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Interview with W. Bruce Cameron, Author of A Dog’s Purpose

December 6, 2016May 17, 2024torforge

As any lover of dogs will tell you, there’s nothing quite like the friendships between human beings and their canine companions. A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron gives us humans a chance at a dog’s eye view of the world, and next month it’s coming to the big screen! We sat down with the author to talk about adaptations and, of course, dogs – on and off set.

How has the movie, A Dog’s Purpose, changed your life?

I have always been so interested in reading that I forget that most people don’t dispose all of their income at the bookstore. When one of my novels is published I’m surprised it isn’t mentioned on the floor of Congress or put into the minutes at the UN. What seems hugely important to me doesn’t really register with most folks. So for a long time I’ve had to tell people what I’ve written and what it’s about. Now, though, when I say I’ve written A Dog’s Purpose, they’ve all heard of it. That has given me the illusion that I am more popular.

What was it like to interact with the canine stars on set?

Okay, you caught me. I was supposed to be talking to the actors, the producer, the director, and instead I spent all my time playing with the dogs. I bonded with the Corgi to the point I think he and I both thought he would be flying home with me, and rolling around with the dogs on set was the most fun I’ve had in some time. I don’t think the dog trainers were too happy with me, though. I was a bit of a distraction.

What, creatively, is the difference between writing a novel and adapting a screenplay?

Adaption is like sitting down and deciding which of your fingers to cut off. It’s all about what to throw out, because if you try to take all of A Dog’s Purpose and cram it into a movie, you’re going to have a five-hour movie. There is so much story that has to go, so much character detail. It’s like tossing ballast out of a hot air balloon—for it to fly, you have to dump stuff. I think the movie is magnificent, but it is not the whole picture. For that, you have to read the novel. I think understanding, for example, what is going on in Todd’s head, or why the dog’s first starts thinking about purpose, or why Buddy returns to the dog park, will really enrich the movie-going experience.

Will there will be a sequel to the A Dog’s Purpose movie?

If enough people go to the movie when it comes out, everything is in place to begin work on the sequel almost immediately. So, fingers crossed.

You have your own dog at home, Tucker. How did he come into your life?

Tucker was abandoned as a newborn with his siblings in a box outside of a city shelter, an act of heartlessness that is the inspiration for my novel The Dogs of Christmas. (Spoiler alert: it’s really happy). My daughter runs an animal rescue in Denver (www.lifeisbetter.org) and picked up the puppies and gave them to a mother dog who had just weaned her pups the day before. The mother dog nursed the little abandoned puppies until they were old enough to be adopted, and by that time, my daughter knew Tucker was the dog for us. She had a real talent for that: matching people with pets. She brought Tucker to us and he’s been in charge of the house ever since.

What else do you have in the works?

I have a set of books for younger readers that are based on the A Dog’s Purpose Ellie’s Story details the life of Ellie, the search-and-rescue dog. Bailey’s Story tells the life of Bailey, the childhood pet. Both of those are just out. And in the fall of 2017 we’ll see the publication of Molly’s Story, the cancer-sniffing dog. On the adult front, A Dog’s Way Home will be out in May. It tells the story of a dog banished by breed-specific legislation who, taken far away from her family, decides to find her way back—through hundreds of miles of wilderness. And in June, A Dad’s Purpose, which is a humorous look at what it is like to be a father in today’s world.

I’ve read A Dog’s Purpose—what should I read next?

I would highly recommend the next novel in the series: A Dog’s Journey continues the story of the dog in A Dog’s Purpose, pretty much picking up right where the first book left off. A Dog’s Journey actually has a high reader-rating than A Dog’s Purpose, but I’ll leave it up to the individual to decide which one is better.

Buy A Dog’s Purpose here:

Follow W. Bruce Cameron on Twitter (@adogspurpose) and Facebook, or visit his website.

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Brazen by Loren D. Estleman

November 7, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

A killer is reenacting the deaths of Hollywood’s blond bombshells, and Valentino must stop him before it’s too late in Loren D. Estleman’s Brazen.

UCLA film archivist and sometime film detective Valentino doesn’t take friend and former actress Beata Limerick very seriously when she tells him that she quit acting because of the curse on blond actresses. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Thelma Todd, Sharon Tate… they all had more fun, but none of them made it out of the business alive, and according to Limerick, she wasn’t taking any chances. But when Valentino finds Beata’s body staged the way Monroe was found, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” playing on repeat; he knows Limerick’s death was no accident.

Police detective Ray Padilla doesn’t quite suspect Valentino is the killer, but he can’t let him off that easy. After all, the film archivist seems to be involved in more than his share of intrigue and death, which makes him a prime suspect. But Valentino is also a walking encyclopedia of Hollywood knowledge. When another washed-up actress is killed, the crime scene a copy of Thelma Todd’s last moments, Padilla enlists Valentino’s help in catching a serial killer of doomed blondes before he can strike again.

Brazen will become available December 6th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

CHAPTER 1

KYLE BROADHEAD LOOPED a giant rubber band on the toe of his wingtip, aimed his leg at a picture of the director of the UCLA board of regents shaking his hand, drew the band taut, and let go. It zinged through the air of his office and struck the protective glass a tremendous whack, but failed to crack it.

“Plexiglas.” He snorted. “I might have guessed. The cheap so-and-so.”

“Why hang it at all, if you dislike him so much?” Valentino asked.

“I need the target practice.”

“One of these days you’re going to snort yourself into a case of sudden retirement.”

“Never. I am an ornament of this institution.”

“Make yourself more useful than one. You know how to tie one of these things.”

The professor looked up at his visitor, in a dinner jacket with both ends of his bow tie hanging loose.

“How come Dean Martin died again and no one told me?”

“It’s a party. Even here they throw them sometimes without writing ‘Torn jeans optional’ on the invitation. Seriously, if you don’t help me out I’m going for a clip-on.”

“Why stop there? Get one of those elastic things, so you can stretch it out and let it snap back when you tell a joke. Better yet, get one with a motor that makes it spin. Come to think of it, I’ll pick one up for myself. I can distract the next moneybags host while I spit those godawful cheese puffs into my napkin, then make my pitch for a donation.”

“Kyle!”

“Keep your shirtboard on.” The old academic got up from his desk, stepped behind the young film archivist, circled his arms around his neck, and tied. “What’s the occasion, and why wasn’t I invited?”

“Dinner party at Beata Limerick’s, to celebrate her newest acquisition. A cozy little affair of sixty or so. That’s as many as can stand on her balcony without finishing up in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard. As for why you aren’t on the list, you’ll have to take that up with Beata.”

“No need. You just told me.”

“Told you what? You get along fine with her.”

“Her, yes. Heights, no. If God had meant people to live in penthouses, He would have given them parachutes.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit you were afraid of anything.”

“I confess to frailty on a case-by-case basis. Let’s keep this one between you, me, and the Lady Limerick. If Mr. Plexiglas gets wind of it, he’ll hold the next meeting in the Watts Tower.”

“Why’d you tell Beata?”

“I had to come clean the third time she asked me over. Contrary to the prevailing theory, I’m only rude to my close friends. There.” He spread his hands and circled in front of Valentino to inspect the result. “If you ever hope to replace me as this university’s chief procurer, you’re going to have to stop renting your tuxes out of Shifty Louie’s trunk in the parking lot. All you need in that getup is a towel on your arm and a phony French accent.”

“I’d make a better maitre d’ than a fund-raiser. I can twist a corkscrew, but not somebody’s arm. And I can’t make a bow out of a wet noodle.”

“Who said anything about a maitre d’? You always did aim too high.”

“Well, I’m off.”

“This time I hope you at least come back wearing a chinchilla coat.”

“Vicuna,” Valentino said. “It was a vicuna coat Gloria Swanson gave William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. And our relationship isn’t like that.”

“I don’t know why not. She signs one check, and that wet dream of an architectural project of yours rises fully intact from a cloud of dust, like in a cartoon.”

“I wouldn’t ask, and she wouldn’t offer, with or without the sordid details. She knows what it means to haul yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

“She should know. She married the guy who bought her the boots.”

It was true, to an extent. Beata Limerick had turned her back on stardom and fallen into a fortune.

That, at least, was the line taken by every feature writer in L.A. who’d succeeded in storming her parapets and scoring an interview, and from Valentino’s personal experience, he found no reason to question it. A town that chewed up and spat out female talent the moment it turned forty had no mercy for those who beat it to the punch, but she had done more than that; she’d rubbed its face in it and made it like it.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been giving her the big buildup in 1967 (“Not since Marilyn…”) when she walked out on her contract, offering no explanation. The studio sued, then withdrew its suit when she handed the head of production a cashier’s check for the entire amount she’d been paid while on salary. The money was accepted, but not before a toady for Louis B. Mayer actually spoke the words, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

She never did; but then she never had to.

Six months after she quit, she married the chairman of the board of the corporation that built Century City. When he died, shortly before their fifth anniversary, he left her forty million dollars in cash and securities, a controlling interest in the corporation, and an additional sixteen million in real property, including four hundred feet fronting on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. She entered probate a grieving widow and emerged a charter member of an exclusive club: Together with Mae West and Greta Garbo, the former Bertha Liechtenstein of Santa Rosa (population 10,773), owned the largest tract of Southern California in private hands.

“I’ve even got a name for it,” she declared, with a chortle: “The Richest Bitches in Britches.”

They were standing on the balcony of her penthouse in Beverly Hills, looking out at the dusting of lights that was Los Angeles on a night swept clean of yellow-ocher auto exhaust. On evenings like that the horizon vanished, the hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs merging with the stars so that the city seemed folded in the firmament. She wore a low-cut evening gown and a wrap filmy enough to create the illusion of transparency, but opaque enough to filter out the effects of seventy-plus years on bare shoulders and bosom. Through it glittered the facets of a diamond choker, her only jewelry tonight, apart from the wedding set that had resided on her left hand for five decades.

Valentino had lied to Broadhead about the number of guests, knowing his mentor would never have let up on the gigolo jokes had he known there was only one.

“I don’t believe you,” he told her. “Kyle says only sane people question their own sanity, and no woman who is truly a bitch would admit to it.”

She smiled. It was an attractive smile, if a bit sad, and her bones were good. Time, not surgery, had been kind to the woman whom Hedda Hopper had declared “Hollywood’s Alice Roosevelt Longworth.” She was a force to reckon with at elegant parties. Coat-check girls who wanted to be starlets, starlets who wanted to be stars, and stars who didn’t want to be coat-check girls laughed at her jokes and gushed over her taste in clothing and jewelry, and came away uncertain whether they should worry more about Beata’s discussing them behind their backs or not discussing them at all.

