – hopefully – helping others. I was hoping to educate readers on the difference between addiction and poisoning, between long-term addiction and the suddenness and unexpectedness of the one pill kill. Few adults understand this distinction and knowing that was a powerful motivation for writing Daughter of Mars.
While researching the book I was fascinated to learn about the “Old China Trade,” New England’s 19th-century business purchasing goods from Canton, and paying with opium grown in Turkey. As a former resident of Marblehead, having grown up surrounded by sea-captain homes built with the profits of that illegal drug trade, I wanted to see if I could draw a steel thread from the American Revolution of 1776 to todays’ One Pill Kill. The result is the 200-year timeline of events you in the Forward to the book.
At the end of 2024, I combined the first three stories into one collected volume entitled Value Never Sleeps, and proceeds from all the books support the endowment for Maddy’s Garden of Light at the Yampa River Botanic Park in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
What’s next for Rave Maps and her team?
My brother and I just completed a Rave Maps screenplay that goes deeper into Rave’s young life growing up on a ranch in Colorado, and being in the military. This explains the origins of her work ethic and how she acquired the skills that enable her to succeed later in life as a consultant.
Readers have asked if there will be another Rave Maps book, and I’m happy to say, yes, I would like there to be. I’ve been wondering what sort of global issues a sequel could focus on in 2026, and I am beginning to zero in on the answer. Over the summer I’ve been asking myself five questions to help get me started:
· What is a five-sigma event?
· What is the difference between a Botanist, a Horticulturalist, and a Gardener?
· Do you remember as a kid, after a long car road trip, how many bugs had to be cleaned off the windshield? And how few there are now?
· As a luxury adventure, would you enjoy visiting the one hundred greatest botanical gardens of the world?
· What happened to evil CEO Bellony LaMarque featured in the second book, Daughter of the Storm, after she was arrested on the island of Grenada for hoarding climate research, nearly wiping out the population of Earth with a weaponized virus, and for consistently exercising poor judgment?
I think that list will help me get started on a story with the working title: Rave Maps in the Garden of Knowledge.
I want readers to know how much I appreciate their interest in the stories and characters. The positive feedback has been very gratifying. I’m an independently published author, and like all independent authors, we very much appreciate readers who take the time to post reviews of books they enjoyed.
I’m Alden Globe. Wishing you a wonderful summer, enjoying many books from Bedside Reading.
Thank you… and happy reading!
Podcast Transcript
Hello Thriller Readers!
I’m author Alden Globe. Today is July 8th, 2025, and I’m in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We’re going to talk for a few minutes about a collection of three novels I call the Maps Private Value thriller series, a female-driven collection that weaves together luxury travel, global adventure, and high-stakes business challenges.
Like most writers, “I write what I know.” Maps Private Value books are based on scenarios and problem-solving approaches I’ve encountered, the themes are very real: AI, climate change, and fentanyl are global forces shaping our world.
My protagonist, Rave Maps, is a kickass female value engineer who began her own private value engineering consulting firm a few years ago. Ex-Colorado rancher, ex-military, and now with business software sales experience, Rave is smart, stylish, socially conscious, and unlike anyone you’ve encountered in the thriller genre. She’s deeply observant everywhere she travels, picking up local customs, exploring food and wine, checking out music, history, recipes, spices, botanical gardens, and traditional folk medicines wherever she winds up.
Rave is thoughtful; she seeks to overcome violence troubling her from her past, blending non-violence, meditation, and luxury travel while working through particularly difficult problems that often start as conventional corporate business issues, but quickly grow into more complex concerns involving AI, climate change, and fake pharmaceuticals laced with illicit fentanyl.
Whether Rave is diving Palau, skiing Steamboat Springs, hiking across Madeira, remodeling an old farmhouse high in the hills above Port de Soller, Mallorca, or consulting with her partner in crime, diplomatic security specialist Mait Orleans in Toronto, her work is a reflection of how value engineers approach problem-solving.
Some might describe this as systems thinking, design thinking, or corporate storytelling. Much of Rave’s work is aimed at keeping the invisible world of logistics that powers our consumer lives running day to day. She’s busy addressing IT issues, including FinTech, cyberthreats, and change management. The books are short, respecting that readers today have less time than ever to consume a book. Each novel is also available as an audiobook, available from Bedside Reading, Audible, and Spotify, narrated by the talented Los Angeles-based actress Elizabeth Schmidt, who is the voice of Rave Maps, and a joy to work with.
When people ask what I do and I answer I’m a value engineer, they often appear puzzled, most have never heard of that. The role is specific to business software sales. In 2021, I realized this puzzlement may be an opportunity to write something to try and raise the profile of the discipline. I’ve spent my career in information technology and software, working to speed access to critical information used by front-line staff, including pilots, call center staff, sales teams, and IT professionals. This is applied knowledge management using technology to improve performance. I’m a value engineer with BMC Software. I work across industries helping large business customers justify investment in technologies that deliver digital business transformation.
To briefly summarize the three books:
Daughter of the Cloud begins with Rave losing an important consulting assignment she’d hoped to launch in Lisbon with an investment firm. The story plays on the term “Digital Twin.” In manufacturing, a “digital twin” refers to the digital model of a physical product containing its specifications, design, and bill of materials. I thought it’d be fun to make it an actual digital twin personality, an AI, built from a sliver of your mind uploaded to the cloud, giving Rave remarkable new abilities to find and share information quickly.
