Excerpt: The Lights of Sugarberry Cove by Heather Webber

April 26, 2021March 20, 2024admin

The Lights of Sugarberry Cove is a charming, delightful story of family, healing, love, and small town Southern charm by USA Today bestselling author Heather Webber.

Sadie Way Scott has been avoiding her family and hometown of Sugarberry Cove, Alabama, since she nearly drowned in the lake just outside her mother’s B&B. Eight years later, Sadie is the host of a much-loved show about southern cooking and family, but despite her success, she wonders why she was saved. What is she supposed to do?

Sadie’s sister, Leala Clare, is still haunted by the guilt she feels over the night her sister almost died. Now, at a crossroads in her marriage, Leala has everything she ever thought she wanted—so why is she so unhappy?

When their mother suffers a minor heart attack just before Sugarberry Cove’s famous water lantern festival, the two sisters come home to run the inn while she recovers. It’s the last place either of them wants to be, but with a little help from the inn’s quirky guests, the sisters may come to terms with their strained relationships, accept the past, and rediscover a little lake magic.

The Lights of Sugarberry Cove will be available on July 20, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

Chapter

1 Sadie

“Whereabouts are you from, Sadie?” Mrs. Iona Teakes asked as she deftly chopped pecans on a wooden cutting board in her sun-steeped kitchen, the summery afternoon light spilling through a bay window overlooking the Coosa River.

Across the yawning stretch of water, the main street of a small town fluttered with activity as people went about their day. Before coming to Mrs. Teakes’s charming home, I’d stopped for lunch at the local burger place, not only for something to appease my grumbling stomach but to also get a feel for the town. Its people. Its mood. Its potential. Its heartbeat.

I’d been looking for a place to call my home for so long now that I was beginning to think I’d never find it.

But Wetumpka, Alabama, had promise.

A revitalization initiative was in full swing, and the heart of the community was evident in the rebuilding that had taken place in the years since a tornado swept through uprooting trees, buildings, lives. Heart was my number one requirement when it came to a hometown.

“I was born and raised about an hour and a half north of here. In Shelby County.”

Curiosity burned in Mrs. Teakes’s watery eyes as her gaze shifted to my hair, then away again, but she was much too polite to ask any prying questions, for which I was grateful. I’d rather not talk about myself at all, but especially not about my hair and the circumstances of how it had come to be this particular color. My mama has often said my glittering silver tresses reminded her of starlight, as though all the stars in Alabama had fallen directly onto my head, leaving me with a sparkly crown, a stunning glow. Time and again, I’d pointed out that Alabama’s famous fallen stars had been meteorites, and if they’d crashed onto my head, I’d be dead. But Mama always argued the fact that I had died the night my hair turned color, and who was to say it hadn’t been the stars that had caused my brief death?

It hadn’t been the stars. It had been a watery accident. But Mama wasn’t one for accepting small truths, favoring bold exaggerations instead.

Stars bested water, plain and simple.

I’d drowned that summer night nearly eight years ago in Lake Laurel, at just eighteen years old. But I’d been saved. Brought back to life. Brought back to a new life. To a new normal. All these years later, I hadn’t quite figured out who this new Sadie Way Scott was exactly. Or why I had been saved. No matter how far I ran away from my hometown of Sugarberry Cove, Alabama, that particular why haunted me, following my every move, because there had been a reason. I felt it, deep down, like a pulsing bubble of pressure that kept me searching, seeking.

“Is there anything I can do to help, Mrs. Teakes?” I needed a diversion from my thoughts or else I was bound to fall into a deep mudhole of self-pity. I’d already set up my cameras, three in all, to frame specific shots of the homey kitchen that breathed vintage charm, which was easy to do since it hadn’t been updated in at least sixty years, possibly more. The room was painted a cheerful blue, and the scent of vanilla floated in the air, as if being exhaled by the colorful floral wallpaper that served as a backsplash. The bulbous white fridge, covered in family photos, postcards, and old newspaper clippings, hummed loudly, its long chrome handle gleaming. The wide stove with side-by-side ovens had two storage drawers at the bottom, and I could only imagine the stories it could tell of the meals it had cooked.

But those stories would have to wait. The focus of today’s video was on a dish served cold. Several small glass bowls were lined up along the ceramic tile countertop, each filled with a different ingredient. Shredded coconut. Mandarin oranges. Sour cream. Maraschino cherries. Pineapple chunks. Mini marshmallows. Once the food prep was complete, I’d be the one asking all the questions for the sake of the video, which would be posted the following week on my YouTube channel, A Southern Hankerin’.

The videos were about more than Southern cooking. At their heart were human-interest pieces featuring people across the South willing to share a family recipe and the story behind it. Last week, I’d had an in-depth preliminary phone interview with Mrs. Teakes, and today, I’d film her while she told me how, in the late 1960s, she’d captured the heart of her late husband with her recipe for ambrosia salad.

During the interview I’d be sure to mention how the South proudly labeled some desserts as salad. To those who lived here, this came as no surprise. After all, this was the land where mac and cheese was considered a vegetable. But my audience wasn’t limited to the South. I had viewership that spanned the globe, a fact that amazed me—though it shouldn’t. People tuned in for the heartwarming, relatable stories, which were needed in the world more now than ever.

Mrs. Teakes set down her knife and flexed age-spotted hands. Intelligent brown eyes, framed in an abundance of delicate wrinkles, assessed while their softness begged for more information. “Not much left to do, only these pecans to finish chopping. Whereabouts in Shelby County?”

I fussed with a camera setting that needed no adjustment. “Sugarberry Cove.”

The river water below Mrs. Teakes’s kitchen churned with happiness, white-crested rapids pushing and pulling and racing. Farther down the river, the water calmed, gradually stretching into stillness near a bridge with five arches that created circular reflections on the water’s suddenly smooth, glassy surface.

Still waters that reminded me of what used to be my home. “On Lake Laurel? How wonderful! I’ve been several times for

the water lantern festival. A lovely little town. So enchanting. Do you still live there?”

Much like the rapids, my stomach churned as I glanced at the clock on the countertop microwave, wishing time away. My gaze shifted to a tarnished brass teakettle that rested on a stove eye, then to two teacups that dangled on hooks under a golden oak cabinet, one cup having Mr. stenciled on it, the other Mrs. The former looked pristine in condition, the latter well used, well loved, with its tea-darkened interior and chipped handle. Hung askew on the wall by the fridge was a framed, stained cross-stitched cloth with the words Home Is Where Your Heart Is.

Old wounds ached at the simple words, and I turned to look out the window instead of at the phrase that haunted. Mocked.

“No, ma’am, but I still have family up that way. My older sister, her husband, and their little boy live up there. And my mother owns a bed-and-breakfast cottage on the lake and my great-uncle, who’s more like a granddaddy to me, lives and works at the cottage, too.” I bit my lip to keep from saying any more, from spilling my heart onto the cutting board next to the pecans. Why was I revealing so much?

But I knew why. The water.

I missed Sugarberry Cove. I missed my old home.

The home, the family that I’d had before the watery accident that had changed everything and everyone. Most especially me.

Mrs. Teakes picked up the knife once more. “Where do you live, Sadie?”

I turned my back to the window and on old memories. “Here and there and everywhere. I travel a lot, and I’m still looking for the right place to settle down. This seems like a nice area. Wetumpka, I mean.”

“Indeed it is. I grew up here, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.” She chopped another pecan, the sharp knife slicing nutty, brown flesh into small, pale pieces. “The water lantern festival is coming up soon, if memory serves. The weekend after next? Will you go back for that? Such a special event.”

“No, ma’am.” Truly, it was the last place on earth I wanted to be. Setting the knife down again, she faced me. Slim, graceful fingers fiddled with the top button of her pale-blue cardigan as she said, “No? The lady of the lake, Lady Laurel, might be especially generous this year, granting multiple wishes. You don’t have any

wishes to set afloat?”

The lanterns at the festival carried wishes across the lake, which came true only if Lady Laurel pulled the floating vessel from the surface of the dark water to fill her underwater home with the glowing light created by pure, heartfelt wishes.

Deep lines fanned across her cheeks as Mrs. Teakes smiled, and the warmth in her eyes pulled at my heartstrings, making me want to tell her the whole story, start to finish, about how sometimes during the water lantern festival it was important to be very careful what you wished for.

“The festival will make do without my wishes.” Faking a smile, I picked up the knife to finish chopping the pecans, etiquette be damned. The sooner I could stop talking about myself, the better.

Mrs. Teakes’s gaze slowly drifted to my hair again. “I’ve heard told several stories of Lady Laurel’s kindness, not always having to do with the lanterns. There’ve been rescues, haven’t there? Boaters? Swimmers? Didn’t she save a young woman once from drowning?”

The glimmer in her eyes made me suspect she already knew why my hair was this color. There had been a flurry of media interest after my accident, but it had died down fairly quickly, thankfully. I’d hated the attention. Everyone stared. Whispered. The doctors had been mystified by my hair but ultimately chalked up the startling change in color to a traumatic shock reaction. These days the looks my hair garnered were a sight easier to deal with because most people assumed I purposely dyed it this color. To be edgy or artsy or as a brand, to set myself apart from a zillion other online creators. But back home in Sugarberry Cove, everybody knew its true source: lake magic.

I’d been saved by Lady Laurel, the lady of the lake.

There were many days I cursed the wish I made the night I’d fallen into the water, the wish that had ultimately caused my accident and its aftermath. I’d love nothing more than to go back in time to make a different choice. But there was no going back to what used to be. It was gone, left behind in the lake after I’d been pulled out, floating away on a water lantern carrying a wish that had changed life as I knew it.

In a span of a few short weeks, I’d died, been brought back to life, dropped out of college, shattered people’s belief in me, suffered crushing heartbreak, and began drifting around the state in search of odd jobs to keep afloat until I eventually started making videos to tell other people’s stories. Now I lived out of a suitcase as I traveled the South for A Southern Hankerin’.

Why had I been saved?

Using the blade of the knife to sweep pecans from the chopping board into a glass bowl, I barely noticed as the knife bit painlessly into the side of my thumb. A spot of red blossomed instantly.

I quickly folded my fingers over the wound, pressing tightly.

Mrs. Teakes gasped and set her hand on my arm. “Oh dear. I’ll fetch a bandage.”

“No need. It’s only a nick, and I’m a quick healer.” An understatement, to be sure. “It didn’t even hurt.”

“Nonsense. I’ll be just a moment.”

As Mrs. Teakes hurried out of the room, an incoming text message vibrated the phone in the back pocket of my jeans. I pulled the phone free and saw the message was from my sister, Leala Clare.

Sadie Way, you need to come home. Mother’s okay but had a minor heart attack. She’s at Shelby Baptist.

My stomach lurched into my throat, and my hands shook as

I stared at the screen. At first I was disbelieving that my sister would text me this news, but then I remembered I’d asked her to always text before calling in case I was filming. And even in the face of something so important, she hadn’t ignored my request. Leala was nothing if not a rule follower.

“Sadie, are you all right? You’ve gone ghostly white.”

Mrs. Teakes stood before me, concern flaring in her eyes, bandage in hand.

“I’m okay, but I’m sorry, I need to go. There’s been an emergency.” I quickly gathered my cameras and notes. As I headed out the door, I said, “I’ll call to reschedule our interview.”

“Anytime, dear. Anytime.”

A few minutes later, I turned down the jazz playing on the car radio and backed carefully out of the narrow asphalt driveway. Mrs. Teakes stood on the front porch, waving, the bandage fluttering in her hand like a tiny white flag. My gaze dropped to my thumb on the steering wheel, to the spot where the knife had pierced. The wound had already disappeared, the skin as smooth as it had been before being sliced.

As I headed north toward the home I’d barely seen in years, I couldn’t help but wish that my emotional wounds could be so easily healed as well.

Pre-order The Lights of Sugarberry Cove—available on July 20, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Tender Is the Bite by Spencer Quinn

April 23, 2021March 20, 2024admin

Spencer Quinn’s Tender Is the Bite is a brand new adventure in the New York Times and USA Today bestselling series that Stephen King calls “without a doubt the most original mystery series currently available.”