“Dear boy. You’ll never be a grown-up until you stop warming over the wisdom of others. I had my coming of age at sixty, when I realized that half of what I knew I’d been told by Pietro.”

Pietro Jacobelli, squat voluptuary that he was, had been the Prince Charming who’d rescued her from cautionary-tale hell. Their marriage had been looked upon at first as the usual merger of beauty and loot, but brief as it was, it had proven to be the genuine article. She’d never remarried, although she’d been proposed to by men who could have increased her fortune many times over.

“He was just sixty when he left me,” she said. “Everything since then I went out and learned myself.”

“I have time, then,” Valentino said.

“Not as much as you think; which is the reason I wonder why you’re wasting it.” She laid her hand atop his where it rested on the balcony’s marble railing. “Why don’t you let me build that theater for you?”

Buy Brazen here:

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Say No More by Hank Phillippi Ryan

October 5, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

When Boston reporter Jane Ryland reports a hit and run, she soon learns she saw more than a car crash—she witnessed the collapse of an alibi. Working on an expose of sexual assaults on college campuses for the station’s new documentary unit, Jane’s just convinced a date rape victim to reveal her heartbreaking experience on camera. However, a disturbing anonymous message—SAY NO MORE—has Jane really and truly scared.

Homicide detective Jake Brogan is on the hunt for the murderer of Avery Morgan, a hot-shot Hollywood screenwriter. Her year as a college guest lecturer just ended at the bottom of her swimming pool in the tight-knit and tight-lipped Boston community called The Reserve. As Jake chips his way through a code of silence as shatterproof as any street gang, he’ll learn that one newcomer to the neighborhood may have a secret of her own.

A young woman faces a life-changing decision—should she go public about her assault? Jane and Jake—now semi-secretly engaged and beginning to reveal their relationship to the world—are both on a quest for answers as they try to balance the consequences of the truth.

Say No More, the thrilling next installment in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s Jane Ryland Series, will become available November 1st. Please enjoy this excerpt.

JANE RYLAND

“Did you see that silver Cadillac? What he did?” Jane Ryland powered down the car window to get a better look. “He plowed right into that delivery van! Pull closer, can you?”

“Anyone hurt?” Fiola kept her eyes on the cars stopped ahead of them in the Monday morning rush on O’Brien Highway.

Squinting through the sun’s glare, Jane could just make out the Caddy’s red-and-white Massachusetts license plate up ahead in the lane to her right. “I can’t tell yet. We need to get closer.”

“Should I call the cops?” Fiola asked.

“Hang on. W-R-C, one-R-four.” Jane recited the license number while scrambling in the side pocket of her canvas tote bag for a pencil. No pencil. Some reporter. Using one forefinger, she wrote it in the dust of the news car’s grimy dashboard, for once the miserable housekeeping of Channel 2’s motor pool working in her favor. Then, before she remembered she wasn’t in jeans, she swiped the leftover grime down the side of her black skirt. Nine-forty A.M., if the dashboard digital was correct. The time wouldn’t matter, nor would the plate number, but it was all reporter reflex.

“Jane? Can you see yet?”

Fiola Morrello—not Fiona, as she’d reminded Jane a few hundred times already—had insisted on driving, even though she’d arrived in Boston only last week. Jane had protested once. Then, recognizing the sometimes-contentious reporter-producer dynamic, let her new producer take the wheel. That’s why Fiola got the big bucks, right?

Jane was more comfortable being in the driver’s seat, but the two new colleagues would work it out. Jane hoped.

“Almost.” She leaned out the window, far as she could, her bare forearm braced on the sunbaked door panel. Their white Crown Vic inched ahead toward the silver car, Jane’s passenger-side window scarcely moving closer to the driver’s side of the Caddy. “Sure sounded bad.”

The chunky new Cadillac had hit a green Gormay on the Way delivery van, the popular take-out restaurant a culinary necessity for college kids, as well as the darling of Boston’s overscheduled millennials and overworked professionals. Including Jane. It was obviously the Caddy’s fault, so the drivers should have been exchanging insurance papers and calling the cops themselves. Damage or not, that big new car had banged into the older van’s rear. Jane had seen—and heard—the whole thing.

“Is the Caddy driver on his cell?” Fiola asked. “Or should I call?”

“He’s just sitting there.” Jane watched the man stare straight ahead, both hands clamped on the steering wheel, acting as if nothing happened. Good luck with that, buddy, she thought. You can’t pretend a car accident away. “Why doesn’t he get out? Check on the delivery guy?”

As they crept closer, Jane catalogued the driver’s face, top to bottom, as she’d been taught back in journalism school. Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak, grayish hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips, clean-shaven.

“Is this a Boston thing? Ignoring an accident?” Fiola, keeping one hand on the wheel, had grabbed her phone. “What if he’s hurt? I’m gonna call.”

“Yeah.” Jane wrapped her fingers around the door handle, ready to leap out if need be. The stoplight was still red, the ridiculously long wait at the intersection straddling Boston proper and neighboring Charlestown now working in their favor. “Something’s happening.”

The Gormay van’s driver-side door opened. Out came a man’s leg—running shoe, khaki pants. The left-turn arrow light turned green. The cars on Fiola’s left pulled away, headed toward Beacon Hill.

“What do we do?” Fiola said. “When the light changes in a second, we’ll be blocking traffic.”

“Don’t move. The people in front of us can go.” Jane twisted around, looked over the leather seat back. “No one’s behind us, it’s fine. Light’s still red. Go ahead, call.”

Another running shoe, another khaki leg. And then the face of the van driver, shadowed by the curved metal door open behind him. He stopped, both feet planted on the pavement, apparently leaning sideways against the front seat. Hurt?

“That guy doesn’t look right,” Fiola said.

“Nine-one-one,” Jane said. “Do it.”

Three lanes of lights above them turned green. Instantly, a cacophony of horns began, each driver behind the Caddy apparently feeling compelled to remind their fellow motorists what green meant.

Their news car was kind of blocking traffic, but what if this was a story? The other drivers would have to go around while the accident scene got worked out.

But the Caddy driver still stared straight ahead. Then, with a wrench of his steering wheel and a squeal of tires, he jammed the car into reverse, veered to the right, swerved forward and across the right lane, other cars twisting out of his path, honking in protest. With a clamor of horns complaining, he peeled away, fishtailed once, spitting pebbles. The big car jounced over a jutting curb as it lost its battle with the acute angle of the turn onto the cross street, and barreled through the graffiti-slashed concrete beneath the Green Line underpass. Jane could almost hear the roar of acceleration as the Caddy sped into the distance, vanishing into the gritty construction-clogged labyrinth of Charlestown.

“Are you kidding me?” Jane yelled at the universe, yanking open her car door, waving her arms, signaling Go around! to the driver now honking impatiently behind her. Though the van’s rear fender hung distressingly askew, this wasn’t newsworthy enough to make TV. Still, it was the principle of the thing. The Caddy hits a van, then tries to get away with it? Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak, gray hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips, clean-shaven.

“Hit-and-run?” Jane could hear the incredulity in her own voice. “Tell the cops—”

“I got this.” Fiola, phone to her ear, pointed to the van. “Go check on the guy.”

“I’ll check on the guy,” Jane said at the same time. So much for Jane and Fiola’s plans. Their interview at the college would have to wait. They’d been early—imagine that—so there was still an acceptable window of not-quite-lateness. Jane trotted up to the delivery truck, looking both ways, then all ways, remembering she was a defenseless pedestrian navigating four lanes of determined chrome and steel. At least the other drivers, now veering around the two stopped vehicles, seemed to acknowledge the potential danger. Day one of her new assignment—two steps forward, one step back.

Maybe two steps back, she thought, as she saw the driver. A young man, arms sticking out of a pale blue uniform shirt, a thin trickle of blood down the side of his face, turned to her. He touched a finger to his check, then looked at the smear of red it left, frowning.

“Are you okay?” Jane could see the young man’s body trembling. He opened his mouth, then said … something. Not in English.

“I’m sorry, I’m Jane Ryland. From Channel 2? My producer’s calling nine-one-one. I saw what happened, okay? Are you hurt?”

The man pointed toward the back of his van. He wants to see the damage, Jane thought. Makes sense. Maybe he’s in shock.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, trying to look supportive and sympathetic. “Stinks. But come see. There’s not much damage.”

The man approached, crouched on the pavement, and ran his finger over the dent, leaving a smudge of red on the pale green paint. He stood, then rattled the twin chrome handles of the van’s double back doors. They didn’t open.

“Are you okay?” Jane persisted. “It looks like you’re bleeding a little.”

“Cops on the way!” Fiola’s voice came from behind them.

“The police are coming,” Jane repeated. Why hadn’t he said anything? “Sir?”

Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak, her brain catalogued again, gray hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips, clean-shaven. She replayed the moment of the collision, the sound of it, the sight of it, making it indelible. Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak, gray hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips, clean-shaven. Yes, she’d remember. She’d recognize him.

And she’d get Jake to run the license number through his magic cop database. Not that he was supposed to do that unless he was working the collision, which he wouldn’t be, let alone telling her what he found. Not that she could use the information, or would even need it. But anyway. Be interesting to know.

Still silent, the food truck driver finally seemed to acknowledge her, his eyes wide, inquiring. A siren, faint but recognizable, materialized from somewhere behind them. The cavalry. She and Fiola could still make their interview, Jane calculated. After this tiny and unremarkable good deed. Being a successful reporter was all about karma.

Then the van driver pivoted, so quickly Jane stepped back, and with one thick-soled running shoe he kicked the white-walled left rear tire. He spat out a few words, almost yelling, in a language Jane didn’t understand.

He kicked the tire again, then looked at her, palms outstretched. That, Jane understood. What the hell? This is crazy.

“Yeah, I know.” Jane nodded, sympathetic.

“You?” The man pointed to her. He could talk—that was good. Not in shock.

“See?” He seemed to be searching for the word. “You see?” The siren grew louder. Any second now, the cops would be here, she’d be gone, and she’d never think of this again.

“Yes, I see. Saw.” Jane held out both hands, nodding, smiling, the international language for ‘everything is going to be fine.’ With one finger, she pointed to her chest, then to her eyes, then to the place where the silver Cadillac had been. And then to the direction it had vanished.

