THOMAS CAVARETTA (06/24/1960 - 03/23/2020) A native of New York City, Thomas Cavaretta moved to El Paso, Texas, with his family when he was only two years old. The coauthor of this work of fiction had learned to love the desert, and he became an avid outdoor sportsman before graduating with a BBS in marketing from the University of Texas in Austin. After completing his undergraduate work, Thomas returned to the Southwest desert and graduated with an MBA from the University of Texas at El Paso. Thomas was married with two sons and was living in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time that he died, soon after the completion of The Obsidian Knife. This coauthor had worked in the complex technological field of hematology and oncology bio-therapeutics for more than a quarter of a century at the time that this three novel set was crafted. Long enchanted by Hispanic lore and the legends of the early Mesoamericans, Thomas Cavaretta found the traditional customs of folk medicine that are still widely practiced among the curandera healers of the American Southwest to be most intriguing. After all, could the contents of the common chicken eggs that are employed in the ritualistic huevo limpia ceremonies portrayed in this novel actually prove to be dangerous to human subjects, as is widely believed? In addition, why does the myth of a night-dwelling creature such as the vampire appear to be pervasive across time, cultures, and ethnic groups? Thomas Cavaretta was compelled to question these phenomena through this work of fiction. As the fund of knowledge expands in the field of biology, along with the confluent appreciation that the appearance of new and previously unrecognized infectious disease entities might be over the next horizon, the human vampirism that is portrayed in this work of fiction may indeed one day turn out to be a plausible horizontally transmitted malady to be confronted within the context of humanity's perpetual struggle against encroaching evil in a fallen world. Thomas Cavaretta certainly had hoped that the readers of this treatise will find this postulate to be as frightening as it is thought-provoking. Thomas was collaborating with Dr. Don W. Hill on Volume III of the VAMPIRO series when he died from a sudden illness on 03/23/2020. He will be sadly missed by all those who knew him.