Chet and Bernie are contacted by a terribly scared young woman who seems to want their help. Before she can even tell them her name, she flees in panic. But in that brief meeting Chet sniffs out an important secret about her, a secret at the heart of the mystery he and Bernie set out to solve.

It’s a case with no client and no crime and yet great danger, with the duo facing a powerful politician who has a lot to lose. Their only hope lies with a ferret named Griffie who adores Bernie. Is there room for a ferret in the Chet and Bernie relationship? That’s the challenge Chet faces, the biggest of his career. Hanging in the balance are the lives of two mistreated young women and the future of the whole state.

Tender Is the Bite will be available on July 6, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

One

“I think we’re being followed,” Bernie said.

That had to be one of Bernie’s jokes. Have I mentioned that he can be quite the jokester? Probably not, since we’re just getting started, but who else except Bernie would even think of saying that? We were creeping along at walking speed on the East Canyon Freeway at rush hour, stuck in an endless river of traffic. Of course we were being followed, followed by too many cars to count! Not only too many for me to count—I don’t go past two—but also for Bernie. And Bernie’s always the smartest human in the room, one of the reasons the Little Detective Agency is so successful, leaving out the finances part. It’s called that on account of Bernie’s last name being Little. I’m Chet, pure and simple, not the smartest human in the room, in fact, not human. I bring other things to the table.

Bernie glanced at the rearview mirror. Our ride’s a Porsche, not the old one that went off a cliff, or the older one that got blown up, but the new one—which happens to be the very oldest—with the martini glasses paint job on the fenders. We used to have a top and also a very cool chain hanging from the rearview mirror, a chain we’d taken off a biker after . . . what would you call it? A dispute? Good enough. But recently, we’d had to use it to temporarily cuff—wow! Another biker! How amazing was that? I came close to finding some sort of deep meaning, but before I could get there, Bernie said, “Three lanes over, six cars back, in front of the Amazon truck—see the maroon Kia?”

I checked the rearview mirror myself. Three? Six? Amazon? Maroon? Kia? Every single one of them not easy for me. But I’ve always been lucky in life, so all I saw in the rearview mirror was Bernie. My Bernie. He has the best face in the world, especially if you like strong noses and eyebrows with a language all their own, and I do. He has plans to get that slightly crooked angle in his nose straightened out after he’s sure it won’t be broken again. But that would mean game over for his uppercut, that sweet, sweet uppercut guaranteed to put perps to sleep, so I hope his nose stays just how it is forever.

“Can’t make out the driver,” he said, “but that Kia was in the back corner of the Donut Heaven lot, meaning whoever it is has been with us for ten miles on a real complicated route.” He turned to me and smiled. “Dollars to doughnuts, Chet.”

That was a puzzler. Bernie’d had a cruller, and I’d gone with the sausage croissant, doughnuts not even mentioned. Just to make sure, I licked my muzzle, picking up the unmistakable— and wonderful—taste of sausage. But in our business, you have to be sure, so I did it again and again and again and—

“Something the matter, big guy?”

Nothing. We were good. I stopped whatever I’d been doing, sat up straight in the shotgun seat, alert and ready for action, a total pro.

“Let’s run a little test,” Bernie said, suddenly crossing several lanes and taking an exit. There was some honking, but I’d heard worse. The point was we were taking charge and naming names! Chet! Bernie! Those are all the names you need to know for now. We’ve been followed by bad guys more than once, the last time down in a little village south of the border, an incident involving an army-type tank packed with unfriendly cartel dudes and a dead-end alley. That had turned into an exciting adventure, full of all sorts of fancy driving on Bernie’s part—and even for a fun moment or two on mine!—but nothing like that was happening now. Instead, we rolled along nice and easy, turning onto one street, then another, and a bunch more, and finally ending up in a shady part of Old Town, with small wooden houses on one side and a park on the other, not one of those green, grassy parks that Bernie hates but the rocky, cactusy kind he likes. He didn’t check the rearview, not even once. We pulled over and stopped on the park side and just sat there. A car went slowly by. Was that what maroon looked like? So nice to be learning new things! Meanwhile, I caught a glimpse of the driver: a young woman, eyes on the road, baseball cap on her head, ponytail sticking out the back. Ponies are horses, and I’ve had lots of experience with horses, none good. They’re prima donnas, each and every one. So how come some humans want to look like them? A complete mystery. But solving mysteries is what we do, me and Bernie. Life was good. I felt tip-top.

Meanwhile, the maroon car kept going, made a turn at the next block, and vanished from sight. Right away, I got the picture. She’d been following us. Now we were going to follow her! That’s called turning the tables in our business. Here’s a secret: you don’t always need a table to do it, although once we did use an actual table, turning it upside down on the Boccerino brothers and perhaps also on some unlucky folks sitting nearby. That was at the Ritz, where we haven’t been back.

But forget all that, because Bernie wasn’t turning the key, jamming the car into gear, stomping on the gas, burning rubber. He was just sitting there, gazing peacefully ahead, possibly even falling asleep. Bernie? I laid a paw on his shoulder in the friendliest way.

“Ooof!” said Bernie, possibly crashing into—well, not crashing into, more like leaning against his door, most likely what he wanted to do anyway. He gave me a look that could have meant anything. I gave him the same look back. Bernie laughed. Laughter’s the best human sound, and Bernie’s is the best of the best, even when it’s a quiet laugh like this one.

“No worries,” he said. “We’re not dealing with a pro.”

Good to know. Were we dealing with anything? Anybody? When was the last time we got paid? I was wondering about all that when the maroon car came by again, this time slowing down, pulling over, and parking in front of us.

“The most amateur kind of amateur,” Bernie said.

We sat. The ponytail woman sat, not once checking her mirror or glancing back at us.

“An amateur and scared,” Bernie said. He made a little click click noise, meaning, Let’s roll, big guy. We hopped out, me actually hopping right over my closed door and Bernie just getting out in the normal human way, which was our usual MO. But I’d seen him hop out—for example, the time with that whole cluster of sidewinders under the driver’s seat—so he had it in him.

We walked up to the maroon car. The way we do this, amateur—whatever that happens to be—or not, is Bernie on the driver’s side and me on the other. How many perps have taken one look at Bernie and then dived out the passenger-side door, only to get a real big surprise—namely, me? But that didn’t happen with the ponytail woman. Instead, she went on sitting there, hands holding the wheel tight.

Bernie leaned down and spoke through her open window. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.

Whoa. We’d met this woman before? One thing about my nose: it remembers the smell of everyone I’ve ever met, and it did not remember this woman. She had an interesting smell, a bit piney, that made me think of New Mexico, which we’d visited on several cases, picking up a speeding ticket every time. Through the open passenger-side window, I was getting my first clear look at her face. A young face, but not quite as young as the face of a college kid. In the faces of college kids, you can still see a bit of the little kid face that was. There was no little kid left in the ponytail woman’s face, which was turning pink. Her eyes were big and the brightest blue I’d ever seen, actually the color of this morning’s sky, like the sky was shining inside her.

“Sorry,” Bernie said. “Bad joke.”

I’m sure it was a very good joke, although it’s true the woman hadn’t laughed. But I was glad to hear it was a joke and we hadn’t met before, because now I didn’t need to choose between my nose and Bernie’s word, which would have been the hardest choice of my life. Stay away from hard choices if you want to be happy.

Pre-order Tender Is the Bite—available on July 6, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: The Kobalt Dossier by Eric Van Lustbader

April 21, 2021March 20, 2024admin

Evan Ryder is back in The Kobalt Dossier, the stunning follow-up to The Nemesis Manifesto from New York Times bestselling author Eric Van Lustbader.

After thwarting the violent, international, fascist syndicate known as Nemesis, Evan Ryder returns to Washington, D.C., to find her secret division of the DOD shut down and her deceased sister’s children missing. Now the target of a cabal of American billionaires who were among Nemesis’s supporters, Evan and her former boss, Ben Butler, must learn to work together as partners – and navigate their intricate past.

Their search will take them from Istanbul to Odessa to an ancient church deep within the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. And all along the way, an unimaginable enemy stalks in the shadows, an adversary whose secretive past will upend Evan’s entire world and everything she holds dear.

The Kobalt Dossier will be available on June 1, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

1

WASHINGTON, DC

PRESENT DAY

Benjamin Butler had made a mistake. A grave mistake. By Zoe’s determination, anyway. His daughter, eight years old going on sixteen, had made him promise that there would always be Oreos in the house. Because they just returned from a week at the Atlantis in Paradise Island, celebrating her eighth birthday, tonight there weren’t any, which was why Ben was trolling down the wide aisles of the Costco on Market Street NE, in DC with an impatient Zoe on his heels. It was almost 8 p.m.; they had just over thirty minutes to find and purchase the Oreos before the store closed for the night. He should have known where they were; he’d bought them often enough. But Costco had this annoying habit of moving displays around.

At last, after long minutes of hunting, Zoe spotted them midway down the snacks aisle.

“There, Dad! There they are!”

He pushed his cart after his sprinting daughter and caught up with her in front of a massive stack of the oversized blue boxes filled with thirty six-packs of the cookies Zoe loved so much. He grabbed one, looked at her happy hungry face, and decided to make it two, so he wouldn’t have to think about buying them for weeks. As he turned to head for the register lines, he saw a suit standing at the end of the aisle. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the suit’s twin—or near enough. Ben had been in the business of espionage long enough to recognize government bodyguards with a single glance. He could smell them too—a combination of cheap aftershave, cheap fabric, and sweat. No one was in the aisle save himself and Zoe. He prudently decided to shelter in place and let the situation reveal itself. He stood with his hands on the bar of his shopping cart, Zoe in front of him cradled between his arms, and waited.

A few seconds later, a new actor emerged from behind a display of M&M boxes the size of his chest. The no-neck monster Ben knew as General Ryan Aristides, his boss at DOD, who had proved himself a gutless wonder when Ben’s job and reputation were on the line several months ago. Instead of coming to Ben’s defense against Brady Thompson, the Secretary of Defense, he had stepped away, keeping himself clear of whatever fallout would ensue from Brady coming down on Ben’s head and on Ben’s clandestine shop. As it turned out Ben and Evan Ryder had been able to neutralize Thompson, uncovering evidence that he had been working for the Russians and turning him. As a double agent, he now delivered vital intel to Aristides while feeding disinformation to his erstwhile Russian masters.

The general’s big square face looked pale beneath the harsh blue-white overheads. He walked with a rolling gait, slightly bowlegged, result of his time aboard ships.

“Quite a sweet tooth you have there, Ben,” he said, pointing at the Oreos.

Ben. Aristides always called him Benjamin. Something was up. It was only then, as the general approached, that Ben realized Aristides was out of regs: he was in a shiny suit he might have worn to his daughter’s wedding.

“Zoe,” Ben said.

“Ah, yes, the lovely Zoe.”

The general should have been smiling, but he wasn’t. Anyone else would have said hello to the girl, asked how she was, but Aristides was busy looking at a display of gummy bears. “I hated these when I was a kid,” he said, his voice a basso rumble. “Disgusting stuff, don’t you think? All that sugar, just rots you from the inside out.” But it was clear he didn’t expect or want an answer. In fact, it wasn’t altogether clear whether he was speaking about gummy bears at all.

The general sighed, turned back to Ben. “I think it would be best if Zoe took a stroll around with Wilson here.” One of the suits stepped forward. He was young, fresh-faced, and, unlike his boss, was smiling at Zoe.

Ben took a short moment for a sit rep. Evaluating the situation wasn’t difficult; Aristides had given him little choice. He leaned over and put his mouth to Zoe’s ear. “How about it, kiddo? The general and I need to have a bit of a chin-wag.” He couched the request in as unintimidating terms as he could.

Zoe, who was both smart and used to the secretiveness of her father’s job, nodded. “Okey-doke.

“I’m not a child,” she said, slipping out from between her father and the shopping cart, ignoring Wilson’s extended hand, fixing him with her disconcertingly direct stare.

“My mistake.” Wilson scarcely missed a beat.

