Forensic Magazine editor Seth Augenstein recently completed one of his biggest writing projects yet. Since joining the magazine staff in 2015, Augenstein has regularly covered the mysteries, breakthroughs, and scandals of the criminal justice system, from crime scene to lab to courtroom. But this time, instead of shedding light on DNA collection flaws, and rape kit backlogs across the country, or interviewing some of the top genealogists and anthropologists of our time, Augenstein is bringing decades-old mysteries to a futuristic setting in his newly released sci-fi novel “Project 137.” 

“Where Have America’s Missing Persons Gone?” reads the tagline of the book, which is set in the year 2087 and follows a punctilious doctor as he investigates a strange disappearance and the unexpected deaths of his patients. Augenstein explained that his work at Forensic Magazine contributed to the “philosophy of investigation” seen in the novel.

“(The novel) has the main character picking through this conspiracy in a logical progression,” he said. “It’s that mentality of the who, what, when, where, why, and how that an investigator would proceed through to figure something out.”

The book, which was released May 8 in paperback and e-book formats, was the product of eight years of work, first conceived when Augenstein was working as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey. What began as an idea to write a book about N.J. serial killer Charles Cullen, a nurse who was convicted of killing dozens of patients over his 16-year career, evolved into a medical thriller that delves into crimes and secrets of World War II, through the lens of a technologically advanced future world.

“You’re taking the historical reality and making it into its most insane logical conclusion, of a conspiracy and a cover-up of war crimes that the United States engaged in,” Augenstein said. “I think the challenge was to make that responsibly reflected while still making it entertaining and fictional.”

The author says his transition from newspaper reporter to forensic science writer had a positive influence on the process of finishing his first fiction novel.

“Being at Forensic Magazine actually reinforced the plot elements, and the peeling of the onion layer by layer,” he said. “The book actually started to get good after I got here and started learning more.”

As for his thoughts on writing fiction versus nonfiction, Augenstein said “it’s a totally different half of the brain.

“With a Forensic Magazine news story (…) you’re observing, hearing, digesting, and then kind of asking more questions. You’re batting it back and forth, where with fiction, you’re sitting down there, you have an idea, but then it’s flights of fancy; it’s what somebody would call ‘inspiration’ or ‘the muse,’” he said. “You’re still bringing that logic and that reasoning out of a problem and solving it, but in a totally different way.”

“Project 137” is published through Pandamoon Publishing in Austin, Texas, and is available for purchase on Amazon.com. It will also soon be available in audiobook format. 

By Eric Obernauer New Jersey Herald

Posted: May. 5, 2019 12:05 am Updated: May. 5, 2019 12:51 am

Eight years after he set to writing a thriller based on the cover-up of one of the most horrific war crimes of the 20th century, former New Jersey Herald reporter Seth Augenstein's first novel is set to debut Wednesday.

"Project 137" includes allusions to places in Sussex County but begins half a world away in the final days preceding Japan's surrender in World War II.

From there, it quickly fast-forwards to the year 2087 as an idealistic young doctor struggles to uphold his values of saving patients at a time when many of the diseases of today have been eradicated and people are living well into their hundreds.

However, when a teenage boy dies unexpectedly on the doctor's watch and the boy's girlfriend goes missing, the doctor detects a phantom force that begins causing others all around him to drop dead at an alarming rate from symptoms of what appear to be bubonic plague and other diseases that should no longer exist at the end of the 21st century.

Thus unfolds a gripping, 296-page tale that's part medical suspense thriller and part historical narrative as the doctor's investigation yields clues to a secret biological warfare regime linked directly to the barbaric medical experimentation performed on live human beings in the Second World War by the Japanese army doctors of Unit 731, a secret arm of the Imperial Japanese government that became enlisted in its war of genocide against the people of China and Manchuria.

Their activities -- chronicled in the book "Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up," by Sheldon Harris -- piqued the curiosity of Augenstein, who spent countless hours poring through other accounts of the period to gain a fuller sense not only of what happened, but how a cover-up of this magnitude was possible.

