By Richard L Turnbull
Henry Beekman, son of a carpenter who dies in the flu epidemic of 1889, creates a privately held company that makes caskets, eventually growing into an international lumber and forestry conglomerate that thrives during wartimes. When Henry dies, he leaves his fortune to Raymond Thomas.
Raymond Thomas hires Helen McEntire who has just graduated from law school to represent Beekman Enterprises interests to Congress. When Jack Williams, a member of the House of Representatives dies, Raymond convinces Helen to run for the vacant seat. However, Conroy Williams, Jack’s son, is appointed by the governor of Montana to complete his father’s term in office.
Helen agrees to challenge Conroy in the next election. On a trip to Idaho, Raymond and Helen see Conroy exiting from a local brothel. Helen confronts Conroy and threatens to go public with photos she took of Conroy leaving the house of ill repute. Conroy threatens Helen. Raymond makes a call to Rangestone, a security division of Beekman Enterprises and has Conroy killed in what appears to be a terrible accident with a logging truck. Helen is subsequently elected to the US House of Representatives.
Helen and Raymond marry and have a son, Ben. Their housekeeper may or may not have overheard a conversation about Conroy’s death, and Raymond murders her to keep the family secret safe. Ben Thomas and Eddie Randall, son of a millworker, become friends whose paths diverge. Dissolution is the story of multiple generations of these two families whose lives are entwined in ways neither of them understands. It is a story of contrasted wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, health and sickness.
Ben Thomas falls in love with Conroy’s niece and they marry and have a son, Benjamin Jr. Raymond is blackmailed into joining the World Business Federation (WBF), a cabal of internationalists who control the levers of power. The goal of the WBF is to create a New World Order where businesses can thrive on an equal playing field. They believe the United States and the Soviet Union have too much power, so they engineer a dissolution of both nations.
Jennifer, the daughter of Benjamin Jr, marries Sean Murphy, a young politician who helps draft the new Charter For America (CFA) that replaces the Constitution. The CFA divides America into seven provinces based on common interests and values. Sean becomes governor of the new Intercontinental Province. His ultra-conservative worldview leads to the creation of a far-right surveillance theocracy.
With a mixture of fact and fiction, Dissolution leads the reader through a world struggling with an opioid epidemic, the rise of nationalism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and political conspiracy.
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Dissolution 
Dissolution, the novel, is now available on Amazon.
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