When the two of them were out of sight, Aristides cleared his throat. “Ben, I’m afraid I have bad news.”

Ben’s stomach dropped, as if he were in a fast descending elevator. “Let’s have it,” he said.

The general picked up an enormous bag of miniature Snickers, regarded it as if it were a crystal ball, then, almost angrily, shoved it back with its brethren. When he turned to Ben, his gaze was concentrated on a spot in the middle of Ben’s forehead.

He can’t look me in the eye, Ben thought, and braced himself as best he could.

Aristides heaved a sigh. His neck was bulging, threatening to burst out of its collar. “As of today, your shop is out of business.”

“Wait. What?” Ben couldn’t believe what he just heard. “You can’t be serious.”

“Everyone but Evan has already been reassigned.”

“After we delivered Thompson as a double agent? The Secretary of Defense? The biggest espionage coup in ” Ben shook his head. “How

is this possible?”

“You delivered Thompson to me, personally. No one else knows we compromised him and to protect him that’s the way it needs to remain.”

“I understand. Of course I do. But still—”

“Listen to me, Ben. First, POTUS doesn’t care for your agents being female.” Aristides began to count on his fingers. “Second, you lost control of one of them, Brenda Myers. She went rogue and killed a civilian. Third, your shop’s incursion on foreign soil and its messy aftermath have made you and Ryder some extremely dangerous enemies here at home— billionaires with the wherewithal and power to influence POTUS.”

Ben grunted in disgust. “General, with all due respect, you still need me, need my shop. These people aren’t done. Samuel Wainwright Wells is right at the heart of the same evangelical conservative cabal that’s been funding Nemesis’s neo-Nazi arm here in America. That’s the right wing’s plan, meld their brand of conservatism with white supremacy. He’s their top dog. I’ve got my eye on him, with his people spewing their evangelical racism through the TV and radio stations he owns.”

“Undoubtedly. Nevertheless, Ben, these evangelical conservatives have POTUS’s ear. Wells’s Super PAC played a major role in his election. Ever since Wells married his third wife, the former Lucinda Horvat, just over a year ago, he’s been even more seriously into the evangelicals.”

Ben shook his head. “Right. They had a low-key wedding at the DC hotel owned by one of POTUS’s companies. I heard he offered the hotel gratis—as a wedding present.”

Aristides nodded. “Tight guest list—an echelon of his compadres, but none of her family; they’re all dead. Probably because Lucinda is in her late twenties, the marriage caused something of a ripple in the mainstream press.”

“Which set off the usual backlash in the right-wing media. And even they weren’t allowed to take photos.”

The general nodded. “Wells is notoriously reclusive, so there wasn’t much of a story for the press to latch onto. And, of course, Wells’s own virulently right-wing media network ignored the age difference altogether. In any event, it took the new Mrs. Wells no time to climb into the Wellsian life. By all accounts he’s content to have her be his mouthpiece. And POTUS seems enamored of her. She often leads his private prayer group. Word is, she also appears to be taking a more active role in Wells’s business affairs. She’s seen more often at high-level corporation meetings than he is.”

“Well, there you go. Their involvement in Nemesis is a logical conclusion, General. Even you can see that.”

Aristides’s expression did not change. “All circumstantial, all conjecture. You have no proof, Ben. As far as we are concerned, the Wellses’ hands are clean.”

“Their hands are as dirty as they come.” Ben shook his head. “This is insane, General. I know it and you know it.” Ben realized that unconsciously he’d taken up a defensive stance: feet at hip’s width, arms hanging at his sides, hands slightly curled. But it was no use— Aristides had already attacked him. He was rocked back on his heels. The ground had been scooped out from under him, and he was falling into an abyss.

“I wish it were, Ben, but facts are facts. This cabal of ultra-wealthy conservatives, whoever they are—”

“Who, not incidentally, are raping this country, following the game plan of the robber barons of the early 1900s.”

“Irrelevant to this discussion. What is relevant is that you thwarted them when you took down Nemesis,” Aristides continued, ignoring Ben’s furious outburst. “They’re not likely to forget that. They’re not used to losing.”

And this is the thanks I get, Ben thought. I get fucked while they get away scot-free. But he didn’t say it. Self-pity was not a trait Aristides could abide. Nevertheless, Ben felt the rage rise in him like bile, burning his stomach and throat, momentarily muting him.

He’d spent a decade in the field, facing innumerable forms of peril that placed him so close to death he could feel its icy heartbeat. He’d deliberately wrenched himself out of the field—a place he had come to view as home—in order to work himself up the intelligence ladder, and at last he’d been delivered his reward: his own black ops shop.

Now it was gone, vaporized with a cynical and self-serving command. “I’ve pulled some strings, dodged a couple of regs, to get you an extremely generous severance package.”

Ben’s lip curled. “Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

Aristides’s meaty shoulders rose, fell. “Either way, the money is yours. It’s in your account.”

“And that’s it?” Ben said with pointed belligerence.

“It’s a shitload of money,” Aristides said with equanimity. “What about Evan?”

“She has a choice. Either accept a reassignment to the Department of Energy or take severance.”

“The Department of fucking Energy? You must be joking. What is she going to do there?”

The general shrugged. “Politics, Ben.”

“You already know what her choice will be, General.”

Aristides nodded. “Money will hit her account tomorrow morning.” Aristides took another step closer. “A word of warning. These people,

they’ll never forget what you and Ryder did,” Aristides said in a raspy whisper. “They’ll never forget.”

Ben passed a hand across his forehead; it came away damp and clammy. He was grateful that Zoe couldn’t see him in this state. The general had done one thing, at least, to ease Ben’s pain—and it was no small thing.

“But—” Aristides’s voice returned to its normal level. “Lemons, lemonade.”

Ben’s eyes narrowed. This was no time for word games. “Please.”

The general’s expression softened like taffy. Ben recognized genuine compassion in his eyes.

“Seen in a new light,” Aristides said, “this turn of events can be fortuitous.”

Ben goggled at him. A bitter laugh exploded out of his mouth. “In what multiverse?” He was incredulous.

“Yours.” Aristides spread his hands. “New start, new opportunities.

You were always a wizard at those.”

Aristides’s face was sallow, unhealthy-looking in the overhead illumination. Briefly, Ben wondered whether he looked as bad.

General Aristides glanced at his watch; their time was up. “Evan Ryder is the only one of your field assets currently out of the country,” he said. “Yes?”

Ben nodded.

“For her sake and yours get her the hell back here ASAP.”

Pre-order The Kobalt Dossier—available on June 1, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: A Dog’s Courage by W. Bruce Cameron

April 20, 2021March 20, 2024admin

#1 New York Times bestselling author W. Bruce Cameron once again captures the bravery and determination of a very good dog in the gripping sequel to A Dog’s Way Home, the acclaimed novel that inspired the hit movie!

Bella was once a lost dog, but now she lives happily with her people, Lucas and Olivia, only occasionally recalling the hardships in her past. Then a weekend camping trip turns into a harrowing struggle for survival when the Rocky Mountains are engulfed by the biggest wildfire in American history. The raging inferno separates Bella from her people and she is lost once more.

Alone in the wilderness, Bella unexpectedly finds herself responsible for the safety of two defenseless mountain lion cubs. Now she’s torn between two equally urgent goals. More than anything, she wants to find her way home to Lucas and Olivia, but not if it means abandoning her new family to danger. And danger abounds, from predators hunting them to the flames threatening at every turn.

Can Bella ever get back to where she truly belongs?

A Dog’s Courage is more than a fast-paced adventure, more than a devoted dog’s struggle to survive, it’s a story asking that we believe in our dogs as much as they believe in us.

A Dog’s Courage will be available on May 4, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

One

I was enjoying the sort of nap that, as a dog, I had long ago mastered: sprawled out on sparse grasses, my nose filled with the fresh smell of trees, ears barely registering the small noises of birds and other rustlings. Sleeping outside near my boy, Lucas, his scent giving me an overall sense of his presence, is one of the most wonderful things to do on a lazy afternoon after a walk in the mountains. I was drifting on well-being, happy to be alive.I was enjoying the sort of nap that, as a dog, I had long ago mastered: sprawled out on sparse grasses, my nose filled with the fresh smell of trees, ears barely registering the small noises of birds and other rustlings. Sleeping outside near my boy, Lucas, his scent giving me an overall sense of his presence, is one of the most wonderful things to do on a lazy afternoon after a walk in

Lucas shared my contentment; I could tell by his relaxed breathing. He was sitting drowsily in the sun with his dog and his Olivia.

So I was startled when all of a sudden, tension jolted him. I instantly popped open my eyes and lifted my head, blinking away the sleep.

“Nobody move,” he urged. I glanced over at him, but then turned my full attention to what I could suddenly smell: a cat, fe- male, a big one, somewhere close, lurking in the bushes. The feral odor was unmistakable.

For a moment I thought it might be a very particular mountain cat, one I knew as well as any animal I had ever met or smelled, but I quickly realized that no, this was a stranger, a new intruder. She wasn’t moving, so I didn’t spy her at first. Then she shifted slightly, and I saw her. She was stocky and powerful and larger than the cats who lived in the house down the street, almost bigger than any cat I had ever seen. Her head would easily reach my back. She was spotted, with alert ears held high and a rabbit dangling from her mouth. I could smell the rabbit as strongly as the wild cat.

So, no, this wasn’t any animal I knew, though she did bring to mind a mountain cat that was much larger than this one.

The cat and I locked eyes, frozen. Lucas and Olivia were both motionless and tense, but not afraid. “Do you see it?” Lucas asked in the barest of whispers.

Olivia stirred. “I’ve only seen one other bobcat in my whole life. This is so cool!”

Lucas nodded ever so slightly. “It’s beautiful.”

I was still staring at the cat and the cat was still staring at me. It was the type of moment I often share with squirrels, when we’re both immobile, right before one of us bolts and the chase is on.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to chase this particular animal, though. “I’m going to reach for my phone,” Lucas murmured. “Get some video of this. Bella, no barks.”

I did not understand why my boy would tell me No Barks when I wasn’t barking, or making any noise at all. I noticed his hand creeping ever so slowly, but it was movement enough to remind the big cat that she had other things to do than just stare at two people and their wonderful dog. With motion as quiet as Lucas’s whisper, she turned and was quickly in the bushes and gone, though her powerful smell lingered long after she vanished.

If I were going to give chase, now would be my moment. But I did not want the cat, or her rabbit. I had not yet been fed dinner, and did not want to be off in the woods pursuing wild creatures when it was presented.

“Amazing, that was amazing,” Olivia enthused.

“I’ve never seen one before. Wow,” Lucas agreed. “You know, I used to camp all the time and I never came across anything but elk. But with you we’ve seen bears, that eagle, a mountain lion, and now we can add a bobcat to the list.”

“You’re saying I’m good luck.”

Lucas grinned at her. “I’m saying that now that I’m with you, maybe I notice more of what’s good about life.”

“That’s sweet.” I wagged.

“Why do you suppose it came so close to our campsite?” Olivia asked. “What does it mean?”

“Mean? What, like a sign, or an omen? A message from the cat gods? I don’t think it needs to mean anything. It was just a wild animal checking us out.”

Olivia shrugged. “It’s just pretty unusual behavior for a felid. Humans are really their only natural enemy.”

“Felid!” Lucas howled. He crawled across the grass to Olivia and pulled her onto her back, laughing at her. “What the heck is a felid?”

Olivia was smiling up at him. “It’s just a name for a wild cat. I was showing off that I know some words that my brainy doctor husband doesn’t know. And it is almost an omen to see a bobcat sneaking up on people instead of the other way around, don’t you think?”

“Maybe it wasn’t stalking us at all; maybe it wanted to get a look at Bella. Our canid.”

I wagged at my name.

“Canid! My husband is so smart.”

“My wife is so smart. So, okay, what else about bobcats?”

“I know they’re territorial, like mountain lions. If a female is in her territory, she’s queen and nobody messes with her. But if she accidentally wanders into another female’s range, it’s open sea- son. She goes from predator to prey. Sort of what would happen if some nurse tried to flirt with handsome Dr. Lucas Ray.”