The sequel, Daughter of the Storm, takes on the climate crisis. Rave and her team are hired by the UN to find a way to bring to life a dry, scientific, factual report called the IPCC 6 summary on global climate.
In true value engineering fashion, Rave, Mait, and Canadian intelligence analyst Kate Tong travel to Belize, Steamboat Springs, and Palau, collecting the human stories behind climate change, with the intent of making a film to share their findings. Powerful forces working against the team destroy the film studio, and the attack inspires Rave to repurpose the data they collected, and instead work to construct a groundbreaking interactive multimedia attraction along the Barcelona harborfront that puts visitors into the heart of burning rainforests and flooded villages, in a terrifying way, to try and get their attention.
Book 3, Daughter of Mars is an attempt to use fiction to raise public awareness of the growing threat of fake pharmaceuticals containing illicit opioids.
Rave finds her usual approach to solving business problems proves inadequate in the face of this growing disaster. The death of her young nephew motivates her to learn more. In order to interdict the global drug supply chain, Rave falls back on military skills she thought she’d left in the past. When violence doesn’t work, she has one opportunity to try again to stop the flow of drugs as the danger flows from Earth to the surface of Mars, where humanity’s first mining outpost and tourism spa are under construction.
Reaching Mars also gives Rave a chance to connect once again with her Digital Twin AI, who had retreated to an old NASA Mars rover years earlier, hoping to avoid the reach of conflicted, warring 21st-century humans.
Writing the first two books helped develop the characters, and positive reader feedback gave me the confidence to use that material to try and write meaningfully about fentanyl in Daughter of Mars. Book three was the hardest to write, I had to work my way up to it as it’s based on personal tragedy. Right now, over 100,000 Americans die each year from this scourge, including my beautiful 21-year-old daughter Madeline, a senior at University of Colorado in Boulder in August 2017. Maddy had just returned from semester abroad in Aix-en-Provence. Seeking to ease anxiety as the new school year began, Madz purchased a $5 Xanax from a fellow student. That pill was a fake, it contained toxic amounts of fentanyl, heroin, and alprazolam. Maddy died asleep in her bed. The ensuing police investigation, Grand Jury, and court proceedings took two years to complete. In 2017, fake pharmaceuticals containing illicit fentanyl were a new, misunderstood threat. Today, a poisoning like Maddy’s is referred to as the “One Pill Kill.” You can learn more about that at pillorpoison.org.
I’ve learned a lot about grief, enough to know that we do not ever get over grief, but we can learn to move forward with it. The best way to help yourself is thru helping others. For that reason, my wife Susan and I have been outspoken on fentanyl, sharing Maddy’s story at local high schools, with the media, and with both houses of the Colorado legislature seeking to introduce meaningful legislation to help push back against this darkness.
Maps Private Value thrillers helped me come to grips with loss while – hopefully – helping others. I was hoping to educate readers on the difference between addiction and poisoning, between long-term addiction and the suddenness and unexpectedness of the one pill kill. Few adults understand this distinction and knowing that was a powerful motivation for writing Daughter of Mars.
While researching the book I was fascinated to learn about the “Old China Trade,” New England’s 19th-century business purchasing goods from Canton, and paying with opium grown in Turkey. As a former resident of Marblehead, having grown up surrounded by sea-captain homes built with the profits of that illegal drug trade, I wanted to see if I could draw a steel thread from the American Revolution of 1776 to todays’ One Pill Kill. The result is the 200-year timeline of events you in the Forward to the book.
At the end of 2024, I combined the first three stories into one collected volume entitled Value Never Sleeps, and proceeds from all the books support the endowment for Maddy’s Garden of Light at the Yampa River Botanic Park in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
What’s next for Rave Maps and her team?
My brother and I just completed a Rave Maps screenplay that goes deeper into Rave’s young life growing up on a ranch in Colorado, and being in the military. This explains the origins of her work ethic and how she acquired the skills that enable her to succeed later in life as a consultant.
Readers have asked if there will be another Rave Maps book, and I’m happy to say, yes, I would like there to be. I’ve been wondering what sort of global issues a sequel could focus on in 2026, and I am beginning to zero in on the answer. Over the summer I’ve been asking myself five questions to help get me started:
· What is a five-sigma event?
· What is the difference between a Botanist, a Horticulturalist, and a Gardener?
· Do you remember as a kid, after a long car road trip, how many bugs had to be cleaned off the windshield? And how few there are now?
· As a luxury adventure, would you enjoy visiting the one hundred greatest botanical gardens of the world?
· What happened to evil CEO Bellony LaMarque featured in the second book, Daughter of the Storm, after she was arrested on the island of Grenada for hoarding climate research, nearly wiping out the population of Earth with a weaponized virus, and for consistently exercising poor judgment?
I think that list will help me get started on a story with the working title: Rave Maps in the Garden of Knowledge.
I want readers to know how much I appreciate their interest in the stories and characters. The positive feedback has been very gratifying. I’m an independently published author, and like all independent authors, we very much appreciate readers who take the time to post reviews of books they enjoyed.
I’m Alden Globe. Wishing you a wonderful summer, enjoying many books from Bedside Reading.
Thank you… and happy reading!