“No question,” she said. “I saw everything.”

Buy Say No More here:

Author Features

The Modern Day Western

September 27, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

Written by Jon Land

My Caitlin Strong books have often been referred to as modern day westerns. While I’d like to take credit for starting that trend, it goes back far longer than Caitlin and me. In fact, the contemporary western dates all the way back to the national disillusion over the Vietnam War, coupled in rapid succession by loss of faith in our own government thanks to Watergate. The country found itself craving old-fashioned, no-holds-barred heroes who could we believe in. Strong (no pun intended!) men with a simple ethos and base nobility in which they stood as the lone hope against bad guys determined to make the world worse for ordinary people. The trend, in my humble opinion, began not in books, but in movies. So, in honor of the release of The Magnificent Seven remake, let’s explore seven examples of the modern day western that have so influenced the form of the thriller novel in pop culture.

Dirty Harry: Clint Eastwood’s seminal, star-making turn as a loner cop breaking all the rules to track down a serial killer. The setting of 1970s San Francisco could just as easily have been the plains roamed by the Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns in which Clint cut his teeth. Harry Callahan is a character literally defined by his gun, making the .44 Magnum famous as well. A great uncredited rewrite by John Millius turned a simple cop film into a portrait of a modern day gunfighter’s obsession with seeing justice done, ending in identical fashion to the Gary Cooper classic High Noon.

Star Wars: A “space western” that contains all the staples of the form right down to the villainous gunfighter in black, as personified by Darth Vader, only with a light saber instead of a Colt .45. Add to that Luke Skywalker’s ingénue evolving into a heroic force of good, the blaster-wielding gunslinger in Han Solo, a rescue sequence (a la The Professionals), and a climactic gun battle transposed into outer space. The result draws upon Akira Kurosawa’s western-inspired samurai movies in crafting an industry-changing masterpiece.

Die Hard: Speaking of modern day gunfighters, Bruce Willis’s John McClane calls himself Roy Rogers and leaves us with a great take on this theme by uttering the famous line, “Yippy-Ki-Yay, mother_______!” to the villainous Hans Gruber amid their final shootout. In that sense, he’s the classic gunman who finds himself in the wrong place/town at the wrong time. Nakatomi Tower becomes a microcosm for a world run by bad guys at the expense of the rest of us. And, like Alan Ladd in Shane, McClane finds himself hopelessly outnumbered which doesn’t stop him from triumphing in the end.

Lethal Weapon: Jack Schaeffer conceived the aforementioned Shane as a kind of “savior psychopath,” who possesses many of the same qualities as those he’s determined to defeat. So it is with Mel Gibson’s Riggs character, as conceived by screenwriter Shane Black. The suicidal Riggs is utterly unhinged and every bit as much a psychopath as Mitchell Ryan’s Shadow Company stone faces, led by Gary Busey as Mr. Joshua. The final scene, in which Riggs challenges Joshua to what is essentially a gun fight without guns, opens with the line, “What do you say, Jack? You want a shot at the title?” Shane couldn’t have said it better.

Robocop (just the original, please!): When Tombstone was overrun by outlaws, they sent for Wyatt Earp. When Detroit of the future faces a comparable menace, they build their own Wyatt Earp in the form of the title character and let him loose to clean up the crime-riddled streets. Remember how Peter Weller’s character twirls his gun to impress the son his new identify forces him to abandon? You think the filmmakers didn’t know exactly the metaphor they were pushing? The film’s villainous Clarence Boddicker is the classic western outlaw, a power-mad creature of corruption it takes a machine with a heart bigger than most humans to bring down.

No Country for Old Men: The purest “postmodern” western on our list, since (in both the book and the exceptionally faithful film adaptation) Tommy Lee Jones’s saintly old-school sheriff never actually confronts Javier Bardem’s twistedly terrifying Anton Chigurh. But the drug deal gone wrong harks back to any number of stagecoach and bank robberies that define so many westerns. And Chigurh’s malevolent menace is reminiscent of every black-clad baddie ever to rampage through the Old West. A creature not so much of the land, as fate itself and thus defined purely in the moment, giving us no idea from where he came or where he’s going next.

Jack Reacher: Okay, Tom Cruise isn’t as big or as bruising as Lee Child’s iconic, nomadic hero who carries only a toothbrush while taming one town, and one book, after another. But Cruise otherwise nails the character’s sensibility to a T. Reacher is a classic western gunfighter, unable to settle down and on a quasi-Quixotic journey to right the wrongs of the world perpetrated on ordinary people like you and I. He vanquishes the bad guys, then mounts a bus instead of a horse to ride on to his next adventure. Not a whole lot different than Paladin from the classic TV western, Have Gun, Will Travel.

Those are my choices. Would love to hear if you have any you’d like to add.

Buy Strong Cold Dead here:

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: An Irish Country Love Story by Patrick Taylor

September 6, 2016May 13, 2024torforge3 Comments

It’s the winter of 1967 and snow is on the ground in the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, but the chilly weather can’t stop love from warming hearts all over the county. Not just the love between a man and woman, as with young doctor, Barry Laverty, and his fiancee Sue Nolan, who are making plans to start a new life together, but also the love of an ailing pensioner for a faithful dog that’s gone missing, the love of the local gentry for the great estate they are on verge of losing, or Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s deep and abiding love for his long-time home and practice.

For decades, ever since the war, Number One Main Street, Ballybucklebo, has housed O’Reilly and his practice. In recent years, it has also opened its doors to O’Reilly’s wife, Barry Laverty, and a new addition to the practice, Doctor Nonie Stevens, a sultry and occasionally prickly young woman who may not be fitting in as well as she should. It is to Number One that patients young and old come when they need a doctor’s care, for everything from the measles to a rare and baffling blood disease.

An unexpected turn of events threatens to drive O’Reilly from his home for good, unless the entire village can rally behind their doctor and prove that love really can conquer all.

An Irish Country Love Story—available October 4th—is a new and heartwarming installment in Patrick Taylor’s beloved bestselling Irish Country series. Please enjoy this excerpt.

In Perils of Water

“Brisk,” said Doctor Barry Laverty, standing on the shore and watching his breath turn to steam in the chilly, early-January air. The tang of the sea was in his nose, a fair breeze on his cheeks. “Distinctly brisk. Cold as a witch’s ti—” No. Out of deference to one of his companions, he’d not make the allusion much loved by his senior partner to the frigidity of a wisewoman’s breast. Tucking his neck down into the collar of his overcoat, he held more tightly to Sue Nolan’s gloved hand. The young schoolteacher, Barry’s fiancée, was spending the weekend at Number One Main Street, Ballybucklebo, before returning to her exchange-teaching work in Marseille.

“Brrrr,” she said despite being snuggled into a sheepskin coat and fur hat. Barry’s old six-foot-long British Medical Students’ Association scarf was wrapped in layers round her neck. She pretended to chatter her teeth and smiled at him, the light sparkling from her green eyes. Her Mediterranean tan looked out of place on this wintry Ulster afternoon. “In some ways I’ll not be one bit sorry to be going back to the sunny Bouches-du-Rhȏne on Monday.” She must have seen Barry’s look. “And don’t worry, silly, I’ll be home for good in March, with the added qualification of having done a six-month teacher exchange. And a much better command of French. I’ll be getting a pay raise aussi.” She pecked his cheek.

He felt her lips, cold on his chilled skin. “And a wedding to look forward to,” Barry said. He loved this girl with the long copper hair, distinct political views, and very tasty kisses. Two months wasn’t that long to wait. Not really. “Our wedding.” He hugged the idea. And mercenary though his thought seemed, her increase in salary would help out with the housekeeping. Becoming a full partner in O’Reilly’s practice last January had been very good for the ego, but with what Barry was paid it was unlikely that he’d soon be up there with the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers.

“Our wedding,” she said, squeezed his hand, and her smile was radiant. “Yours and mine, mon petit choux.”

Barry smiled at the French endearment, although why being called a little cabbage should be thought affectionate was beyond him. He held her gaze, then his visions of their soon-to-be married life became entangled with the real world as two little boys dashed past. One, pursued by a scruffy mongrel, yelled, “Happy New Year til youse all,” but before Barry could reply, Colin Brown and his dog Murphy had juked round a small crowd of folks enjoying a stroll in the Saturday sunshine.

“Hi lost. Go on out. Hey on,” Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly said to his big black Labrador. Typical of the man, he was hatless and wore a tweed sports jacket over a woollen sweater. No overcoat for him. Barry was convinced that O’Reilly, despite his colourful expressions about the cold, was impervious even though his bent nose and boxer’s cauliflower ears were red.

Barry watched a tennis ball thrown by his senior partner fly over the damp ochre sand and splash into the waters that lapped Ballybucklebo Beach. A kayak was hauled up above the tide line. Its owner must have gone to get something because there was no one near the little craft, and unless the paddler came back, the soon-to-be-rising tide might carry the boat out to sea.

Arthur Guinness charged past the kayak, his paws leaving blurred prints on the beach. What must be very chilly water didn’t seem to bother the big dog as he swam out, grabbed his ball, turned, and headed snorting for the shore. It would be for him no worse than making retrieves, for which he and his clan had been bred, when he was with his master wildfowling on nearby Strangford Lough.

Barry didn’t know Strangford well, but he was at home here on Belfast Lough. He’d grown up in Ballyholme and its waters had been his playground for canoeing, sailing, fishing, swimming.

Arthur came ashore, stopped, stood with splayed legs, and shook, the water droplets spraying away to shimmer in the winter sunlight.

“Happy dog,” Barry said.

“And happy Barry, I hope,” said Sue. “I have loved the sunshine in France, but truly, March can’t come soon enough for me, pet.”

“I know. And I couldn’t be happier. Just look out there.” He pointed to a sailing dinghy whose shining white sails gently pushed the boat along in a fair breeze rippling the blue waters. Here and there was a chalk mark of white foam where a wave had broken. “I love the lough. And you know I love sailing.” The little sailboat was only about a hundred yards from the tide line. The 16 sail number told him that his pal Andy Jackson was out in his Shearwater. “One of my friends. He must be daft. Out in this weather?” Barry said, but well remembered winter sailing before he’d gone to medical school. “It’ll be cosier on that big one out there.” In the shipping channel, an oil tanker made her way to Belfast, a pilot boat keeping the great vessel company. “I’m happy because I have a great job here in County Down. I could never leave the sea or Ulster for long.” He bent and said into her ear, “And I’m happy because most of all I love you, Sue Nolan.” And he didn’t need her to parrot his words. He knew now how she felt, although until she’d come back from France for the Christmas holidays he’d had his reservations.