Lucas laughed. “I still don’t think Felid the Cat was an omen.” I had the sense that they were talking about the cat and the rabbit, but I didn’t feel motivated to pursue it into the trees. My place now was with my people, my Lucas and Olivia. We lived together in a house with a room to sleep in, a room to eat in, and a room where all the food was kept, called “kitchen.” Sometimes I would lie on the floor of the food room, just to drink in the wonderful smells.

I never know why, but on occasion Lucas packs things into a car he calls “the Jeep” and drives us up into the mountains. On those nights we sleep in a single, soft-sided room Lucas and Olivia would temporarily erect near the vehicle. That’s what we were doing now.

Not long after the wild cat ran off with her kill, Lucas opened some packets and made dinner, an action I found to be a very positive development.

They sat in chairs Olivia unfolded. While I watched attentively for dropped food items, my thoughts returned first to the cat with the rabbit, and then to how her appearance had instantly brought to mind a much larger cat, one with whom I had spent many, many days and nights in these same mountains. Though she grew to be a huge creature, I always thought of her as Big Kitten, because she was a kitten when I met her.

Lucas tossed me a piece of dinner. As I deftly snagged pieces of food out of the air, I realized how the feral odors of the wild cat were more imagined than actually sensed, now that she had faded into the woods with her rabbit. That’s what happens in the mountains—it isn’t that a dog can’t find a particular odor out there, it’s that there are so many other smells competing for the primary position in the nose. I gave up trying to track her—she was long gone. In fact, after a time, I was back to reflecting on Big Kitten, calling up the memory of how she smelled when we curled up for sleep together, the snow coming down on both of us in a soft blanket.

Often when I am sprawled at my boy’s feet at night I will ponder how different my life is now that I am back with people. For a time, I was a dog who hunted and roamed the trails with a giant cat, and didn’t sleep on beds, or get fed dinner twice a day. I was often hungry and afraid, but my companion and I survived. Big Kitten and I were a pack through two winters, relying on each other.

I usually thought about Big Kitten whenever Lucas and Olivia took me up into the mountains, because it was in the mountains where I first encountered her.

When I found Big Kitten she was smaller than the she-cat I had just seen with the rabbit, and she was alone. Her mother had recently died because of something two men had done to her. That’s what I concluded as I sniffed the mother cat’s lifeless body sprawled in the dirt, because there had been a loud bang- ing noise and the two men were running toward me, shouting excitedly to each other. The powerful odor of fresh blood clung to the mother feline’s motionless corpse, and the air still carried the sharp tang of an acrid smoke that was growing stronger as the men thrashed through the woods, headed in my direction. I was tensed and ready to flee when I spotted the baby cat watching me from the bushes.

I decided in that moment that the big kitten hiding in the bushes, though larger than any adult cat I had ever seen before, was the baby of the gigantic cat who lay dead and bloody in the sand.

I needed to protect her from the bad men. I had the sense that whatever they had done to the huge cat to kill it, they would do to the big kitten, and probably to me as well.

Over time, I became Big Kitten’s mother cat. In a way it was a natural role for me, because when I was just a puppy, long before I met Lucas, my mother dog was taken from me by a different set of bad men, and I wound up living under a house with a family of cats. My littermates were kittens, and their mother was my mother.

This lasted a short time, until Lucas took me home, and then I lived with people instead of cats.

I taught Big Kitten how to hunt. She and I went for long, long walks together because I was a lost dog. I had been separated from Lucas, my person, and was making my way home to him. Big Kitten came with me. Along the way, we fed together, and Big Kitten grew until she was much larger than me.

I loved Big Kitten, but I loved being a dog to Lucas even more. So as I did Go Home, Big Kitten remained behind in the wilds, watching me walk away from her, out of the mountains and toward the smells and sounds of a big, open city with cars and many, many people.

As I left Big Kitten and descended toward the streets and buildings and traffic, I couldn’t separate my boy’s smell from the countless human scents on the air, but I could sense him, feel him, and I knew I would be able to find my way home to him.

I never saw Big Kitten again, but it was not hard to imagine, as I drifted off to sleep many nights, that she was right there next to me, keeping me warm, keeping me company: the best animal friend I ever had.

Often when we took car rides in the Jeep, ranging along bouncy mountain roads, I would thrust my nose out into the wind and concentrate on trying to find her, searching for a single whiff of cat to let me know she was still alive. Thus far I had been unsuccessful, but Lucas always found new places for us to stay, and I thought it likely I would one day see my dear friend again.

I looked forward to that.

Lucas and Olivia were eating chunks of meat, but they did not neglect a good dog like me. I was dazzling them with my Sit. That one always works.

After dinner, Lucas and Olivia and I crawled into the small room where we slept when we were on Jeep car rides. This was our second night and, if past behavior was any guide, we would soon be driving back home to sleep on our bed inside our house.

I didn’t mind where I slept, as long as I was with my boy. I fussed to get the soft blankets just right, but eventually settled in between Lucas and Olivia. As I did so, a warmth rose up from within me, because I was with the people who loved me and I loved them. Since the moment I first met Lucas, I knew the two of us belonged together. The reason I never gave up on my long trek back home was because I was his dog. On my travels I met several people who were nice to me and wanted to take care of me, but there was only one Lucas.

As often as I dreamed of Big Kitten, I dreamed of my boy, running with me, or feeding me treats.

Not long after Lucas zipped the door closed, I heard some- thing rustling in the plants outside in the night and raised my head and gave a low warning growl.

“Bella, no barks, okay?” Lucas murmured sleepily. “Lucas, no snores, okay?” Olivia replied.

Lucas chuckled in the dark. “I’ve read that wives often pretend that their husbands snore, just so the poor guys will feel guilty.”

“I’ve read that when men snore, their wives will dump water on them just to make the poor guys feel wet,” Olivia countered.

Lucas propped himself up on an elbow. “You snore sometimes and I’ve never complained.”

“That’s because your snoring drowns mine completely out.” “Well, see how lucky you are?”

Olivia laughed. “This thing you do where you pretend to be really dumb is pretty funny.”

“Glad I amuse you.”

“Maybe sometime in the future you could pretend to be smart. Like for my birthday, maybe,” Olivia teased. “Just one day. The rest of the year you can go back to playing dumb.”

They were grinning at each other. Lucas reached over me and touched Olivia’s shoulder, and I wagged because his arm was rest- ing on my back. “Hey.”

“Hey what.”

“I love you, Olivia Ray.” “I love you, Lucas Ray.”

I heard a rustling sound and growled again. “Bella, no snores,” Lucas intoned.

“No snores, Bella,” Olivia agreed.

I wondered what they were telling me.

“I have a surprise for you tomorrow,” Lucas remarked after a long moment of silence.

Olivia stirred. I opened my eyes but didn’t otherwise react. “Surprise? What is it?” she demanded.

“Well, clearly, I can’t say—that’s the nature of a surprise. Surely someone has told you that before.”

“Does it rhyme with ‘whirl wecklass’?” “Go to sleep, Olivia.”

“How about ‘wuby wing’?”

Lucas laughed. “Go to sleep. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

Pre-order A Dog’s Courage—available on May 4, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Double Threat by F. Paul Wilson

April 19, 2021March 29, 2024admin

Double Threat is a new stand-alone thriller from New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson.

Daley has a problem. Her 26-year life so far has been unconventional, to say the least, but now she’s got this voice in her head. It claims to be a separate entity that’s going to be sharing her body from now on. At first she thinks she’s losing her grip on reality, then considers the possibility that maybe she really has been invaded – but by what? Medical tests turn up nothing, yet the voice persists… and won’t stop talking!

When she finally she accepts the reality that she has a symbiont, she discovers that together they can cure people of the incurable.

Maybe hosting a symbiont isn’t such a bad thing.

She retreats to a remote town in the southwest desert to hone her healing skills. But there she runs afoul of the Pendry clan, leaders of an obscure cult that worships the Visitors who inhabited the area millions of years ago. They plan to bring them back but believe Daley is the prophesied “Duad” who will undo all the cult’s efforts. She must be eliminated.

You know things are bad when the voice in your head is the only one you can trust.

Double Threat will be available on June 29, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

WEDNESDAY—FEBRUARY 18

1

The very idea of hiding in a cave gave Daley the deep creeps.

This one was shallow, basically a cleft in the rocks, maybe twenty feet deep. She’d done an inspection using the mini Maglite she always carried on her key chain and found nothing but a grayish mossy patch on the ceiling. Lichen, maybe? She’d heard the term but had no clear idea of what lichen was, except that it wasn’t going to bite her. She’d been more concerned about finding some of the more disgusting things that liked to make their home in desert caves. Bats, for one. And rattlesnakes. And scorpions. Probably tarantulas too.

None of those, thank you. But just the thought of them . . .

She shuddered but stayed put. She needed this cave. At least for the moment. At least until she was sure a certain SUV full of angry Coachella hausfraus had given up on finding her. What was the saying? Hell hath no fury like a woman scammed? Something like that.

Miles away in the sandy valley below, the glittery blue of the stagnant and stinky Salton Sea dominated the view. Not high desert out there—low, low desert, with not a Joshua tree or saguaro in sight.

She studied the expanse of sand between her perch and the palm-tree farm that bordered the highway, looking for a dust cloud, the telltale sign of an approaching vehicle. But as she watched, she couldn’t resist repeated glances over her shoulder. The cave was empty. She’d checked. So why this feeling she wasn’t alone?

No dust cloud in sight out there yet, so Daley did another quick check of the interior with her mini Mag. But just like before: nada except for the lichen patch. A crazy idea that it had moved wormed into her head but she laughed it off and went back on watch.

Not her first time running the car-raffle game, but those pissed-off marks might make it her last if they caught up with her.

The game was simplicity itself: She rented a space where she could display the brand-new sports car—also rented but no one knew that. This time out she’d brought along a fire-red Mazda Miata. They go for less than 30K but look soooo sexy. As usual, a carefully chosen Talbot’s wardrobe combined with her wide blue eyes and innocent twenty-six-year-old face made the raffle tickets sell like Girl Scout cookies outside a cannabis store.

The lure was winning off the books. If you win a car worth thirty grand, it’s the same as winning an equal amount in a casino: The IRS and the governor want their cut. And you’ve got to cover that in cash, which, depending on your tax bracket, can add up. Daley’s lure was to keep the lottery under the table, which meant winner take all. To some extent—in some folks more than others—everyone has a little larceny in their soul. Nothing like appealing to the dark side to add a little spice to the game.

Then comes the drawing. Daley had found that Wednesday tended to be a good day for this. The usual process is to take the winner to the display space and present him or her with a junker, explaining how the raffle’s backer had, well, backed out, and this is the best Daley could do. When the winner squawks, Daley makes amends by refunding the price of the winner’s raffle ticket plus a little extra to compensate for the inconvenience. The winner walks away disappointed but not angry—after all, they got back their investment and then some—and Daley walks away with the proceeds from all the losing tickets.

But in today’s case, the winner—Amber Seabolt by name— returned with a crowd of her angry friends who all wanted refunds plus compensation. Well, Daley wasn’t having any of that, so she’d been forced to beat a hasty retreat—in the junker Jeep, of all things. She’d raced south along the 86. Being a state highway instead of an interstate, it has stoplights here and there along the way. Her pursuers stayed close behind until she beat them through the light at the Avenue 66 intersection. While Amber and her posse waited for the cross traffic to pass, Daley increased her lead.

Somewhere south of Desert Shores she spotted a side road on the right through a palm-tree farm. Side path was more like it, running parallel to a drainage ditch. Once clear of the palms she shot off into the desert toward the hills, going totally off-road into the Santa Rosa Mountains. Of course, that was where the old Jeep started coughing and wheezing and losing power. She’d rented it from a garage in Indio—the cheapest thing they had—and it looked like she’d got her money’s worth.

With the Jeep bucking and making death rattles, she spotted a group of major boulders and pulled in behind them before the thing died. Farther up the slope she spied this cave, its curved, oblong entrance looking like a toothless grin. The shadowed interior offered shade and a long view of the valley—early warning of trouble approaching. She’d accepted that offer.

