Robert Kroese s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In the second grade he wrote his first novel the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship, Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009 he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Mercury Rests, his third book, concludes the trilogy.