“Good boy.” O’Reilly took the ball from the grinning dog’s mouth and threw it again. “Hi lost.”

Barry watched Arthur run and again noticed the kayak. It triggered a memory. “See that kayak, Sue?”

She nodded.

“I tried one once years ago. Couldn’t get it to do anything but go round in circles and then I dropped the paddle and tipped myself right into the sea trying to retrieve it. Don’t trust the things. Never tried again. I much prefer something bigger, like a Glen-class yacht.”

“And so do I when I’m sailing with you, but once I’m back for good I’m going to get you to try kayaking again. It’s lots of fun.”

“You know how to paddle one of those things?”

“I do, and—don’t get huffy now—but my friend Jean-Claude…”

“Ah, yes, Monsieur Hamou.” Barry recalled the awful feelings of jealousy he’d wrestled with when her letters from Marseille had arrived, filled with mentions of the fellow teacher who was showing her the sights. A lot of worry about nothing. Jean-Claude Hamou had just been a friendly colleague who had taken Sue under his wing and made her feel at home in a strange place. “Water under the bridge.”

“Good.” She gave him a wide smile. “He persuaded me to take kayak lessons and it’s great fun. I can even do a screw roll.”

“A what?” He chuckled. “Any relation to a jam roll?”

“No, silly. A screw roll’s the simplest type of Eskimo roll to right a capsized kayak while you’re still sitting in it.”

“I’m impressed. I really am.” He shrugged. “All I could ever do was paddle a kind of Indian canoe. It was more beamy than that one. And less cramped.” He pointed across the lough. “Look over there.” She and O’Reilly turned and followed where his hand pointed. On the far shore, the solid, blue, eternal Antrim Hills rose above the grim granite face of Carrickfergus Castle. Its name meant Fergus’s Rock. “When I was fourteen I had a canoe made of wood and canvas. I took it from Bangor to Carrickfergus and back one day.”

Her eyes widened. “That’s quite a way for a youngster.”

“And,” said O’Reilly, who had taken the ball from Arthur and told the dog to sit, “what did my old shipmate, your dad, have to say about that?”

Barry laughed. “My father, as you should know, Fingal, believes in discipline. He was, as I believe Queen Victoria said to a minion who had told an off-colour story, ‘Not amused.’ He thought I’d been very reckless.”

O’Reilly laughed, a deep rumbling. “And so you had. I’m sure he wasn’t at all amused.” He patted a smiling Arthur before adding, “And it is reported that she also said it after watching Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.” He frowned. “I must say I like the piece, but I prefer The Mikado. Councillor Bertie Bishop, worshipful master of the Orange Lodge, committee member of the Ballybucklebo Bonnaughts Rugby Club, et cetera, et cetera, holds so many offices he reminds me of one of its characters, Pooh-Bah.”

Barry shook his head. “Sometimes, Fingal, I worry about your store of minutiae. I really do. You’re a sort of idiot savant, or at least the first half of one.” Inside, despite his words, Barry felt a deep sense of comfort. Three years ago, when he had applied for his first job after qualifying as a doctor and completing his houseman’s year, he’d been terrified of O’Reilly. Now he was completely at his ease with the big man and never hesitated to tease him.

“Less of your lip, Laverty,” O’Reilly said, but he was smiling.

“Anyhow,” Barry said, “Dad put his foot down. No more cross-lough forays. When Dad said ‘no,’ he meant ‘no.’”

“How’s about youse, Doctors, Miss Nolan?” The speaker, a buck-toothed young man, lifted his duncher by the peak as was proper when a lady was being addressed. The shock of hair beneath was carroty red.

“We’re grand, Donal,” O’Reilly said. “Giving Bluebird her run?” He nodded at a greyhound, the recent mother of pups. She was exchanging sniffs with a tail-wagging Arthur Guinness. They had been friends for years.

“Wasn’t it dead sad about your man Sir Donald Campbell and the real Bluebird?” Donal said.

“It was,” Barry said. “I saw the film on TV. The speedboat did a back somersault and he’d nearly broken his own water speed record.”

“And no sign of the body,” O’Reilly said.

“Very sad,” said Sue.

“Right enough. He was a brave man, so he was. Just like his da, Sir Malcolm.” Donal patted his dog’s head. “Don’t you worry your head, girl. Nothing’s going til happen til you because you share a name. But we’ve got to get yiz back into condition and then,” Donal lowered his voice, “come here til I tell youse…”

Oh oh, Barry thought, that meant Donal was going to impart some secret.

His left eyelid drooped. “Me and your man Dapper Frew are—”

“No,” said Barry. “Oh no, Donal.” Barry and O’Reilly had been involved in too many of Donal Donnelly’s harebrained get-rich-quick plots with dogs and racehorses. “Tell us when it’s over. Doctor O’Reilly and I are going to be busy.” Indeed they were only able to be out together today because the new assistant, Doctor Nonie Stevenson, who had taken over from Jennifer Bradley, was holding the medical fort. It was going to be interesting to see how she worked out in the months ahead. Barry had been in her year at medical school and had some reservations about her suitability, but she’d been fine so far.

“Fair enough, sir,” Donal said. “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, if youse get my meaning.”

Barry nodded and couldn’t hide a smile. Donal was incorrigible, but in local parlance he had a heart of corn.

“And how’s the family?” O’Reilly asked, clearly, like Barry, not wanting to become involved in another of Donal’s ploys.

“Julie’s got some more work modelling for that Belfast photographer man and wee Tori’s growing at a rate of knots. And,” he glanced at Sue, “I hope you don’t mind, Miss Nolan, but I’d like to tell my doctors that me and Julie think we’re…” He hesitated then the words tumbled out. “… up the builder’s again.” His blush was nearly as red as his hair.

“Wonderful,” Sue said. “Congratulations.”

Barry wondered at the numerous Irish euphemisms for pregnancy.

“Great news,” said O’Reilly. “Now you tell her, Donal, that we’d like to see her before the end of her third month. Get her care organised.”

“I’ll do that right enough, and this time it will be a wee lad because—”

The calm of the day was interrupted by shouting. People were rushing to the water’s edge, gesticulating, pointing out to sea. Barry stared. Andy Jackson had managed to capsize his dinghy, and Shearwaterlay on her side, sails in the water. Andy, in yellow oilskins, was trying to clamber onto the keel, obviously hoping to right the boat. Trying and failing. He fell off with a great splashing and thrashing. Andy Jackson had never learned to swim.

Barry turned to Donal. “Donal, run like blazes round to the harbour. See if any of the fishermen can get a motorboat round here quick.”

“Right.” Donal took off with Bluebird at his heels.

Out at sea, Andy had stopped floundering and was clinging on to the keel.

“Hang on,” bellowed O’Reilly, waving furiously, “we’re getting help.”

Barry, his eyes fixed on Andy’s boat, sent up a silent prayer for his friend. “Hypothermia was common on the North Atlantic convoys during the war,” said O’Reilly. “At fifty degrees Fahrenheit, a man develops it pretty quickly and just might stay alive for an hour. Near freezing, people die in fifteen minutes. That’s about how long the swimmers from Titanic survived.” He pursed his lips. “This time of the year the water’s going to be close to fifty degrees. It could take nearly an hour before Donal finds someone and gets them here. I’m going to go look for that kayaker. See if he can help.”

“The nearest lifeboat’s at Donaghadee away down the coast,” said Sue. “They wouldn’t make it in time. I can help, though.” She shrugged out of her sheepskin coat, unwrapped Barry’s long scarf, and tossed them higher up the beach on the dry sand. “Barry, give me a hand.” She headed toward the beached kayak. “I’ll take the bows. You take the stern.” She was very much in charge.

“Sue,” he said, “what in hell’s name are you up to?” He glanced out to sea and saw Andy still clinging to the dinghy. Not waiting for an answer, he picked up the little boat and saw that the twin-ended double paddle was aboard. Sue was running to the water’s edge and Barry had to sprint to keep up, following her into the sea, feeling the freezing water fill his shoes. “Put the boat down.” She bent and Barry followed suit. “But you can’t,” Barry spluttered. “You can’t drag a man into a kayak. If he panics, he could capsize you. I’m not letting you go. It’s far too risky.”

Sue grinned. “No, it’s not, and that man, and we know it’s Andy, is in real trouble.” She strode toward the little craft’s stern, grabbed the port gunnel, and dragged the kayak out until it was well afloat. Sue turned back. “I’ve done this before. They made us take turns in the kayak and in the water.” She smiled. “I preferred it in the boat. Now, if Andy can hang on to my stern or if I can get a rope round him, I can drag him into shallow water. Get him ashore.”

Barry hesitated, glanced out to sea again. Thank God, Andy was still afloat, clinging to the dinghy’s keel. But hypothermia would sap his energy quickly. “All right. Do it,” Barry said, conceding defeat. “But for God’s sake be careful. Please.”

“You weren’t the day you dived in to fish me out. I’m off. Wish me luck.” She put a hand on either gunnel to steady the boat and with an obviously well-practised skill, hoisted herself into the cockpit, sat legs outstretched, grabbed the paddle, and with strong rhythmic strokes set off.

Barry watched. She had to cover the hundred yards to the capsized dinghy before Andy’s strength gave out and he slipped into the sea. Silly bugger that he was. Sailing without a life jacket when you can’t swim. Barry scowled and dug the toe of his shoe into the soft sand. The human capacity for ignoring the obvious sometimes took his breath away. And here was his dear Sue risking life and limb to safe the daft bastard. He loved her for it. Barry took a deep breath. Please, please be careful, Sue. I couldn’t bear to lose you.

Buy An Irish Country Love Story here:

Author Features

Me and Robert Frost

August 30, 2016May 10, 2024torforge5 Comments

Written by Shannon Baker

and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Holy Cow, what a difference! When I was in college, I had plans. Big ones that involved corner offices and six-figure salaries, high heels, power suits, cocktail dresses. It was the same road all of us business majors hoped to travel. I attended the University of Nebraska (Go Big Red!) so it wouldn’t surprise a thinking person that at age 21, love hurtled into my life like the meteor that burned through our atmosphere wiping out the dinosaurs. In my little life, love had about the same impact. The man I oh-so naively fell for was a rancher in the Nebraska Sandhills.