Still no sign of pursuit. She’d lost them. Yay for me. But she’d also stuck herself in the middle of nowhere with a dead junker. She seriously doubted she could get an Uber or Lyft to drive out here and take her back to her own car in Coachella, which meant she was going to have to walk to some outpost of civilization along the shore of the Salton.

And that brought up the recurring question of whether these games were worth it. Just because she’d been raised by a grifter family, did she think she had to avoid the straight life?

Maybe. And maybe not.

Not like she hadn’t tried straight jobs. Once she’d ditched high school and struck out on her own, she’d found herself honest work. But nothing she tried paid more than minimum wage, mostly because she lacked marketable skills—legally marketable skills. Even if they paid her more, she invariably found herself, after only a few weeks on the job, ready to jump off a building from boredom.

That was her problem. Everything bored her, including most people. High school had bored her so deeply she couldn’t even consider college.

Because nothing—absolutely nothing in this screwed-up world— gave her a jolt of satisfaction that came even close to walking away from a game with someone else’s money in her pocket.

She supposed it was in her blood. Certainly in her upbringing. After her father’s murder, his extended family—“the Family”— insisted on raising her. They were all lower-lip-deep in grift. They believed in scamming rather than schooling. So, while her mom was out working a legit job as a grocery cashier—she wasn’t part of the Family—her daughter was having her left leg tied up behind her with her foot nestled against her butt and being put out on the street with an older cousin to beg for money for this poor little amputee. When she got older, she graduated to the big sister of the amputee. She was also dragged along as a cute little prop when her uncles would go door to door finding customers for their driveway-coating scams because, really, would a con man bring his daughter along? Little Stanka—yeah, her given name—also learned to pick pockets and rifle through an unwatched handbag in a shopping cart.

No guilt. Her mother tried to instill some sense of right and wrong into her life, but the vast majority of her extended family— virtually everyone else she knew in the world—took it for granted that grift was life. And so it became second nature for little Stanka, and carried over to grown-up Stanka.

With the sun sinking behind her and shadows of the Santa Rosa peaks starting to creep across the desert before her, Daley figured she’d better get moving.

But as she rose she felt something slap against the top of her head.

She screamed—couldn’t help it, screamed like a little girl and ran out of the cave frantically slapping at her head. Something flat and oblong and slightly fuzzy there. The lichen patch? Still running / dancing / hopping in a circle, she gouged at it, trying to work a finger under an edge and peel it off but it was stuck fast to her hair—glued to her head. She screamed again as her scalp began to burn, like something was seeping into her.

Then her vision blurred and her legs went soft. She dropped to her knees. As she swayed there, still clutching at her scalp, her vision cleared and she was no longer looking at a desert. The Salton Sea had expanded to a huge lake or small sea that ran as far north and south as she could see, and lapped at the Chocolate Mountains to the east. Something huge roiled the water as it glided beneath the surface.

And then everything faded to black.

THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 19

1

Daley awoke in the dark with her face in the dirt.

Where—? What—? Why was she—?

It came back to her: racing through the desert, the cave, the thing on her scalp—

“Oh, shit!”

She rolled over and clawed at the top of her head. That thing, that lichen thing or whatever it was, was still stuck to her.

“Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit! ”

Wait . . . no, not so stuck. She hadn’t been able to budge it before but now it felt loose, ready to fall off. She peeled it away and tossed it aside. Good rid—

No, wait. She might need it. The thing had poisoned her or drugged her—done something to knock her out cold for . . . for how long? Across the valley, the eastern sky behind the Chocolate Mountains was growing pale.

Almost dawn? Had she been out cold all night? God, she was thirsty. The time . . . Where was her phone? In her bag . . . but where was her bag? In the cave . . . but where was—?

All right, stop. Get a grip.

She was scattering. She needed to take a breath and get it together. Which she did.

Starlight and predawn glow revealed the black grin of the cave a dozen feet behind her. She stumbled up the slope to the mouth where she made out the lump of her shoulder bag. Stretching, she snatched it to her without going inside. A quick rummage found her keys and mini Maglite.

Okay. Now she had some control of the situation. The flashlight helped her find the thing that had attacked her, although now it didn’t look like lichen or moss. An oblong shape, maybe five inches long, wider in the middle, tapering at both ends. Like a mini Nerf football someone had ironed flat and painted gray.

Though it looked dead as could be, Daley didn’t want to touch it. She flashed her beam around, looking for a stick, and found instead a short length of two-by-four, nailed to a square of plywood. She flipped it over to reveal a sign with faded red letters.

STAY OUT! DANGER!

“Now you tell me?”

But danger from what? What was this thing? She felt pretty good now. In fact, except for the thirst, she felt fine. But how had it knocked her out? She knew she’d have to find out.

Using the sign like a spatula, she scooped it up and picked her way down the hillside to the Jeep. She dumped the sign and the thingy in the rear, then tried to start the engine. Lots of clunky whining noises sounding like forget-it-forget-it-forget-it but not a hint of combustion.

She stepped out and looked around. Down in the valley she spotted the lights of Desert Shores. Two choices: Start walking now and risk breaking her ankle or worse in a rattlesnake hole, or spend a few hours in the Jeep and start hoofing it at dawn.

But off to her right . . . a light. She watched it for a moment or two but saw no movement. Stay with the Jeep or check it out? With thirst pushing her, the latter seemed like the best option at the moment, so she headed that way.

Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Gambit by David Hagberg

March 4, 2021March 21, 2024admin1 Comment

The latest Kirk McGarvey novel, Gambit, is an international thriller with non-stop action, perfect for fans of Jason Bourne.

“If you like thrillers full of international intrigue, Hagberg is a major find.” —Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author

An American billionaire and a Russian oligarch want Kirk McGarvey dead. First they send a South African assassin, and when Mac kills him, they commission a Canadian sniper for the kill. When Mac put him down, they hire a team of highly specialized Chinese killers called “Scorpions.” When Mac dispatches them, they send a squad of Russian special ops armed to the teeth with high-tech firepower.

Mac’s only chance of survival is to turn on the tables on the people behind this assassination conspiracy, that is, if he can find them.

Gambit will be available on April 27, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

One

Leonard Slatkin had never worked through an expediter in his three years in the business, nor had he ever been paid $500,000 for the assassination of a single individual.

Although the intelligence he’d been given was spot-on, it had taken him nearly two weeks to arrange for the second-floor apartment in Georgetown, and another ten days of nearly around-the-clock surveillance of the windows in the third-floor apartment slightly kitty-corner across the street and the front door to the brownstone before he was sure that he would have a clear shot.

He came and went at normal times, in a business suit, an attaché case in hand, walking to the end of the block, and taking a bus into Washington, where he spent most of his days in Union Station working on his iPhone to gather as much information on his subject as he could. He was of medium height and build, with a totally unremarkable face and outward attitude.

By the second day, he had begun to wonder if a half a million was too small a sum. Too little by a very substantial margin. But he had no idea of the name of his primary employer, nor did he have access to the expediter. He was on his own.

Sitting in the dark now at the window in his apartment, the ordinary

.223-caliber M16 military assault rifle resting on a tripod well enough inside the living room to be invisible to anyone outside, he waited patiently, just as he had the past three days since his preparations had been completed for Kirk McGarvey to return from Florida at the start of spring break and show himself at his window, five hundred feet away as the bullet flies.

The late afternoon was as bittersweet for Kirk McGarvey as it was for his wife, Pete. They hadn’t talked much on the flight to Dulles from Sarasota, where he taught Voltaire at New College for one dollar per year. His passion had always been philosophy, but his life had been the CIA since he’d been in his mid twenties right out of the air force.

“Hard to believe,” Pete said as they headed toward the ground transportation exit.

She was much shorter that McGarvey’s six feet, and slightly built next to him. But she was voluptuous with a movie star’s physique, and pretty oval face, with wide eyes and a mouth like Julia Roberts’s—a little too large—but her ready smile making her perfect.

“That Otto’s happy?” McGarvey asked. “That Louise is gone.”

It was all about history. After the air force when McGarvey had worked as an investigator for the OSI, he had been recruited by the CIA, where, after an extensive series of psychological examinations, he had been placed in the Company’s black ops division—a unit that never existed on paper.

And he was good, a natural-born killer—an operator, in the parlance. After a couple of field runs, mostly as a bagman bringing operational funds into a badland, he’d been assigned his first kill in Chile, where he took down a general who had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent men and women.

He’d been married by then, and his wife objected to his too-often unexplained absences. After the Chilean op, she had given him the ultimatum: her or the Company. Psychologically battered by what he had just gone through, he chose neither. Instead, he quit the CIA and his wife and went to ground in Switzerland until, a couple of years later, the Company came looking for him with a new assignment, a thing that had to be done extrajudicially. The CIA had to be held blameless if the operation went bad. At all costs, Washington had to be kept completely out of the mix. The only fall guy would be McGarvey.

And at the time, he had become so irascible in his self-imposed isolation that he had practically jumped at the chance.

So it had begun, one impossible assignment after another, stretching back more years than he wanted to remember. Now at fifty, he wanted to step off the merry-go-round at last. He’d endured too many losses over the years— every woman he’d ever loved, including his first wife and their daughter— had been killed because of who he was.

Friends dead, isolation for long stretches, a kidney lost, bullet wounds, skin grafts on his back from a car bomb meant to kill him that had taken his left leg from below the knee.

Yet he was still in superb physical condition, some of it because of the luck of the genetic draw, but in a large measure because he willed it. He ran and swam nearly every day. Several times a year, he spent a few days to a week at the Company’s training facility—the Farm—south of Washington along the York River, where he pushed himself to the limits. And never did he let himself merely laze away a weekend, not even a day.

“Sometimes you’re like a monk in a monastery,” more than one woman had told him. “Ease up a little.”

His stock answer had always been: “I don’t know how.” The real answer was that his life had very often depended upon keeping sharp.

And now there was Pete, and he was just as afraid for her safety has he had been for the other women in his life, although she was herself a highly trained and very capable field officer who had more than once fought at his side and had even saved his life. They had become partners in every sense of the word. Able to read each other, able to sense each other’s moods, anticipate each other’s moves.

They’d brought only carry-on bags with them, so they had no need to wait for the luggage carousel. Outside, they got into the taxi queue. Pete was going directly out to Otto’s McLean house, where Mary Sullivan was waiting for her, and Mac was going to their Georgetown apartment.

It was Thursday, and Otto and Mary were getting married in a civil ceremony at the house tomorrow morning, with only Mac and Pete and Mac’s three-year-old granddaughter, Audrey, who had been adopted by Otto and his late wife, Louise, after Mac’s daughter and her husband—both CIA employees— had been assassinated.

“Memories,” Pete said. “Sometimes I think that’s all we’ll ever be left with.”

“All anyone’s ever left with,” McGarvey said a little too sharply. He’d been feeling on edge for the past couple of days, even a little morose at times. Yet he couldn’t believe that it was because his only true friend in the world had fallen in love and was getting married so soon after his wife’s murder.

Pete looked up in surprise. “Nothing stays the same, that it?” “I don’t know.”

“But everyone’s happy.”

Out of old ingrained habits, Mac watched an airport cop talking to a driver who’d pulled up in a dark green Tahoe in a no-parking zone. A windowless van passed slowly, and one hundred feet away across the several lanes of traffic, a man carrying a duffel bag was waiting at a crosswalk. In the farther distance was the possible glint of sunlight on a lens of what could have been a sniper scope.

Pete touched his shoulder. “What is it, Kirk?” “I don’t know.”

She followed his gaze. “Okay, you have my attention, sweetheart. Is this one of your premos?”

Mac’s premonitions—premos, as Otto called them—were feelings almost at the subliminal level that he’d developed over the past years as a defense mechanism. Something he’d picked up in a daily report, something he’d read in a newspaper or heard on television or online, some disconnected bits and pieces here and there that somehow made patterns inside his head, brought his awareness almost to the preternatural level. Hunches, they were sometimes called. Feelings. Inklings. Notions. Intuitions. Premos.