"This is stuff you never learn in school, and to me, it was an outrage," he said.

History records that as part of Japan's surrender in 1945, and with the Cold War getting underway, many of the Japanese scientists and top brass from Imperial Japan's military and political elite who condoned the atrocities cut deals in which they agreed to share the "knowledge" gained from their experiments in exchange for being spared war crimes tribunals.

Unlike with the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust and World War II, it would be decades before the world learned the extent of the horrors carried out by Unit 731, the numerals of which Augenstein transposed into the name of a fictional United States government operation that became the title of his book.

As the novel unfolds, the aforementioned doctor turns for help to his century-old mentor, with whom he uncovers further clues that lead him to realize both the scale of what's happening and that many of his colleagues are not who he thought they were -- and that he and his pregnant wife could themselves become casualties of this government experiment.

"It's very paranoid, but that's what makes a good story, right?" Augenstein joked. "Take the reality and make it insane."

Still, he argues, the events depicted in the novel are not impossible to imagine given other episodes such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted on untreated black male patients beginning in the 1930s, for which the government apologized in 1997, and the secret germ warfare testing conducted over populated areas of San Francisco and the New York City subway system in the 1950s and '60s, as documented in the book "Clouds of Secrecy," by Leonard Cole.

They're also of a piece with some of the unsolved missing persons cases and other true-life horror and crime stories Augenstein continues to write about for Forensic magazine, of which he's currently the editor. The events were inspired as well by prior stories he covered during the decade he spent reporting for several newspapers including the Herald, where he worked from 2008 to 2010, and later The Star-Ledger, where he covered hospitals, health and crime.

"I actually met some really inspirational people through my work, including a brain tumor doctor whose patient I followed from the moment she got her brain tumor diagnosis right up to her death," Augenstein said.

By his own account, the experience affected him deeply and culminated in what he described as one of the most moving newspaper stories he ever wrote.

"I was at her bedside and at her funeral, and the doctor who treated her actually became the inspiration for my main character," he said.

Astute readers of the novel will also detect some local references inspired by Augenstein's old stomping grounds of Sussex County and nearby Morris County, where he currently resides, such as the "Double L" Diner and what he described in an interview as a "Sparta-like community" where the young doctor and his wife at the center of the novel make their home.

The novel includes other futuristic but plausibly believable elements, such as a government-approved, biometric tracking device called an Atman -- it's the year 2087, so smartphones have long since become obsolete -- that everyone has embedded in their arms.

Like most published authors prior to their first taste of success, Augenstein estimates he received between 40 and 50 rejections of the novel's first draft, one of which came in the form of what he called a "Dear John" letter from a book editor at Pandamoon Publishing who eventually changed her mind and agreed to take the project on.

"I sent a note back to her because I was feeling pretty good about it, and I just said, 'I know you're busy but can you tell me why.' And she wrote me back pretty quickly saying she normally doesn't do this, but here's where it fell short -- and it was some of the best editing advice I've ever gotten."

Augenstein finally received an acceptance letter from her just prior to New Year's Eve heading into 2018, and spent the next six months working with her on polishing the manuscript, which included tightening the plot and changing the narrative voice from the third to the first person.

Prior to publication, Augenstein also had a little fun filming a "trailer" in his basement with the help of his wife and a few of his buddies. The video, captioned "Project 137 Book Trailer -- Where Have America's Missing Persons Gone," comes in at just under 90 seconds and can be viewed on YouTube, where it playfully depicts a few "scientists" pretending to harvest the organs of a hapless victim who's strapped down to a table.

"I'm a big horror movie fan so I guess that kind of informed it," Augenstein said.

"My sewer line had also clogged just two days before, and the smell was still lingering, so it was a lot like method acting," he joked.

Still, he said, the novel raises profound questions about each person's intrinsic human dignity and just how far an unfettered government might go to sacrifice individual human beings in the service of what some might euphemistically call "the greater good."

"Project 137" will officially be released Wednesday and can be purchased in both Kindle and hard-copy editions on Amazon and other book retail websites.