1.
After a university lab building sinks halfway into the ground overnight with a sign left in one of its windows reading “Explain This,” Ryan Flynn, a veteran down on his luck and Freya Thorensen, a beautiful artist recovering from trauma, team up to find her missing brother, a scientist who holds the secret to a technology that could change the world.
2.
The chief antagonist in “Explain This” is Freya’s brother Robbie, a brilliant but irresponsible scientist who vanishes just before a violent and mysterious incident at the lab where he was conducting classified research. Freya, our heroine, is desperate to find him to make sure he’s all right and that he hasn’t done something stupid that’s gotten him into a lot of trouble. Ryan, our hero, needs to find him because that’s his job even though he has growing doubts about his new employers and their motives. The stakes are raised in an early scene when we see an old panel truck we suspect is being driven by Robbie being followed by a state trooper in a cruiser because it looks suspicious. The cruiser’s front end is suddenly crushed by an unseen force and the panel truck speeds away.
Secondary antagonists are the holders of the many other secrets that Ryan and Freya singly and then together must uncover through the course of the story. These secrets run the gamut from revolutionary technologies that have been classified to family scandals to personal wounds that the two protagonists don’t want to look at themselves, much less share with anyone else.
In the first half of the book, Ryan and Freya are also mutual antagonists. For Freya, Ryan is a government agent who shows up asking all sorts of questions about her brother and her family. Her family’s history and the circumstances of her father’s death and the source of her injuries aren’t subjects she wants to talk about and she wants to find Robbie on her own. For Ryan, Freya says she doesn’t know where her brother is or any more than she’s already told him but she’s a bad liar and he hates it when people hide things from him.
Ryan has a number of other people to contend with. His new boss in the “Special Transport Unit” (“the Unit”), Captain Baker, didn’t bother to tell him his new job involves a lot more than just backing boxes full of official documents and driving them from place to place. Ryans’ first day of work, he finds himself in the middle of a mess and Baker still won’t tell him anything because he thinks he doesn’t “need to know.” In addition, the F.B.I. arrest Ryan for a burglary that was probably done by another member of the Unit and someone has started following him. Freya has to contend with her mother with whom she has a combative relationship.
Because of their core wounds, Ryan and Freya are also their own worst enemies.
Ryan suffers from undiagnosed P.T.S.D. and can control his anxiety only when he has a job to do. The only one he’s got at the moment though is doing whatever Baker tells him to do, and he doesn’t trust Baker or the Unit and he has no idea what he’s gotten himself into.
Freya has recovered from her physical wounds but, when the darkness gathers inside her, about all she can do is to try to get rid of it is to paint, run or spar at the Akido dojo. Her latest painting of a half man, half wolf trapped in a cave scares the hell out of her. She doesn’t know why. Is it about her father or somebody else? And why the hell is she having nightmares about her father and their old farmhouse in North Dakota. And why is it stuffed with junk and on fire?
Ultimately Ryan and Freya help themselves by revealing their secrets to one another.
In the last act of the book, the final flesh and blood antagonists are revealed, rogue members of the Unit who are determined to steal Robbie’s revolutionary technology for themselves. In the last act, Ryan, Freya and Robbie as well as honest members of the Unit have a showdown with the rogue Unit members at the Thorensen’s deserted farmhouse where Freya and Robbie grew up.
3.
Explain This!
4.
Sci Fi Thriller
Comparables: Dark Matter, Stranger Things
Explain This is a story in the tradition of Dark Matter, the Xfiles, Fringe, and other works that revolve around an extraordinary technology disrupting the lives of ordinary people.
5.
Hook line, a variant on the story statement above:
After a university lab building sinks halfway into ground overnight with a sign left in one of its windows reading “Explain This,” Ryan Flynn, a veteran with PTSD eager to make good and Freya Thorensen, a young artist recovering from trauma must learn to trust one other and confront their pasts in order to find her brother, a missing scientist who has disappeared with the secret to a revolutionary technology. “Sometimes the hardest secrets to uncover are the ones you’re keeping from yourself.
6.
The basic conflicts are as follows. I’ve put this from the point of view of the characters:
Ryan Flynn shows up for his first day of work in the Special Transport Unit (the “Unit”) hung over and wearing a brown plaid suit borrowed from his father. He’s suffering from undiagnosed P.T.S.D. Bread or most any other baked good makes him anxious but that’s another story. All that’s holding him together is this new job which, he was told by the firm’s recruiter, “just consists of guarding boxes of classified material and moving them from place to place.” He thinks he can handle that. On the way in from the airport, however, his new partner, Dickie Gautier, tells him the Unit has a secret, highly classified side and that the “stuff” in their care is sensitive technology with military potential which Unit members must protect “by any means necessary.” On their current project, the lead scientist on the project has gone missing after a bizarre incident at the lab. Ryan needs to focus on his new mission or he’ll go to pieces but his new superiors won’t even tell him the secret he’s supposed to be protecting. The scientist’s sister says she doesn’t know where her brother’s gone. She seems desperate to find him but it’s clear she’s hiding something. It doesn’t help that she’s beautiful and he feels a strong desire to help her if he can. What if finding her brother means turning him over to people who want to put him in prison or worse? How much will he have to share about himself to gain her trust? How can he do that when he’s been avoiding looking at himself since he got home from overseas.