He turned to her, smiled, and shook his head. “Just putting myself in Otto’s shoes. He sounded nervous yesterday on the phone.”

“This is me you’re talking to,” Pete said. “Something coming our way?”

“Otto’s darlings have been clear all last week.” “That’s not what I asked.”

Otto Rencke was the CIA’s ranking computer expert. His darlings were a set of advanced programs that mined billions of data sources looking for anomalies—bits and pieces that didn’t seem to belong. Things that more often than not led to nothing. But every now and then, something buried deep rose a little above the background noise and fit with perhaps a half dozen or more other anomalies to mean something.

“I don’t know,” Mac said, because he didn’t.

McGarvey had the cabby drop him off at the corner of Dumbarton Avenue NW where it dead-ended at Rock Creek Park a half block from his apartment. It was a Thursday, and Otto had said that he was going to work, leaving Mary and Pete to work out the last-minute arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding.

“Cold feet?” Mac had asked him last night on the phone. “You’re damned right. But second thoughts? No way.”

The late-afternoon traffic was light even on the parkway along the creek behind him, and standing alone with his bag in hand as the cab drove away, he listened to the sounds of a siren a long ways off back toward the city. Somewhere closer, a horn beeped once, and church bells rang from the university campus. Normal sounds. But nothing felt normal to him, and he didn’t know why except that he was spooked.

Neither he nor Pete had brought firearms with them on the flight. They had weapons in the apartment, but there hadn’t seemed to be the need just now to carry. They were coming for the weekend, a wedding, nothing more. Nothing moved on his street. He stood for just a moment, then turned and went around the barrier and made his way down the shallow grassy slope toward the parkway, on the other side of which was the creek, holding up by a tree ten feet from the rail.

He phoned Otto, who answered on the first ring, out of breath as he often got when he was excited. The man was a genius with all the oddities and complexities that went with that level of intelligence.

“Oh, wow, Pete just called, worried about you.” “What’d she say?”

“Wanted to know what my darlings were up to. And I told her plenty, but nothing bearing down on us. Anyway, I’m the one who’s supposed to be getting nervous, not you.”

“How’s Mary?”

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Otto said, stumbling just a little over the last two words. “I’ll always love Lou; don’t ever think I won’t. But she’s gone, and Mary’s here.”

Tall, gangly Louise Horn, all arms and legs akimbo, narrow, angular face, and a million-watt smile, had come over to the CIA from the National Security Agency, where she’d been a chief satellite product analyst. From the moment she and Otto had met and begun working together, it was as if they’d always been a couple; almost clones of each other.

As a long-term bachelor, Otto had been a slob; his clothes usually a mess, his long, red, out-of-control hair reminiscent of an Einstein, his sneakers unlaced, his sweatshirts and ball caps with the logos of the old KGB or CCCP, dirty. His only real vice—not alcohol—were Twinkies and heavy cream or half-and-half, which he never seemed to be without. As a result, he’d been overweight and out of shape for most of his life.

Lou had changed all of that. And the people in the intel community in and around Washington who’d always been afraid of his genius coming unglued and sending just about every mainframe inside and out of the beltway crashing down around their ears had breathed a collective sigh of relief.

When she had been shot to death during an assignment last year that had gone bad, Otto’s world had come crashing down around him. Pete had been with her and had taken her death very hard, blaming herself for not preventing it. Not doing something.

“Not throwing yourself in front of the bullet?” Mac had asked her at one point.

“Something like that,” she admitted, scarcely able to choke out the words. And then Mary had come into their lives. She was an IT genius in her own right, in some ways even smarter than Otto with a higher IQ but without the oddities. She could have been a middle-grade schoolteacher in a small midwestern town; quiet, even meek. But when she spoke, softly, everyone

listened, because what she had to say was always brilliant and spot-on.

For the past eight years, she had been considered the ranking genius in what had been the Company’s Directorate of Science and Technology, so when she and Otto had found each other, no one was the least bit surprised. Lou had reined him in; now it was Mary’s turn.

“What’s got your dander?” Otto asked. “Someone on your six?” “Probably not. Just a feeling.”

“A premo?”

“Not that much,” McGarvey said, glancing over his shoulder up Dumbarton as a cab turned the corner and passed his apartment building.

“But?”

McGarvey shook himself out of his funk. “Where you going on your honeymoon?”

“Honeymoon?” Otto asked after a brief hesitation, and Mac had to laugh.

Slatkin had been a loner all of his life, which had been a plus point when he had applied out of the South African Air Force Intelligence Division for a position with the Special Forces Brigade, known informally as the Recces.

The small, tightly knit counterinsurgency unit had seen combat in Rhodesia, Mozambique, and along their own border. Slatkin had been extensively trained in everything from weapons and explosives to infiltration, exfiltration, and especially hand-to-hand combat and was assigned to the Fifth Special Forces Regiment based at Phalaborwa in northern Limpopo. His specific assignment was as an assassin, a job at which he excelled, especially when he was given a target and was left to his own devices. All he’d ever required was intel. He took care of the rest.

His one weakness was money. He’d been born and raised poor in the white slums of Jo’burg, and within three years of joining the Recces and after four successful hits, he’d resigned and had gone freelance.

He’d never regretted the decision, because he was good and he knew it. One of his burner phones buzzed, and he answered it. “Yes.”

“Your subject is one hundred fifty meters away.” “What is he doing?”

“Watching traffic on the parkway. He may suspect something.”

A specialty of Slatkin’s had been reading people from their voices. Their inflections, the stress levels, the hesitations, the oftentimes outright lies or exaggerations. Most people in the hiring side of the murder-for-hire business were terrible actors. They were the moneymen accustomed to never being questioned.

But this man, an American, was a puzzle. He wasn’t money, but he spoke for it. A lieutenant who had connections. Maybe an ex-cop. But he had good sources of information.

“Is he armed?”

“We don’t think so.”

“Is his woman with him?” “He’s alone.”

“Is he aware that he is being watched?” The man hesitated for just a fraction. “Do not lie to me,” Slatkin broke in. “It’s possible.”

“Possible or likely?” “Likely.”

“Thank you.”

“What will you do?”

Slatkin thought the question was odd. “Watch for him.” “And then?”

“What I was hired to do.” The man did not reply.

Slatkin switched off the phone and took out the battery and SIM card and laid them aside.

He checked the sight picture in the M16’s scope, steady on the third-floor living room window across the street. Then, without taking his eyes off the street below, unholstered his Glock 23 compact pistol, checked the load and action against the possibility that the situation this afternoon would devolve into a close-quarters combat op, and laid it on a side table close at hand.

Pre-order Gambit—available on April 27, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Blood on the Table by Gerry Spence

February 22, 2021March 20, 2024admin

Blood on the Table brings to life the same powerful emotions and riveting excitement that Gerry Spence evoked from juries when the blood was real.

Blood on the Table is a blend of darkness, sex, and violence, with characters who are far from perfect and often are their own worst enemies. Spence takes the reader to savage—back country Wyoming, where an eleven-year-old boy must take the witness stand against a vicious prosecutor, corrupt police, and a prejudiced judge, to keep his family safe.

Blood on the Table will be available on March 2, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

CHAPTER 1

Laramie, Wyoming, Winter, 1947

Ringo felt something hard poking him in the ribs. He couldn’t remember where he was. When he pulled his head out from under his bedroll, he was attacked by a blinding light.

“Get out of there,” a harsh voice demanded. “I said, get out of there!”

When the cop prodded him again, Ringo bolted straight up. He grabbed for his hat and stood up in the pickup bed, naked, all that belonged to him in plain view. He tried to cover it with his hat.

“Whatcha doin’ here?”

“I was sleepin’,” Ringo said.

“I could run you in for sleepin’,” the cop hollered.

A scruffy tramp stumbled up in a dirty gray overcoat with a gray woolen cap pulled over his ears. “Ain’t no law in Laramie, Wyoming, against sleepin’,” the tramp said. The bottoms of his ragged pants were dragging on the sidewalk.

“Get your ass down the street, or I’ll haul you in, too,” the cop yelled at the tramp.

“Been tryin’ to get one of you cops to haul me in for three days,” the tramp said. His thick whiskers held his face together. “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass in January out here.” He walked over to where the cop was standing. “And I’m hungry. I could eat the ass off a skunk.” He stood huddled, his hands in his coat pockets.

“Get down out of there,” the cop ordered Ringo. He reached for his pants, but the cop started at him with his stick again. “I said, get out of there.” Ringo slid down from the back of the pickup onto the street in his bare feet. His toes recoiled from the cold, rough pavement, and he tried to balance himself on his heels.

“Turn around.” The cop prodded him with his stick. Ringo jumped and spun around. “Stand up against that pickup door and don’t move, or I’ll shoot your ass off.”

“Ain’t much to shoot off,” the tramp said.“Anyways, you’d probably miss.”

The cop climbed into the pickup bed. He shook Ringo’s bedroll, and, satisfied it contained no illegal contraband, he began to untie the rope that held Ringo’s old suitcase closed.

“Hand down this boy’s clothes,” the tramp ordered the cop. “It’s cold out here, in case you didn’t notice.”

“He ain’t gonna run no place without no clothes,” the cop said. “Well, you can deputize me. I’ll watch him. Hand down his clothes.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” the cop said. He began rummaging through the suitcase and scattering its contents across the length of the pickup bed—two pairs of socks, a pair of old boots, a couple pairs of patched Levi’s, and a faded western shirt, town pants and boots. The cop ripped open Ringo’s old lunch bucket and dumped out a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bar of soap, along with a small box of Ex-Lax his mother insisted he take “just in case.” Finding nothing of interest, the cop jumped down from the pickup and walked over to Ringo, who, by this time, had begun to shiver in spasms.

The tramp stuck his whiskers in the cop’s face. “I am hereby orderin’ you in the name of the law to give this boy his clothes. If you don’t, I’m makin’ a citizen’s arrest and turnin’ you in for cruel and unusual punishment.”

The cop beamed his flashlight into the tramp’s eyes.

“You are a cruel motherfucker,” the tramp said. “I should take that billy club from you and stick it up your fat ass.”

The cop raised his nightstick, and the tramp backed off, telling the cop, “You lay a hand on me and I’ll sue your fat ass plum off you. My brother’s a lawyer in this town.”

“Yeah? Who’s your brother?” the cop asked. “Christopher Hampton. Ever hear of him?”

The cop poked his nightstick into Ringo’s belly. “Whatcha doin’ in Laramie?”

“Goin’ to school, the university.”

“Don’t give me no bullshit,” the cop said. “You ain’t no schoolkid.

Where you from?”

“West of town at Bear Creek.”

“More bullshit. Just a bunch of rich ranchers live out there.” The cop stuck his nightstick under Ringo’s testicles and gave it a small, quick, but hard upward lift. Ringo jumped, and when he did, he grabbed the cop’s nightstick and pulled it loose from his hand.

Ringo hollered at the tramp. “Get my clothes.” He stood waving the stick in front of the cop. “Don’t be goin’ for your gun. Throw it down there on the pavement, or I’ll break your head wide open.” “Go ahead and smack him,” the tramp said. “He’s got it comin’.

And there ain’t nothin’ inside his head but donkey shit. That’s why we call him ‘Shithead Henry.’” The tramp picked up the cop’s service revolver and handed Ringo his pants and shirt.

“You hold his gun on him while I get dressed,” Ringo said.

“If you do, I’m charging you with aidin’ and abettin’ a crime,” the cop said to the tramp.

“Finally!” The tramp pointed the gun at the cop’s nose. “I admit it take me in.” The tramp started to shiver. “I’m gonna make you a deal. Number one: You let this kid go. He’s goin’ to school. See here?” The tramp picked up a copy of Ringo’s registration from the hodgepodge the cop had spilled over the truck’s bed.

“Number two: You gotta haul me in for vagrancy. It’s too fuckin’ cold out here. Okay?”

The cop thought about it for a minute. “Okay, but don’t tell nobody about this.”

“Right.”

“You a man of your word?” the cop asked the tramp.

“Yeah, just like you.” He handed the cop his pistol and his nightstick. “Take me in, Officer,” the tramp said.