I went traipsing off to a place where cattle outnumber people by more than fifty to one and my nearest neighbor lived five miles away as the crow flies. Living so far out I learned all the survival skills, such as how to stock a pantry, cook on the lean, stay warm when the electricity goes out for a week. *hint: body heat is greatly underestimated. I was outdoorsy, but in the cross-country skiing way, not in the round-u- cattle-in-a-blizzard kind of category.

My father-in-law bought me a helluva good cutting horse. Named Big Enough because he wasn’t much larger than a pony. But that horse had a lot more cow savvy than I did. If you pointed him after a critter, you’d be hell-bent to get him stopped. Big Enough made me a good enough hand I got called on to work cattle often.

One blustery afternoon, we were out in the calving lot cutting heavies because there was a big storm coming in. What this meant is that my husband and father-in-law would slowly, ohmygod so slowly, ride through the bunched herd and quietly isolate one pregnant cow after another, checking their back ends to predict who would calve soon by “how loose” they were. When they chose one, they’d push it away from the rest and my job was to meet it, and Big Enough and I would walk it across the pasture, through the gate to a corral close to the house so they could keep an eye on her during the bad weather.

Our job was as fun as watching Jello harden. The culling went on for millennia, until I couldn’t feel my feet in the stirrups, my lips were probably the color of the icy Atlantic, and my fingers couldn’t grip the reins. All I could think about was the warm cinnamon rolls and hot coffee I had in the kitchen. Frozen brain drifting, I was snapped to attention by hollering. I think Big Enough had been dozing because when I kicked him to attention he startled and jumped. I grabbed the saddle horn to keep from pitching onto the hard ground.

My husband—never one for subtly—started screaming unmentionable things at me with the general gist that they’d kicked a cow our way and, because of our inattention, she’d double-backed into the herd. I kicked Big Enough after her and, smart guy that he was, he identified her immediately. He went after her, cutting her from the herd. She was a determined bossy and tried moves a Husker running back would be proud of. But Big Enough had her number and he’d feint and parry until all I could do was clamp my knees into his sides and white-knuckle the saddle horn.

Big Enough succeeded in getting her separated from the herd but she was riled up. You can imagine running a pregnant cow is not good, but by now, Big Enough was focused. The cow took off on a full run across the pen, my father-in-law and my husband were telling me to stop chasing the cow, in between all the cursing, of course. But a mere mortal was powerless against the force called Big Enough. My ski hat blew off, tears streaked from my eyes and froze before they reached my temples. We raced across the frozen pasture, the cow in a panic, Big Enough committed, and only me with enough foresight to notice the approaching three-strand barbed wire fence.

Big Enough only saw the cow, who only wanted to get away from us. I wedged my feet in the stirrups and pulled the reins with all my strength, standing and leaning back. This convoy was heading for disaster and nothing I did made any difference.

Big Enough didn’t slow. The fence loomed. The cow kept running. We were all going to die. I’m sure I ground a layer or two off my teeth.

The cow hit the fence at roughly 200 mph. She tangled in the wire and did a gymnast’s tumble. Still we careened toward her. We’d roll in the barbed wire. Big Enough would shred his flesh, maybe break a leg in the fall and have to be put down. I clenched, preparing for the Rodeo Apocalypse.

Did I mention Big Enough was smart?

He stopped inches from the fence line.

I didn’t. Like a cannonball, I shot out of the saddle, over the fence and landed in a heap on the frozen sand. The cow, tail still raised, turned from me and trotted into the corral. Big Enough stared at me in disappointment that I couldn’t do my job of staying in the saddle. My husband and father-in-law had already returned to sorting cattle.

A few minutes later I enjoyed coffee and rolls in my kitchen and about fifteen years later, I left the Sandhills for good.

I might have taken that well-traveled road after college to a business career. But I’m glad I took the one less traveled. No denying it was bumpy and rough, but along the way I discovered Kate Fox and now, I get to write her stories.

Buy Stripped Bare here:

Don’t forget to follow Shannon Baker on Twitter (@sbakerwriter) or visit her website.

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: End Game by David Hagberg

August 18, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Langley is experiencing a series of gruesome murders. The CIA’s own headquarters should be the safest spot on the planet, but a highly professional, violently psychopathic assassin, who hideously disfigures his victims, strikes without mercy.

The murders spread from Langley to a prison outside of Athens, where the first clue to what will become the End Game surfaces. A code carved into four copper panels of the legendary statue in a courtyard at CIA headquarters, known as Kryptos, predicts the means and the terrible necessity for the serial killings.

Before the first Iraq war, something horrifying was buried in the foothills above the oil city of Kirkuk. It will not remain buried forever.

Only Kirk McGarvey, Pete Boylan, and the CIA’s odd-duck genius, Otto Rencke, can find the truth still buried in Iraq. A truth so devastating it could well ignite the entire Middle East into an unstoppable, apocalyptic war.

Retired CIA assassin Kirk McGarvey faces the most formidable adversary of his long and storied career in End Game—available September 6th—by David Hagberg. Please enjoy this excerpt.

One

Walter Wager heaved himself off the floor, using the edge of his desk for leverage, blood running down the collar of his white shirt from a ragged wound in the side of his neck. He was an old man, even older than his fifty-four, because of the life he’d led as a deep-cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was no longer a NOC, and he’d struggled for the last year, sitting behind a desk, in a tiny office buried on the third floor of the Original Headquarters Building, trying to lead a normal life, trying to fit in with the normal day-to-day routine without the nearly constant danger he’d faced for thirty-five years.

The beginning of the end for him had come eight years ago when his wife, Sandee, had been shot to death during a situation that had gone terribly bad in Caracas. They were meeting with a cryptanalyst from SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, who’d promised to hand over the latest data encryption algorithms his science directorate had devised. It was late at night in the warehouse district when the transfer of money for a disk had just taken place, and the headlights of a half dozen police vehicles came on, illuminating the three of them.

Sandee slammed her shoulder into the cryptanalyst’s chest, knocking him backward. “Run!” she shouted.

Wager reached for her arm, the same time the police opened fire, hitting her in the back and in her head, and she went down hard.

Something very hot plucked at Wager’s left elbow, and on instinct alone he jogged to the left, away from the headlights, and with bullets slamming into the pavement all around him and singing past his head, he managed to make it into one of the abandoned buildings.

Several cars started up, someone shouted something, and police came after him. But he was running for his life, the adrenaline high in his system. And somehow he managed to escape back into the city to the safe house he’d set up in the first days after his arrival. Sandee had called it: refuge.

“Let’s hope we never have to use it,” she’d said the first time he’d brought her there.

He’d never forgotten her words or the sight of her falling forward, bullets ripping into her body. And no day had gone by since then when her face, the feel of her body, her breath on his cheek, didn’t come to him in the middle of the night.

He was dying now, and of all things, what he would miss the most would be his dreams.

Calling for help would do no good. It was well past midnight, and all the offices on this floor were empty. No one would hear him. But security was just a phone call away. And even if they couldn’t get here in time to save his life, he would be able to tell him who his killer was.

Though not why.

“Don’t touch the phone, Walter,” warned the man behind him.

Wager’s heart pounded in his ears as he reached for the phone on his desk. He felt no real pain, only a weakness from the terrible blood loss, and an absolute incredulity not at what was happening but howit was happening.

The face of his attacker was that of a stranger, but the voice was familiar. From years ago, maybe just before the first second Iraq war. In the mountains outside of Kirkuk. They were looking for WMDs that a lot of people in the Company knew didn’t exist. All that was required were a few photographs, something with a serial number or any sort of markings the analysts at Langley could use.

There’d been seven of them spread out over a twenty-five-mile line, and he remembered the guy they called the Cynic, who’d called himself a realist: The only sane man in a world gone completely bat shit.

The man took Wager by the arm and gently turned him around so they were facing each other. The Cynic, if that was who he was, had a lot of blood around his mouth.

“It’s too late to call anyone.”

Wager was hearing music from somewhere, very low but very close. Church organ music, complicated.

“You never had culture, Walter. Too bad,” the man said. His voice was soft, with maybe a British accent. But high-class.

“Why?”

“Why what? Why am I here? Why have I decided to kill you? Why like this?” The Cynic turned away, his eyes half closed, a dreamy expression on his bloody face.

The music was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Wager couldn’t say why he’d dredged that up out of some distant memory, but he was sure of it, and it was coming from a small player in the breast pocket of the Cynic’s dark blue blazer.

“Yes, why?” Wager asked, his voice ragged and distant even in his own ears. He felt cold and weak, barely able to stay on his feet.

“Sandee was such a lovely girl. Was from the beginning, She never belonged with a bore like you.”

The Cynic had a round, perfectly normal face, small ears, thin sand-colored hair, a slight build. Everyman. Someone you would never pick out of a crowd, someone you would never remember. Perfect in the role of a NOC. The accent was a fake, of course, because if he was the man Wager was remembering, he was from somewhere in the Midwest. But how he knew Sandee—who was a big city San Francisco girl—was beyond comprehension just at this moment.

“I knew her,” the Cynic said. “And I was fucking her before Caracas.”

A blind rage rose up, blotting out Wager’s weakness, and he lurched forward, but the Cynic merely pushed him back against the desk, grabbing his arm so he wouldn’t fall down.

“I wanted to get your attention, and I have it now. Maybe briefly, but I have it.”

Wager’s head was swimming.

“You illuminated the spot with an encrypted GPS marker. I need to know the password.”

He was the Cynic from Iraq, but Wager could not dredge up a name—though it would have been work name, it would have been a start. “It’s gone.”

“The password or the stash?”

“Is this about money?”

The Cynic laughed softly, the sound from the back of his throat. “Come on, Walter. Is there anything more important?”

Wager could think of a lot of things more important than money in whatever forms it came.

“The password, probably both. The country has been overrun. Holes in the sand dug just about everywhere.”

“They didn’t find the bio weapons labs. What makes you think they found the cache?”

“Because the weapons never existed. Nor was there any heroin. And you didn’t fuck my wife.”

“Ah, but I did. She had a small mole on her left thigh, just below her pussy. Remember?”

Wager leaned back against the desk for support, and he tried to hide his effort to reach the phone, but the Cynic pulled him away, a broad smile on his bloody lips. Even his teeth were red, and Wager thought that a bit of flesh was hanging from the side of the man’s mouth.

