Press Room

Kurt Kamm’s Literary Awards

CODE BLOOD (Unpublished)

  • Writer’s Type First Place – First Chapter Competition – January 2011

RED FLAG WARNING Literary Awards (Aberdeen Bay 2010)

  • Royal Dragonfly/Five Star Book Awards
  • First Place – Mystery 2010
  • The Infinite Writer
  • First Place – Mystery 2010
  • The Written Art Awards
  • First Place – Mystery/Thriller 2010
  • Public Safety Writer’s Association 2010
  • Honorable Mention – Published Novel

Red Flag Warning Reviews

 

One Foot in the Black Reviews

In the News

What People Are Saying about Code Blood

“Full body tattoos and Goth fetishists – an exciting trip through the Los Angeles underworld. Great Story”
–Justice Howard – World Class Photographer of the Tattooed Female

“From blood work to blood play – this thriller takes the reader from the hi tech world of academic medical research to the subculture of body parts dealers”
–Weijie Huang ,  B.S., M.S. Ph.D. – Senior Scientist

“A fire paramedic responds to a fatal accident and risks his career to find the beautiful young victim’s severed foot in order to bring closure to a grieving family and his own tortured soul. Research of actual events and processes weave an intriguing story of suspense and realism.”
–Captain Tony Duran, Safety Officer, LA County Fire Department.

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PRAISE FOR CODE BLOOD (Amazon Review)
5.0 out of 5 stars The stupidity of evil, November 15, 2011
By E. A. Lovitt “starmoth” (Gladwin, MI USA) –
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)

It has been suggested that ordinary people become evil when they identify with evil ideology. This might be the case with the villain in “Code Blood” who is a wannabe vampire. The sight of blood arouses him. He has started a collection of body parts, including the foot of an accident victim which he stole from the scene of a car crash. He somehow normalizes acts that the rest of us would consider unthinkable. Author Kurt Kamm has crafted a truly despicable, yet believable villain in Markus the albino, who tumbles into an evil that is far greater than his own drug-addled attempts at blood-letting. I actually ended up feeling sorry for him.

Stories of vampires are found in all cultures, as we learn from another “Code Blood” character, A Li, who is a PhD student from Tibet (or as the Chinese now call it: “The Tibetan Autonomous Region) at the University of California: “The Tibetan Book of the Dead told tales of the Wrathful Deities, also called the Blood Drinking Deities. These spirits stole blood from sleeping people and drank it from cups made of human skulls.” A Li has her own personal demons, including a ‘deceased’ twin sister, a PhD advisor who seems to scorn her work, and lastly Markus the wannabe vampire, who has hacked into her personnel records at U of C and has discovered that she possesses one of the world’s rarest blood types: Bombay blood, which occurs in only 1 out of every 250,000 people world-wide.

Colt Lewis, the hero of “Code Blood” is a paramedic-in-training who is obsessed with finding the missing foot of an accident victim who died en route to the hospital.

The chain of events that connects Markus, Colt, and A Li is filled with fascinating details about the California Goth scene, the workings of Los Angeles County Fire paramedic teams, shady morticians, life in Tibet under the Chinese invaders, and research into the DNA of blood. The author has very obviously done his homework on the background of this techno-thriller, but unlike many novels in this genre, his characters come alive. They live, breathe, make mistakes, and stumble toward their individual dreams, even though one of those dreams is a blood-soaked nightmare.

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“A book that will fascinate Californians who watch and hear those flames rise each summer fanned by Santana conditions, but it will also be a book that is so readable that the audience should steadily grow across the country. Highly recommended.”
–Grady Harp, Amazon Reviewer

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Photo Credits

One Foot in the Black Photo Credit:
Front cover photograph by John Ames, LACoFD VPP
Background photograph by Ken Morris, LACoFD VPP

Red Flag Warning Photo Credit:

Brian Haimer

Code Blood Photo Credit:

Justice Howard