“And you ain’t gonna tell Chistopher Hampton?”

“Naw,” the tramp said. “I was just shitin’ you. I don’t even know him. I just heard he was a pretty good lawyer, and that he’s got you cops scared to fuckin’ death.”

Pre-order Blood on the Table—available on March 2, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: The Eagle and the Viper by Loren D. Estleman

February 19, 2021March 20, 2024admin

Part high-octane suspense, part dire warning, The Eagle and the Viper from multiple-winning novelist Loren D. Estleman reveals how close our world came—at the dawn of a promising new century—to total war.

It’s a time of improvised explosive devices, terrorist training camps, international assassins, and war on civilians. It’s Christmas Eve, 1800.

This much is history: On Christmas Eve, 1800, an “infernal machine” exploded in one of the busiest streets in Paris, France, destroying buildings and killing innocent civilians. It wasn’t the first attempt on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the newly minted Republic of France.

This much is exclusive to our story: Upon the failure of the Christmas Eve plot, the conspiracy takes a new and more diabolical turn.

Posterity knows what became of Napoleon: He led France into a series of military adventures that ended in his defeat, followed by decades of peace. But this future hung on a precarious thread. One man can make history; another can change it.

The Eagle and the Viper will be available on March 2, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

1

“This is no work for a soldier,” said Saint-Réjant. “I joined the army to get out of farming.”

“Did you gripe this much in the army?” Carbon asked. “Only until they made me a general.”

“You’d enjoy the work better if you’d served aboard ship. Once you’ve survived battle with the enemy, the sea offers you a second chance to die.”

“It wouldn’t make me any more wet.”

The rain had begun at dusk and settled into a monotonous drizzle, icy and glutinous. It dripped off their slouch brims, their noses too, and the ropy mud of the boulevard clung to their boots and made them heavy as sledges. It turned a level stretch into an uphill climb.

The date was 24 December, 1800 (4 Nivose, Year VIII by the Revolutionary calendar). Traffic was heavy, despite the weather. France had cut the heads off priests and abolished religion, but after a dozen years of austerity, Parisians insisted on celebrating Christmas Eve. Twice now, Carbon had almost been run down by carriages bearing drunken revelers toward the Rue Saint-Nicaise. After the second near miss he’d cajoled Saint-Réjant and Limoëlan to step down from the cart and help him lead the lame, wind-broken mare.

Carbon, a naval veteran, and one admittedly inclined toward recklessness for the sheer thrill of it, nevertheless considered his companions bad risks. Saint-Réjant, most recently a common bandit, had found that occupation more to his liking than his late service to the King, at the expense of his commitment to the Cause, and Limoëlan’s lust for vengeance was the very thing that had led the despised regicides to ruination. If this plan had a flaw, it was his partners.

“Shit!” Limoëlan stepped in a hole, turning his ankle and slamming him shoulder-first against the cart. It lurched. Something heavy shifted under the sodden pile of hay.

Carbon snatched his arm. “Watch your step, ass! You want to blow us all to ashes?”

A week earlier, on 17 Frimaire (December 17 to the rest of Europe), a grain dealer named Lambel had admitted to his shop in the Rue Meslée a thickset man with a blond beard and a large scar above his left eye. He walked with a rolling gait that spoke of years at sea. The man paused, breathing in the sweet smell of oats and wheat preserved in barrels; an odor the merchant himself no longer noticed. “Will you hear a proposition?”

“That would depend on the proposition,” said Lambel.

“I sell textiles. I recently came into possession of a shipment of brown sugar, which I hope to barter for bolts of cloth in Brittany.” “You’ll have no problem selling that lot in Paris. The women in the Tuileries would scratch out each other’s eyes for three yards of muslin. For silk they would do murder. I don’t exaggerate.”

“At the moment I have no way of transporting either the sugar or the cloth. I understand you have a horse and cart for sale.”

“I have for a fact.”

“Will you take two hundred francs?” “I would.”

Lambel was under no illusion that the man was trading in either cloth or sugar: He had been too quick to offer the money without inspecting the horse and cart. More likely his cargo was English Port, or some other product outlawed by government embargo. But the times were too uncertain to quibble over a fellow’s motives, and Marguerite, the mare, was very old and had a cataract. He helped the man with the scar hitch her up and watched him lead her out of the barn behind his place of business.

The man with the scar stopped at a wine shop, where he bought a spare Macon cask large enough to contain sixty gallons. Once again the customer explained that he intended to transport sugar. The proprietor helped him load the cask aboard the cart. From there he went to a shed he’d rented in the Rue Paradis near Saint-Lazare. He drew the doors shut, but they were joined poorly, and neighbors had a largely unobstructed view of what went on inside. One did not trespass, of course. Was a curious fellow resident no better than a voyeur? But there were few enough entertainments at the best of times, and most of them taxed by the Republic; a free show was not a subject for question.

The spectacle taking place across the narrow street was not without curiosity. When two more men appeared and set to work reinforcing the cask with ten stout iron bands, conversing in whispers all the while, it was assumed they were brandy smugglers, hardly an unusual sight that time of year, when a dram was just the thing to drive the cold from one’s bones, even at black market prices.

The neighbors paid them little attention after that. The mystery was explained, and as for reporting the activity, there was no telling what miseries may follow any kind of contact with the authorities, however civic-minded. Madame Guillotine seldom distinguished between accuser and accused.

François Carbon was neither a cloth merchant nor a brandy smuggler, but a Brittany-born sailor who came by his fearsome scar when a line broke loose during a storm in the Channel and the frayed end struck him above the eye, gouging out flesh like a piece of grapeshot. He had no sugar in his possession. He’d trained in the proper use of firearms and explosives under Georges Cadoudal, a French Royalist who operated a camp for insurgent expatriates in England, on the estate of a British peer in sympathy with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. (Where, after all, might it end? George III in exile or executed, and the American parvenu Thomas Jefferson in charge of the Empire? As well a bishop!) Although still in his thirties, Carbon had seen the government of his adopted country change hands three times.

He was determined to make it four.

The two men seen working with him on the cask were Pierre Robinault de Saint-Réjant and a master cooper named Jardin, who’d been recruited to forge and fashion the iron bands. Jardin thought the cask stout enough for its purpose, the storage of wine; but a job was a job, and the man with the scar paid up front and in cash, not in promises or poultry. Saint-Réjant wore his civilian attire with the air of a uniform, snug and tidy and with nothing dangling loose, his handkerchief tucked inside his sleeve. He’d served as a divisional general under Cadoudal, and knew little of casks and cart horses.

A fourth man who visited the shed from time to time was later identified as Joseph Pierre de Limoëlan, an aristocrat who’d seen his father borne, fettered and beaten, past jeering crowds to the Place de la Revolution to have his head taken from his shoulders. Cadoudal, a conservative commander not given toward impulsive promotions, had made Limoëlan a major general after he returned from patrol swinging the head of a Jacobin leader by the hair. Individual initiative must be rewarded.

When the cooper left, Limoëlan stood watch at the door while Carbon and Saint-Réjant drew the sacking off two kegs and poured black powder into the cask, then scooped broken and jagged pieces of stone from a barrow and mixed them with the powder; “to slash flesh and pulverize bone,” explained Limoëlan, who’d suggested the refinement, “and make as many good revolutionaries as possible.”

On Christmas Eve, a street musician strummed a mandolin and sang the refrain of a Catholic hymn outlawed in 1789. He frowned at the small collection of coins in his upturned hat, slung it onto his head without spilling them, a gesture perfected through repetition, and trudged off through the drizzle. Behind him, his corner on the Place du Carrousel glimmered in the light of torches struggling against the rain in front of the Tuileries Palace. Through those same gates, eight years before, King Louis XVI’s own gunners had escorted their sovereign to his place of imprisonment, and from there to his execution.

The musician passed three men loitering beside a shabby cart piled with hay, two of them knocking their heels against the wooden wheels to dislodge mud from the soles, a third squatting to feel the fetlocks of a bay mare that didn’t look as if it would last to the end of the street.

“Poor buggers,” he muttered to himself. All he had to look after was his mandolin.

A patrol of National Guardsmen came along a few minutes later in their blue uniforms and shining oilcloth cloaks, observing the trio still engaged in the same activity. The heightened presence of the sentries suggested that the man in the Tuileries—no king, this, Limoëlan thought; merely a contemptible clerk appointed to govern his betters—was preparing to venture out. The plotters’ intelligence was sound.

The patrol slowed as it approached. Seized with a wicked whim, Carbon gestured with his short-barreled pipe; what the English called a bulldog.

“Have you a light?”

The guardsman hesitated, shook his head, and continued walking with his companions.

“Was that necessary?” Limoëlan was the bloodthirstiest of the three and therefore the most cautious.

“I judged it so. In another moment he’d have been searching the cart. This way he knows we have nothing to hide.”

“What if he’d given you the light and searched it anyway?” “Have you ever tried to get a spark out of flint and steel on a night like this?”

“You mistake audacity for valor. It will mean your death.” “Sound advice from a highwayman.”

Limoëlan did not respond. If this plan had a flaw, the rash sailor was it; but Carbon was in command and so he swallowed his retort. He and Saint-Réjant had spent many such a dismal night waiting to waylay coaches on the stage roads along the coast—an unbecoming pursuit for generals; but even the great causes needed financing, same as mummery shows and ladies’ wardrobes.

For Saint-Réjant, his alliance with Carbon, a sailor-adventurer unhinged from reason by a blow at sea, and Limoëlan, a fanatic who would usher in a new Reign of Terror, only with the executioners and the victims reversed in favor of the monarchy, was far from ideal. If this plan had a flaw, it was they.

The clouds were bottomless. Foul drizzle soaked the conspirators to the skin and chilled them to the bone.

Perfect weather, Limoëlan thought, for a funeral of state.

Moving quickly now before another patrol could appear, the men backed the cart into position, not quite blocking the street, but obliging any passing traffic to slow and swerve round it. Carbon and Saint-Réjant tilted the heavy cask while Limoëlan unwound the oilcloth from a twisted length of twine and inserted it in the hole drilled in the top. The fuse was impregnated with gunpowder: the fast-burning variety intended for muskets.

“How much time?” Saint-Réjant helped right the cask.

Carbon’s teeth ground on his pipestem. “Who’s to say? The cocksucker is always early. Ask the Austrians.”

“I meant the fuse.”

“Then say what you mean. Six seconds, give or take.” “Give or take what?” Limoëlan asked.

“Give or take the life of one Corsican more or less.” Saint-Réjant crossed himself, an automatic gesture.

Carbon smiled in the darkness. “Careful, my friend. We are surrounded by atheists.”

Limoëlan did not smile. “In a little while they’ll be surrounding themselves.”

Pre-order The Eagle and the Viper—available on March 2, 2021!

What's New

5 Historical Fiction Books About World War II to Add to Your TBR

February 16, 2021May 6, 2024admin

By Lizzy Hosty

Comes the War, the second in the Eddie Harkins series which began with Blame the Dead published last year follows Harkins, a Military Police officer who’s tasked with solving murder mysteries against the backdrop of World War II. To get you ready for Comes the War, Ed Ruggero’s latest, here’s a list of more thrilling books set in WWII.

Also, make sure to grab a copy of Comes the War, available now wherever books are sold!

The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis

This thrilling series by Ian Tregillis explores an alternative WWII where the Nazis have supermen and the British have demons. Book one, Bitter Seeds, follows Raybould Marsh, a British secret agent, as he tries to rally support against the Germans. Book two, The Coldest War, explores the nuclear conflict following this version of WWII, and book three, Necessary Evil, has Marsh travelling back to WWII to save humanity from aliens who are watching the war.

A Midwinter’s Tale by Andrew M. Greeley

A Midwinter’s Tale by Andrew M. Greeley is the first in the Family Saga series following the O’Malley family, an Irish American family. Charles “Chucky” Cronin O’Malley is stationed in Germany after the end of WWII where he meets and falls in love with Trudi, all while the two try to avoid smugglers, black marketeers, border patrols, and even the US Army.