“The password, please.”

“I don’t have it,” Wager said, and it came to him that the Cynic wasn’t lying: he had fucked Sandee. But then, in those days, everybody was fucking everybody else. Wives, girlfriends, sisters, even mothers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. It was the game from the get-go, so the stories went. From the beginning of the Agency, and even before that in the WWII OSS. Fucking was not only the ultimate aphrodisiac; it was a powerful tool.

Wager thought that the happiest time of his entire life had been during training at the CIA’s base on Camp Peary in Virginia—south of DC. It was called the Farm because it grew agents. They were young and naive. Anxious for the future, but dedicated. “Truth, justice, and the American way,” a former DCI had supposedly once said. They were supermen and women. It was where he had first met Sandee, who was two years older than he was. But they’d been a natural pair from the beginning, though at first he’d thought she’d been working him, been given him as an assignment. But then he fell in love—and he’d always thought she had too—and nothing else mattered.

“Too bad for you,” the Cynic said. “But there are others.”

Wager started to shake his head, if for nothing else but to ward off what he knew was coming next. But it didn’t help.

Grinning like a madman, the Cynic took Wager into his arms and began to eat his face, starting at the nose, powerful teeth shredding flesh and cartilage.

Buy End Game here:

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Repo Madness by W. Bruce Cameron

August 11, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Ruddy McCann is back in Repo Madness–the laugh-out-loud, thrilling adventure from bestselling author W. Bruce Cameron!

Ruddy McCann, former college football star, now Kalkaska, Michigan repo man, is finally getting his life back on track. He has a beautiful fiancé, Katie Lottner, a somewhat stable job stealing cars, and a lazy, lovable basset hound.

With his job suddenly in jeopardy, his fiancé wanting a break, and a new court-ordered psychiatrist insisting he take his medication or violate the terms of his probation, Ruddy finds himself missing the one thing he thought he would be happy to be rid of–the voice of Alan Lottner, dead realtor and Ruddy’s future father-in-law.

When a woman tells Ruddy that the tragedy that defines his life may, in fact, be a lie, Ruddy starts to investigate the disappearances of women in the area and soon discovers that his own redemption may be within reach. Alan’s voice returns, and Ruddy and Alan work together to bring down a corrupt banker, win back Katie’s love, and stop a serial killer before he can strike again.

Repo Madness will become available August 23th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

Nothing Like You in the Literature

I flipped the light under the little sign that said JOHNSTON and then took my seat, pensively glancing at my watch. I was close to fifteen minutes late.

The small anteroom had a coffee table layered with magazines for every possible sort of person who might be seeking psychotherapy: fishermen, people who cared about fashionable clothing, people who wanted their houses to look like someone else’s house, women who were pregnant or wanting to be pregnant or had recently been pregnant. I picked up one whose cover had a snowmobile straddled by a woman in a bikini. The girl and the machine were both impressively muscular. Maybe where she lived, that’s how everyone dressed for snowmobiling.

I’ve never actually owned a snowmobile, but I’ve stolen a few.

The door popped open, and I blinked in surprise at the guy standing there—fit, wiry, fifties; short, sparse hair receding from a freckled forehead; green eyes. My regular psychiatrist was a trim and frankly attractive woman who I felt was really helping me because she laughed at my jokes. “Mr. McCann?” he asked.

I stood and tossed aside my magazine. “Where’s Sheryl?” I asked.

He bent and arranged the snowmobile magazine so that its edges lined up with the magazine for people who dress their dogs in sweaters. I’m not an edges-lined-up kind of guy and didn’t feel bad about my apparent negligence.

“You call your doctor by her first name?” he asked mildly. “Why are you late, Mr. McCann?”

“I had to repo a Mazda from a guy who got fired from his job for threatening his boss with a baseball bat.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows in interest.

I shrugged. “The guy still had the bat.”

“Come on in. Dr. Johnston was in a skiing mishap. She’s all right, but she won’t be able to work for a few months, so I am helping out. My name is Dr. Schaumburg. Robert Schaumburg.”

I followed him into Sheryl’s office. There was a couch, of course, but I always sat in a chair across from her, and I settled into my habitual place uneasily. After eighteen months of dealing with one psychiatrist, I was feeling awkward starting up with another.

“I’ve been reviewing her notes, to which I am allowed access under the terms of your probation.” He settled into a soft chair, tapping a thick green folder. My file, I gathered.

“Okay, so should we wait for her to recover, probably?” I suggested helpfully.

Dr. Schaumburg regarded me blandly. “We have no idea how long that might be, unfortunately,” he responded finally. “Shall I call you Ruddick? Ruddy?”

“Ruddy. No one calls me Ruddick except those phone calls at election time.”

“Ruddy, then. Are you still taking your meds, Ruddy?”

My discomfort increased. “Well, yeah, of course. Why do you ask?”

“People on your mix of medications usually exhibit small changes in facial muscle tone and general body movements. I’m pretty good at spotting those, and you don’t seem to have any.”

“Guess I’m just lucky that way.”

“Under the terms of your probation, you are required to be on your medication. I’m sure Dr. Johnston advised you of this.”

I used my facial muscle tone to give myself a frown. “Did you talk to her? Because this whole probation thing is BS.”

Dr. Schaumburg settled back slightly. “Tell me about that.”

I shrugged. “Not a lot to tell. A bomb went off. A couple of people got killed. I wasn’t to blame for any of it, but I was in the middle of everything and the D.A. felt like I had to be charged with something, even though I did nothing wrong.”

“Because you’re an ex-con.”

“Because I went to prison, yeah. So we worked out this sham arrangement where I would get probation for obstruction of justice, because instead of taking matters into my own hands, I should have called the cops and let innocent people get killed while we all waited for them to respond, I guess. Sheryl agrees it’s ridiculous. I didn’t obstruct. I solved. Things could have been a lot worse, let me tell you.”

Schaumburg reflected on this. He looked at his notes. “You were in prison for…”

I blew out some air. “Murder.”

“Because you were drunk and crashed your car and a woman died.”

“I was not drunk,” I corrected. “I tested well below the limit. And many people accidentally took that turn down to the ferry before they reengineered it.”

He regarded me blandly. “But you were drinking.”

“Yes.” I bit off anything else I might add.

“You don’t seem to have any remorse.”

I wanted to stand up. That’s what guys my size do when we’re getting pissed off: We stand up. A lot of times that ends the conversation. But something told me that was not a good idea here, so I jammed my hands into my pockets. “No remorse? I think about that accident every day of my life. Didn’t I plead guilty? Didn’t I stand up in front of a judge and say I deserved to go to prison? Don’t you think I would give anything to have it all back, to have her back? That I would have traded places with her if I could?”

“Lisa Maria Walker.”

“Yes. That was her name.”

“Your girlfriend.”

“No.” I looked away. “We had just met.”

Schaumburg nodded as if I had just confirmed something. “Before that, you were something of a local hero,” he observed. “Football star, NFL career all but assured. And now you are a repo man and a bouncer in a bar.”

“You say that like it’s a step down or something.”

“You’re getting agitated.”

“Well, who wouldn’t? It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“I would expect someone on your dosage to be more calm. A deadening of response is typical.”

Okay, now I wanted to stand up and also punch him in the face. He was needling me, picking at a deep wound to test me. “I am calm. Bob.”

A tiny smile played on his lips, but it wasn’t amusement. “All right then. Has Dr. Johnston ever discussed with you something called dissociative personality disorder?”

“Mostly we discuss sports.”

“Let’s talk about the voices in your head.”

I sighed. We sat there, silently regarding each other for a full minute before I nodded wearily. “One voice, actually.”

“Under what sort of circumstances do you hear the voice? Is there something that triggers it?”

“I don’t hear it anymore,” I replied dully.

“The meds are working, then.” He was giving me a look full of irony, and I didn’t reply. “But you also told Dr. Johnston that there were times when the voice would take over your body.”

“No, not ‘take over.’ Look, I had a voice in my head that said his name was Alan Lottner. That’s all.”

Schaumburg pulled out a pen and clicked it, positioning it to write something. I waited patiently. “Alan Lottner,” he repeated. “Who was once a real person? Now deceased.”

“He died, yes.”

“And it turns out you are engaged to his daughter?” His green eyes flicked up to meet mine, glinting slyly.

Jesus, had Sheryl written down every single one of my personal secrets for this schmuck to read? “Yes, but that was just a coincidence.”

“A coincidence.”

“Meaning, I didn’t know Katie when Alan showed up. Okay, I had met her, but I didn’t know who she was. In relation to him, I mean.”

“You met a woman you were attracted to and then started hearing her father in your head,” he summarized.

I was developing a real dislike for this guy.

“It’s not typical for someone who harbors the delusion of a voice in his head to tie it to real person,” he informed me. “Historical figures, maybe, but I’ve never heard of it being the father of a fiancé. Does she know?”

“Who, Katie? That I had her father talking in my head for a while? No, I guess none of the bridal magazines in your lobby suggested I should bring it up. He’s gone now, anyway. Alan, I mean.”

“Which makes you sad.”

“What? No! Where do you get that? Did Sheryl say that?”

“Your reaction is interesting. Your … vehemence. Why do you deny it with such force? Would there be shame if you missed the voice?”

“Shame? No, of course not.”

“Then what is the matter with admitting you might, at times, regret you no longer hear the voice?”

“What is the matter?” I repeated incredulously. “If I went around saying I used to hear a voice and I want him back? People would think I was crazy.”

“Well…” Schaumburg gave a lazy shrug. “People. Perhaps. But in here, I think it is important to probe these areas.”

“Okay, sure. Let’s probe.”

“What do you want to tell me about how you feel about the voice? Today, I mean.”

“I want to tell you that the voice is gone,” I replied firmly.

He looked amused. “All right, then.”

I glanced longingly at the door. The clock said I had to endure just a few more minutes of this.

“Tell me about when Alan would control your body,” Schaumburg prodded after neither of us had spoken for an awkward while.

“That only happened a couple of times. I would be asleep, and he would sort of take my body out for a spin. He never did anything bad with it. Like, he would fold the laundry, stuff like that.”

Another long silence. I regretted bringing up the laundry—it made me sound pretty crazy somehow, even though doing my shirts was Alan’s idea.

