Author Description

Air-Minded is a braided historical novel that follows two lives moving through the golden age of flight. John Paul Riddle was an aviation evangelist, a builder, promoter, and teacher who helped turn spectacle into infrastructure: airfields, training programs, and air mail routes. He believed flight could connect and protect a nation. Earnest Pletch was an aviation assassin. He moved through the same system with intent, exploiting its gaps as it took shape. Where Riddle built trust, Pletch tested it, hard, destroying lives. Their stories unfold in parallel across the early decades of powered flight, from barnstorming fields to flight schools, from improvised risk to organized industry. They do not move in lockstep, but they share a sky and a culture coming to terms with the miracle of flight. At its core, Air-Minded is about how systems take hold: who builds them, who uses them, and what happens when the same technology can inspire, connect, and kill.