Freya Thorenson thought she’d been doing pretty well. The bullet wounds in her side have been healed for some time and, physically, she’s in good shape. Emotionally, though, she suffers from bad dreams and works through her anxiety by painting, running, martial arts training and ceaseless work on her graphic design business and the renovations to the house she shares with her mother. Everything was going okay until her brother Robbie showed up. His wife threw him out and neither he nor she would say why. He acted strangely, working till all hours and then just disappeared one night, leaving behind a note saying he’d be back soon and not to worry. All this might have been manageable if his lab hadn’t sunk halfway into the ground a few days later and someone hadn’t left a whiteboard in one of its windows with “Explain This!” scrawled on it in big purple letters. Wouldn’t that be enough to make anyone anxious? And then this Ryan Flynn shows up on her doorstep in his silly ass brown plaid suit, asking way too many questions about her brother, the family, her, everything. She spent five years trying to put her family shit behind her and she isn’t inclined to share it now with some spook. The image of her late father and his crooked ways fills her mind. Her brother had that same look just before he left. Where did he go? Did his going away have something to do with what happened at the lab? How can she figure out where he’s gone and get to him before the government does? Ryan Flynn wants to find him, sure, but for his own reasons. Can she trust him? He’s a human border collie, driven and whip smart but she can sense he has glaring weaknesses as well. Her father taught her how to readthose. Can she work Ryan over to her side or is he too smart and strong for that? Does even looking at the situation this way mean she’s just like her father?
Some scenes:
Freya invites Ryan to her art studio and he quizzes her about her paintings, which he admires. She secretly likes him and is torn about sharing that side of her with him. She can tell he’s using this as a way to probe and find out more about her and her family. Ryan is drawn to Freya and is actually impressed by her talent. Picking up certain clues within her dark, symbolic painting and around her studio, he confronts her with things she has been hiding from him. She suggests they have dinner. Over food and a beer she shares a certain amount about herself and her family’s troubled past while also probing him, trying to gain a foothold and win his trust. Over these two scenes each is dancing around the other, trying to get as much as they can out of the other one without giving away too much.
Some scenes with secondary conflicts:
Freya argues with her mother about having a relative stop by their old farmhouse in North Dakota to check it out for the Winter. Her mother says they wouldn’t charge anything. Freya says they’re just out to make a buck and why bother when no one will ever live in the house again which hurts her mother’s feelings. Throughout the conversation her mother calls her by her first name, Christine, when Freya’s told her many times she wants to go by Freya, her middle name from now on. Her mother ends the conversation by saying Freya should come home and fix the downstairs toilet which she’s been after her to get to for days.
Ryan is detained by the F.B.I. who suspect him of having broken into the apartment of Robbie Thorensen’s research assistant. Ryan is in the possession of a classified document but he got it from Freya’s house, not the other place. The F.B.I. grill him and tell him the Unit has a bad reputation but after a phone call from an unknown party they simply give him back the document and turn him loose.
Ryan flies to North Dakota in pursuit of Freya who has determined where her brother has gone. After he and Freya spend the night together, he is called repeatedly by his superior in the Unit, Captain Baker, who wants to know what progress he’s made and insists on sending out more men “to help.” Ryan, who has grown to distrust the Unit and wants to find Robbie and bring him in peaceably resists. He buys some phones and puts his Unit issued phone in a special bag which blocks radio signals so it can’t be traced.
7.
Setting 1: A street on the border of a major university campus in the Boston area containing an old candy company warehouse and its offices, a low rent bar, a building that once belonged to a now bankrupt printer and an old university lab building, marked for demolition. The lab building has sunk halfway into the ground overnight under mysterious circumstances.
Setting 2: A Special Transport Unit armored SUV which contains a police radio, a radar tracking device, and document packing and transport materials such as boxes, markers and envelopes. There is also a safe under the floor containing a pistol, two compact sub machine guns and ammunition as well as a tazer, lock picks and rubber gloves.
Setting 3: The Thorensen house. A three story Victorian house which is undergoing renovation. The first floor has refinished floors and paneling and new plastering. The furniture is a mix of new relatively expensive furniture and inexpensive antiques from the former Thorensen farmhouse in North Dakota. Landscapes of the prairie painted by Freya, the heroine, adorn the walls. The second story has two renovated bedrooms and a bathroom. There is a third bedroom still undergoing renovation. The third floor has been gutted and renovated has just started.
Setting 4: The flooded basement of the sunken lab building which contains a number of experimental devices based on a revolutionary technology.
Setting 5: Freya’s art studio. A semi finished divided loft space where Freya has an easel, paints, a computer and other equipment for her graphic design business.
Setting 6: A room in cheap motel in Grand Forks North Dakota
Setting 7: A churchyard in a small North Dakota farming town.
Setting 8: An abandoned farmhouse in rural North Dakota built with a variety of defensive features by Freya’s father including reinforced doors with gun ports and sideways periscope peepholes, hiding places for guns and money, several safe rooms with reinforced doors and a mud room that doubles as a killing room with gun ports and peepholes on the sides. Intruders can be locked inside the mud room by releasing a cable on an exterior wall which drops weighted bolts through the tops of the inside and outside doors.