“I’m not able to find anything like your case in the literature,” Schaumburg told me. “Schizoaffective disorder, which is how Dr. Johnston has classified your condition, is entirely separate from dissociative personality disorder, though people commonly make the mistake of believing schizophrenia means having a so-called split personality. In other words, patients never describe their alter ego as a voice; they just morph from one personality to another, spontaneously and, sometimes, conveniently.”

“I see we’re out of time and I’m sorry I was late,” I replied sincerely. “It took longer to get that bat out of his hands than it should have.”

“Did you hit him with it?”

“What? No. That’s not how it’s done. You think I would last long in this profession if I went around braining people with a baseball bat?”

“What if Alan were running your body: Would he hit someone with a bat?”

“Alan?” I laughed. “No. A badminton racquet, maybe. Or he’d write them an angry note.” I stopped chuckling at Schaumburg’s expression.

“You really miss him, don’t you?”

I wasn’t buying the sympathy. This guy was playing me, and I needed to pay more attention before I talked myself into trouble. “He’s gone,” I responded unequivocally.

“There have been cases where people miss the voices; they crave their delusions. You’ve perhaps seen the movie A Beautiful Mind? It’s even hypothesized that some patients could so yearn for the return of their imaginary companions that they re-create the voice. Bring them back, in other words.”

“Sounds like something we should talk about next time,” I noted amiably, standing up.

“Why don’t you sit down? I have some time before my next appointment.”

It didn’t sound like a suggestion. I sat, flexing and unflexing my fists on my knees.

“What is your pharmacist going to tell me when I call him to find out the last time you filled your prescription?” Schaumburg asked.

“Tom? That I was just in there last week,” I replied with all the truthfulness my soul could muster. I had, in fact, been in there just four days ago, getting some medication for Katie.

“All right, Ruddy. I’m your doctor and interested in what is best for you. But if I call your pharmacist and find that, as I suspect, you have not been getting your medications, I’m going to report your lack of cooperation to the court. And you do know what that means, don’t you?”

I licked my lips. “It means I would go back to jail,” I finally rasped. I believed this bastard would do it too—put me behind bars just for not taking some stupid pills.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Schaumburg said.

I thought about giving him the stare I had successfully used to close down bar fights and get people to hand over their unpaid-for cars, but I knew it wouldn’t work here. Schaumburg had all the power. In the end, I just stared at him helplessly.

I did not know what I was going to do.

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Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Any Minute Now by Eric Van Lustbader

July 18, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Red Rover is broken, finished, dead. The blackest of black ops teams is betrayed on its top-priority mission to capture and interrogate a mysterious Saudi terrorist. One of their own is killed, the remaining two barely get home alive. Then without warning or explanation the mission is shut down.

Greg Whitman and Felix Orteño are left adrift in a world full of deathly shadows, blind alleys, and unanswerable questions. Into their midst comes Charlize Daou, a brilliant, wildly talented arms expert with a past entangled with Whit’s. Though Charlie grapples with damage of her own, she becomes their new center, their moral compass, and their reason for resurrecting Red Rover.

Despite Whit’s seemingly super-normal abilities it is Charlie, fully rooted in reality, who recognizes that both Whit and Felix have lost parts of themselves. And it is she who possesses the true power necessary for survival: the power to heal, to forgive, and to bring these two lost souls back from the demonic spiritual darkness into which they have fallen.

Ignoring their new orders, Red Rover secretly sets out to find the protected Saudi terrorist, the first step in a perilous journey into the heart of a vast conspiracy that involves the NSA, a cabal of immensely wealthy mystics known as the Alchemists, and an ageless visionary out to create an entirely new way of waging war. A war that will destabilize one of the great super-powers and forever rearrange the balance of power across the entire globe.

Any Minute Now will be available August 16th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

“A mess,” King Cutler was saying.

“A mess?” Whitman echoed. “It’s a goddamned clusterfuck, is what it is.”

Cutler watched Whitman with the eyes of a tiger, green and glittering. His torso, tense and leaning slightly forward, gave him the aspect of someone about to rend anyone who opposed him limb from limb. “Seiran el-Habib was an extremely high-risk target, even for you guys.”

“And that’s another thing,” Whitman said, heatedly. “There are no ‘you guys,’ not anymore. Sandy is dead and Flix just got out of surgery. Red Rover is dead, gone, finished, kaput.”

“Flix will be fine.” Cutler struggled to maintain an even tone in the face of Whitman’s rage and pessimism. “They got the bullet without any difficulty. No bones involved. With our accelerated PT program he’ll be as good as new in a week, ten days at the outside.”

“And what about Sandy? Will he be good as new? Are you going to resurrect him?”

Cutler made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. They were seated opposite each other in Cutler’s office, which held the look of a room in a gentleman’s club rather than an office. Paneled in gleaming mahogany, its myriad shelves were filled with books on military history and biographies of great generals and admirals going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Only one anomaly appeared in the room, and it was a doozy: an enormous flat-screen TV set into the wall opposite a massive tiger-oak desk, on which played an endless rotation of scenes of battle zones from across the globe, images from closed-circuit and drone cameras, exclusive to Universal Security Associates.

“I know you’ve got your team to consider, Gregory, but I have to take in the big picture.”

“Which is what? What’s more important than one of your men being shot dead?”

“The president.” Cutler stared at his flat-panel computer screen. “This fucking president is going to be the death of us all. He’s just not that into war. On every front he’s dragging his feet. This crap with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had breathed some new life into our business, but for how long? That’s the question that keeps me up at night. We need wars, no matter the size. No American military presence, no business for us.” He shook his head in consternation. “It’s a new day, Gregory. Our world is becoming smaller and smaller. I’m lucky I have my contacts in NSA, otherwise the company’s bottom line would be bottoming out.”

Outside the bullet- and soundproof windows, the expanse of the Washington Mall flowed away like a stream on which ten thousand pleasure boats drifted back and forth.

Whit appeared entirely unmoved. He’d heard this lament before from the members of the Alchemists. “Like you say, my focus is on my team, and because of this snafu one of them is dead and another is injured. It’s unacceptable.”

Cutler was wrenched away from his contemplation of USA’s future. “Are you really going to make me say that we all know the risks?” he said, clearly annoyed. “In our business, it’s such a fucking cliché.” He was a big man in all directions, tall and wide as a Mack truck. He was an ex-Marine, had seen combat three times that Whitman knew of. Divorced twice, two kids, one from each marriage. They stayed in touch, even if his exes didn’t. “Worse than a cliché.” He had a head like a football, his hair still shorn in a Marine high-and-tight, and there was not a gray strand to be found on him. His knife-slash of a mouth was always grim, his nose constantly questing for danger. “Honestly, Gregory, this talk will go better when you simmer down to a rolling boil.”

“You weren’t there, boss. You didn’t see…” Whitman gritted his teeth, stopping of his own accord. “We were betrayed. There was a leak, a breach of security, call it what you want. The upshot is that someone from inside—one of us, boss—didn’t want us to get to Seiran el-Habib.”

“We were warned that el-Habib had connections.”

“No fucking kidding.”

Cutler’s green eyes seemed to flare. “What did I just tell you? Nothing’s going to get settled when you’re too hot to handle.”

“Why shouldn’t I be hot? It’s a fucking miracle we weren’t all killed. Not only did Seiran el-Habib’s people ambush us inside the compound, but his patrol outside the perimeter knew our exact escape route, and were lying in wait for us. That meant they not only knew the day and time of the raid, but the details of the brief as well. But how could they have known? This is the question that’s been eating at me ever since I watched the hellish landscape drop away as the helo took us out of there. There’s only one answer. We need to go mole hunting.”

Cutler held up a fistful of black-jacketed files. “Here is everyone who had knowledge of the Seiran el-Habib brief. I’ve already started vetting them—movements, travel, mobile phone records, bank accounts, family, friends, acquaintances, the whole nine yards.”

“Yeah, well, everyone’s already been vetted up and down the yin-yang, so don’t forget to look in all the dusty, unremarked corners of their lives.”

Cutler cut across his words. “That includes Orteño and you, hotshot.”

“Maybe it was Sandy.” Whitman’s tone hung heavy with sarcasm. “Maybe he was shot on purpose to keep him from blabbing.”

“That’s enough.” Cutler put down the files. “We need to move slowly and carefully. NSA and DARPA personnel are involved.”

“Fuck them.” Whitman jumped up, held out his hand, fingers wiggling. “Let me see those files.”

“Were you suddenly elevated to CEO?”

Whitman, looming over the desk, appeared not to hear him. “It’s my right. My team—my freaking right.”

“Sit. The. Fuck. Down.”

The two men, engaged in a staring contest, were immobile. The atmosphere in the room turned gelid, as if the clash of their respective wills had sealed them in amber.

Whitman, possibly coming to terms with the futility of his position, finally fell back. “Okay, okay.” Slowly, deliberately, he sat back down.

Cutler, seeming to relax a couple of notches, shook his head. “This is typical of you, Gregory, you know that? I’ve got very powerful people perched on my shoulder like owls, their claws digging into my flesh. I’ve got the politics to consider, you don’t. It’s imperative to think things through clearly and completely.”

“What’s to think?” Whitman inched forward until he was on the edge of his chair. “Like other security contractors, we’re hired by the NSA. Like other security contractors, we hose the government, but also give them access to services their own people cannot provide. We do the real overseas dirty work for the United States government. But unlike other contractors you have us—or at least you did. We did the real down and dirty work no one would trust even normal contractors to do. But there’s nothing normal about what we do; it’s the kind of crap that if it ever saw the light of day would surely topple the current administration, no matter how much plausible deniability they believe insulates them from the sewer Red Rover works in on every brief.”

“What is this?” Cutler spread his hands. “A pitch for a raise?”

“Yeah,” Whitman said sourly. “I want Sandy’s salary as well as mine.”

The edge of Cutler’s hand sliced through the air, cutting through Whitman’s sarcasm. “Your job, in case you forgot, is to return Red Rover to operational level. Assemble your team, Gregory. Leave the mole hunting to me.”

The staring contest resumed as if it had never been broken off, while the tension in the room ratcheted up another couple of notches to strangulation level. Cutler’s phone rang, but he ignored it. His assistant, Valerie, could be heard briefly outside his door, as she told someone in her not-to-be-brooked tone that the boss could not be disturbed. While inside, the staring match continued unabated.