This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II by Andrew Fukuda

This ALA award-winning YA novel by Andrew Fukuda explores the effects of WWII’s impact on Japanese Americans, specifically Alex Maki who fosters an unlikely friendship in his pen pal from France, Charlie Lévy. As the war looms, they hold onto the hope found in each other’s letters.

An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War by Patrick Taylor

Even though this is the ninth installment in the Irish Country series, the author, Patrick Taylor, takes us back to before the events of the first book, An Irish Country Doctor, to explore Doctor O’Reilly’s life as a medic during WWII, while also cycling back to two decades later where life seems to be on repeat with an outbreak of German measles, the odd tropical disease, and secrets threatening his new life.

Blame the Dead by Ed Ruggero

And of course, before you can truly enjoy Comes the War by Ed Ruggero, you should read the first in the series, Blame the Dead, detailing Eddie Harkins first brush with investigating a murder mystery at the US Army’s 11th Field Hospital. While book two takes place in England, book one is set in Sicily, and both are imbued with intrigue and suspicion intrinsic only to World War II politics.

Order Comes the War—Available Now!

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Margaret Truman’s Murder on the Metro by Jon Land

January 8, 2021March 20, 2024admin1 Comment

In Margaret Truman’s Murder on the Metro, Jon Land’s first thrilling addition to the New York Times bestselling Capital Crimes series, Robert Brixton uncovers a sinister plot threatening millions of American lives!

Israel: A drone-based terrorist attack kills dozens on a sun-splashed beach in Caesarea.

Washington: America awakens to the shattering news that Vice President Stephanie Davenport has died of an apparent heart attack.

That same morning, a chance encounter on the Washington Metro results in international private investigator Robert Brixton thwarting an attempted terrorist bombing. Brixton has no reason to suspect that the three incidents have anything in common, until he’s contacted by Kendra Rendine, the Secret Service agent who headed up the vice president’s security detail. Rendine is convinced the vice president was murdered and needs Brixton’s investigative expertise to find out why.

In Israel, meanwhile, legendary anti-terrorist fighter Lia Ganz launches her own crusade against the perpetrators of that attack which nearly claimed the lives of her and granddaughter. Ganz’s trail will ultimately take her to Washington where she joins forces with Brixton to uncover an impossible link between the deadly attack on Caesarea and the attempted Metro bombing, as well as the death of the vice president.

The connection lies in the highest corridors of power in Washington where a deadly plot with unimaginable consequences has been hatched. With the clock ticking toward doomsday, Brixton and Ganz race against time to save millions of American lives who will otherwise become collateral damage to a conspiracy destined to change the United States forever.

Margaret Truman’s Murder on the Metro will be available on February 16, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

PROLOGUE

CAESAREA, ISRAEL

I’m not scared, Nana.”

Lia Ganz held her three-year-old granddaughter, Meirav, in her arms in waist-deep water. “You’re not?”

“I want to go higher! Make me go higher!” “You’re sure?”

“I’m brave, Nana, just like you.” “All right, then.”

Lia tossed Meirav higher into the air and watched her splash down into the warm, crystal-clear waters off Caesarea’s Aqueduct Beach. The Israeli schools were currently on spring break, accounting for crowding more typical of the weekend on this weekday, beneath the midday sun amid a piercing blue Mediterranean sky. Never a fan of crowds, Lia cringed as more beachgoers packed in around them, and she resolved to take her leave as soon as this swim was complete, assuming she could coax her granddaughter from the water.

The beach had been named for the ancient structure that adorned the sand, forming a natural barrier between modern civilization and this ancient site. The seacoast grounds of Caesarea, halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa had been proclaimed a national park. The site had been reconstructed over a long stretch of years to create one of Israel’s most attractive and fascinating archaeological locales, featuring an easy mix of the old and the new. The restored Caesarea amphitheater hosted modern-day concerts during the summer months, while the Old City featured a range of boutiques and restaurants. The new town of Caesarea itself, meanwhile, comprised luxurious neighborhoods, dominated by seaside villas, that claimed this beach as their own.

Lia watched her granddaughter bob below the surface and pop right back up, thanks to the arm floaties that her parents insisted she wear at all times if she was anywhere near the water. Lia found herself musing how handy those puffy blue things might have been when she was doing water training for the elite special ops Yamam team she’d joined after serving in the Israeli army as one of the most decorated female soldiers in the country’s storied history. For forty years, Yamam commandos had operated under a veil of total secrecy. Only recently had Israel even acknowledged the existence of the country’s most elite antiterrorism force, around the time the government had wanted to recognize her in a public ceremony after she had suffered wounds in a bold attack launched on a Hamas stronghold in Gaza. But she had declined, since it was all about being honored as a woman and not a soldier. And she didn’t believe in heroes anymore, because all of her heroes were dead.

“One more time, Nana,” Meirav pleaded, throwing herself back into Lia’s arms.

Reflexively, Lia’s gaze scanned the beachfront. Force of habit, she supposed, watching for anything in the scene that stood out, something different from the last time she’d checked. She couldn’t say exactly what she was looking for, only that she’d know it when she spotted it.

The Americans had an expression that went “If you see something, say something.” The phrase originated sometime after the infamous 9/11 attack, but seeing and saying had been part of the Israeli way of life for a half century prior to that. You learned to live defensively or, sometimes, you didn’t live at all.

Today, the unseasonably warm spring temperatures and tepid breezes had brought a flood of people to the golden sand, which was all but invisible beneath all manner of chairs, blankets, towels, and shade cast by the sprawl of beach umbrellas. Lia hated those for how they limited range of vision in the area they covered, either obscuring or obliterating her view. Still, she spotted no more of note on this scan than on the last one or the one before that. The lifeguard chairs were still manned by the same young men and women—one of Lia’s prime concerns, given that their height would make them formidable shooting platforms, from which any number of victims could be claimed by a decent marksman before some pistol-toting Israeli zeroed them in their sights.

“Nana?” Meirav said, pulling her grandmother’s hair. “I’m too tired, little one. My arms have nothing left.”

And yet, at forty-nine, she felt too young to be a grandmother and was in as good a shape as she’d been on her last day as a field operative with Yamam. After her wounds suffered in the Gaza raid ruled her out of future missions, they’d wanted to put her behind a desk. But Lia found coordinating missions from the group’s secretive headquarters in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem far less fulfilling than leading them, and the process left her with a helpless feeling. The Xs and Os, literal marks on a dry erase board or a chalkboard, represented operatives in harm’s way, who could die or be captured if the plan failed in any way. If she missed the slightest sign or signal, or neglected to consider some random factor, some of Israel’s best and brightest would pay with their lives. In the field, she missed nothing. Working behind a desk to dispatch others there in her place, though, left her fearing she’d missed everything. When her request to return to active duty was summarily denied, Lia announced her retirement to become a full-time grandmother.

“But you’re so strong, Nana,” Meirav said, snuggling up against Lia’s breast and letting her arm stray to the fleshy skin over her shoulder. “I found a hole.”

Lia felt her granddaughter’s tiny finger pushing and pressing. “It’s a scar.” “What’s a scar?”

“What’s left when a boo-boo heals.”

The little girl seemed to ponder that. “I have boo-boos, but I don’t have scars.”

“Only bad boo-boos leave them, little one.”

Lia felt Meirav press deeper into the scar. It felt like a tickle. “Was this a bad boo-boo, Nana?”

Lia hugged her granddaughter tighter, thinking of that final mission in Gaza. “From a bullet.”

Meirav cocked her head backward to meet her grandmother’s stare. “You were shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It did.” Lia nodded.

“I found another,” Meirav said, pushing her finger into a depression of ridged, pocked skin above the shoulder blade.

“From the same bullet, little one. Where it came out.” “Eww,” Meirav uttered, making a face. “Did it hurt?” “I don’t remember.”

More poking and pushing. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. It could have been any number of people.” “Did you hurt them back?”

“Maybe,” Lia said, honestly not knowing the answer. “I’m not sure.” She’d suffered the wound in that nighttime Gaza raid on a Hamas strong-

hold where a meeting of the terrorist group’s cadre had been convened. The mission had been ill-timed and hastily prepared, an overly aggressive move undertaken by a government desperate for a major victory against an indefatigable foe. Lia was second-in-command of the ten-person team. Only six made it out alive, and she’d dragged two of the bodies out herself, shot-up shoulder and all.

The democratic world and the West exulted in Israel’s many successes in such missions but seldom learned of failures like this. Going back to Entebbe, Mossad had been celebrated for its dramatic strikes and never criticized for those that ended the way that night had in Gaza. That raid had been undertaken by Sayeret Matkal. Yamam was founded shortly after, to undertake missions that required the quick-strike capabilities of rapid deployment. Its superbly trained forces were originally umbrellaed under the Israeli National Police, but of late they were left answerable to Mossad. Lia had struggled to return fire with her wounded arm, while with the other she dragged one of the downed men from the firefight. Another man fell when the squad was racing back to the extraction point, and she abandoned further fire to drag him along as well. By the time they reached the American stealth chopper, same type of Black Hawk the Navy SEALs had used in their raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, both men were dead.

Her granddaughter scrunched her face up into a scowl. “They must have been bad people.”

“They were.”

“Somebody should punish them.”

Lia couldn’t help but smile. Though she was hardly a biblical scholar, she knew her daughter and son-in-law had named their first child after the daughter of King Saul, which seemed quite appropriate for a child who was a bundle of energy forever in motion, given that the word meirav also meant “to maximize.” Yet, in that moment, she also feared that her granddaughter would follow in her footsteps—too much of the Ganz blood pumping through her veins, which would leave her eventually wanting to spill that of Israel’s enemies.

She shelved that thought for the time being and positioned herself to toss her granddaughter into the air yet again. “I’m sure somebody did.”

That’s when she heard the buzzing sound, something like a lawn mower growing louder as it neared an open window, a soft engine sound that Lia first took for a small motorboat or Jet Ski, until a sweep of her gaze showed nothing of the sort anywhere about.

Then what . . .

Insects, Lia thought, when she first spotted the drones. They look like giant insects.

Each was about four feet across, flying in a triangular pattern. The next sound, the staccato burst of gunfire, was accompanied by flashbulb-like spurts of light springing from the barrel of whatever automatic weapons had been rigged to the low-flying murder machines. Lia watched the carnage unfold with her granddaughter clutched tight against her, the sounds of shots and screams reaching her a millisecond after the initial line of bodies fell, drenching the golden sand red. The effect was like watching dominoes fall, the drones closing on the last wave of beachgoers who were trying to flee. A few had the fortune or foresight to rush toward the sea. The rest, who charged off down the open sands toward the ancient aqueduct that had lent this beach its name, did not fare nearly as well.

Lia clutched her granddaughter to her tighter still, ignoring the child’s whimpers. The cries of pain and anguish from the beach pierced her eardrums like a thousand needles. A few armed Israelis bravely chased after the drones, their own pistol fire clacking away. One of the dreaded machines went down, then a second, while the third continued its deadly flight, stopping only when its ammunition was expended and it dropped from the sky with the others.

“You’re hurting me, Nana, you’re hurting me!”

Her granddaughter had felt more like a piece of Lia Ganz than a separate body. She eased her from her breast almost surgically.

“I’m scared, Nana! I’m scared!” Meirav sobbed, fat tears rolling down her cheeks to mix with the salty waters of the sea.

Lia hugged her tight again, both of them shaking, the warm water suddenly feeling like melted ice.

“So am I, little one,” Lia said, as soothingly as she could manage. “So am I.”

Chapter

1

Sadie

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One

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1

WASHINGTON, DC

PRESENT DAY

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One

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WEDNESDAY—FEBRUARY 18

1

THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 19

1

Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

One

Pre-order Gambit—available on April 27, 2021!

CHAPTER 1

Laramie, Wyoming, Winter, 1947

Pre-order Blood on the Table—available on March 2, 2021!

1

Pre-order The Eagle and the Viper—available on March 2, 2021!

Order Comes the War—Available Now!

PROLOGUE

CAESAREA, ISRAEL

Pre-order Margaret Truman’s Murder on the Metro—available on February 16, 2021!

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