“Listen, listen,” Cutler said at length, apparently feeling it was his turn to back off. “It’s not just Red Rover that’s gone to hell in a handbasket, it’s the entire world.” His tone had lost its hard edge, was even a touch conciliatory, unusual for Cutler. But then Whitman was his most prized operative. The Red Rover team would have been inconceivable without him. “Do you think you can settle yourself enough to hear what I have to say?”

Whitman didn’t reply, but neither did he get up and walk out. Cutler took this as a positive sign, because he continued. “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon—a Devil’s triangle. After a decade of fighting overseas, battling Taliban, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda cadres of all stripes and nationalities, after losing men left, right, and center, we are back where we started. Al-Qaeda has retaken Fallujah, where our boys fought them back tooth and nail. For what? Post-American Middle East is worse than ever. A power vacuum has arisen, as all the major players have left the field. In their place a whole host of Islamic jihadists have rushed in, fire-bombing, massacring, destroying whoever does not conform to their particular brand of cruel sectarianism. In both Iraq and Syria, extremists of all stripes have parlayed their foothold into majority stakes.

“And now we have Islamic State to contend with, a terrorist organization so extreme al-Qaeda has distanced itself from them. Does the president give a shit? Doesn’t appear so.”

Cutler’s hands were restless, roaming over the tops of the files, as if eager to get to work digging deep. “So who are the big fish in this wretched pond? The two who have always stood as the major antagonists: Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Both countries are fanatical in their own way; the rational concept of coexistence is anathema, let alone an accord. The falling apart is a renewed call to the ancient enmities of clan and sect. It echoes loud and clear across the rubble and the corpses, calling forth battalions of teenagers eager to martyr themselves for the cause of jihad.”

Throughout this speech, which sounded like a history lesson he had already absorbed countless times, Whitman moved from one buttock to another, restless in his barely stifled rage. “Is there a point to all this?”

Now Cutler did glare at him, and Whitman was smart enough to stifle whatever else was about to come out of his mouth.

“The point,” Cutler said, leaning even more forward and interlacing his fingers in a gesture that seemed vaguely ominous, “is this: while you were away at the party the Saudis announced an aid package of French weaponry to the Lebanese, in order to counter the alarming inroads the Shiite Hezbollah has made in that country in recent months.”

“How much was the package?”

Something flickered in Cutler’s eyes. “That’s the first intelligent thing out of your mouth since you stalked in here.” He sighed. “The answer to your question is three billion dollars.”

“Almost twice the annual Lebanese military budget.” Whitman’s eyes narrowed. “But still, that’s not gonna get it done for Lebanon. The effect, if any, will take years. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is making mincemeat of the Lebanese army.” He spread his hands. “So, I mean, why bother?”

“It’s a shot across our administration’s bow,” Cutler said. “The Saudis don’t like our new nonintervention policy in Syria, and they’re furious over our reaching out to elements inside Iran. If, in fact, the Saudis push the Lebanese army to confront Hezbollah it will blow up the army along sectarian and political lines. The result will plunge the country into utter chaos.”

“And that affects us how?”

“The NSA isn’t sure. Last night I was at a briefing with Hemingway, where I was updated. Though the administration is in a muddle over this development, the NSA isn’t. Hemingway is extremely concerned. He wants eyes on the ground in Lebanon. Eyes he can trust. He believes the threat posed to America’s interests abroad is imminent, and he wants Red Rover in-country ASAP.”

“I told you, boss, there is no Red Rover.”

“Okay, come off the Captain America kick, Gregory. You had a loss. It isn’t the first time, it won’t be the last.”

“It will, if I have to say anything about it.”

“Be that as it may,” Cutler broke in, clearly enunciating each word, “you will immediately determine Orteño’s condition. You will find a new armorer and, if need be, a replacement for Flix. Is that clear?”

Whitman rose. “Any clearer and I could see my reflection in it.”

Buy Any Minute Now here:

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Night Talk by George Noory

July 8, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Greg Nowell is a voice in the darkness–a late-night talk-show host who tackles controversial subjects, from angels to aliens and government agencies so deep in shadow that the puppet strings they use to exercise control are invisible. His radio show is a world of the paranormal and paranoia, where claims of alien abductions, Big Foot sightings, and a mysterious world government are the norm.

Greg’s world explodes when government agents accuse him of having received ultra-secret files from Ethan Shaw, a hacker intent on exposing a secret cabal with tentacles throughout the government. Greg knows nothing about the files. When Shaw is killed and the evidence points to Greg, the radio personality goes on the run, stalked by a demented assassin. As he tries to unravel the deadly secrets the hacker uncovered, Greg is helped by Alyssa Neal, a mysterious woman who says Shaw also dragged her into the boiling cauldron of intrigue.

Greg realizes his paranoia is really “heightened awareness” of strange machinations. He seeks help from callers to his show who don’t trust the government, have gone “under the radar,” or are angry and paranoid about the vast gathering of information and invasions of privacy by government agencies.

Night Talk will become available July 26th. Please enjoy this excert.

Los Angeles

This is Night Talk with the Nighthawk. We’re back on the phones with time for one more call before we sign off. Let’s go to Josh in Grand Junction, Colorado.”

Greg Nowell’s late-night radio talk show ran from ten at night to three in the morning. He had been sitting in front of the microphone for five hours, still going strong but a little tired because the show required a lot of energy and staying constantly on his toes. Tonight’s show had been filled with guests who had spoken about near-death experiences, a psychic who led the police to a child killer and a UFO incident over Stonehenge, followed by “Open Lines,” in which callers from all over the country called in to discuss what troubled or interested them.

“Thanks for having me on, Greg. I listen to your show every night but I haven’t gotten up the courage to call in. I … I like your show because you listen to people; you aren’t out there lecturing everyone, telling people what they should have done instead of what they did. But like I said, I haven’t had the courage.”

It was closing in on the time for Greg to make it a short call and hang it up for the night, to go home, put his feet up and have a glass of red wine. But something in the man’s tone caught his attention.

Colorado was an hour ahead of L.A., making it nearly four in the morning for Josh. Greg sensed both fatigue and tension in the man’s voice. Not just the nervous tinge some callers get when they suddenly realize they’re on a national radio show, but sadness, even grief. Josh obviously wanted to talk but it was hard for him. Like he said, he had to get up his courage to make the call.

“You got the courage tonight and you’re among millions of friends coast to coast and overseas. We have strength in numbers and we’re here to share with you.”

Greg shrugged as Vince, his broadcast engineer, gave him a grin and a shake of his head. The engineer had picked up on the stress in the caller’s voice and Greg’s empathetic response. His late-night talk show got all kinds of callers, some with fear and anxiety about the world they lived in, some with information or observations they wanted to share and sometimes a caller who just needed a sympathetic ear. Many sensed that they lived in a world manipulated by unknown forces that operated in secret and conspired to achieve complete control.

Greg was seated at the broadcast desk. In front of him, almost in his face, was a big microphone that hung from a flexible arm mounted on the desk. Besides the microphone, the large desk held his keyboard, computer monitor and other screens displaying information. Three other positions with computer plug-ins and mics were available for in-studio guests.

Vince was positioned at the control console across the room. To Greg’s right was a large window that divided his soundproof broadcasting booth from the control room where Soledad, his producer, and her assistant were positioned.

Soledad was the show runner. She screened all incoming calls, putting the callers she approved in a queue. Their names, locations and subject matter appeared on a screen in front of Greg so he could introduce them.
The studio was located in L.A.’s historic Broadway Theater District, where twelve movie palaces, grand dames of the Golden Age of Hollywood, still stood.

“It’s about what happened to my family,” Josh said. “Three years ago, out near the Four Corners, where those states all bump. We were making our way home after visiting my wife’s family in Albuquerque … me, Emma and our baby.”

“Four Corners; I’ve been there, out to the monument and some of the small towns in the area,” Greg said. “Give me a second; I want to bring up a satellite view of it on my screen.”

He brought up a map and then a ground image of the quadripoint where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico came together, the only place in the country where four states touched. A short distance off Route 160, at the exact spot where the corners of the four states met, was a monument maintained by the Navajo Nation.

The region was sparsely inhabited at best and much of it was under the auspices of Native American nations. Rocks, dirt, stunted plants and not much else populated most of the region. Even the sagebrush looked lonely.
“That’s quite a desolate stretch, Josh. Some of it looks like the moon.”

“It’s the dark side of the moon at night. You drive for miles and miles and there isn’t anything but sagebrush and rattlesnakes in every direction.”

“True. But it’s a hot territory for UFO sightings. All of New Mexico is—Roswell, Aztec, Dulce, the secret experiments at Los Alamos. UFOs seem to flourish out there like orchids in a hothouse.”

“Yeah, that’s because there are places out there where nobody is going to see what’s happening.”

“You see something out there, Josh?”

“Yeah, but they won’t believe me.”

“Who won’t believe you?”

“Nobody. Not one damn person.” His voice cracked. “Not the police, my wife’s family…”

“What happened out there, Josh? What did you see?”

“It came down right in front of me with lots of lights, just like in the movies. A big disk, just hovering there over the highway.”

“A spacecraft?”

“Yeah, a UFO with blinding lights. Lights that felt like they were sucking out my eyeballs. Hypnotizing me as I stared at them. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them, I couldn’t see the road, couldn’t feel the steering wheel in my hand. I felt like I was being sucked out of the car, into the darkness, but no one believes me.”

“What about your wife? What does she say?”

Soledad shot him a look with her eyebrows raised and Greg grimaced. He realized he had asked a bad question as soon as it rolled off his tongue. The man wasn’t grieving because he saw a UFO, but because of what happened after he was blinded by the light.

There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line. Greg could hear Josh breathing, choking back a sob.
“She—she … they … Emma and the baby—Oliver, that was his name, the name of our son…”

Greg’s guts tightened. He wanted to crawl under his desk and hide but he had to help the guy out. The man had kept the story festering in his heart for too long. He needed to get it out and realize that he was not alone, that there were others who had had tragic incidents. Greg spoke softly. “They’re gone, Josh?”

“They said I ran off the road. I told the cops that I was hypnotized by the lights, the blinding lights, but they said that it happens because the road is so damn long and straight and narrow that people just doze off and run off the road. We rolled—rolled over a couple of times.”

Greg had heard the story before—cars drifting off long, narrow flatland roads and rolling. The highways in the Four Corners region were classic flat roads, slender black ribbons elevated a few feet off the desert floor on either side to keep them from being washed out by flash floods. Elevating the road with little shoulder room on either side meant it didn’t take much to go off and roll.

With no houses or traffic for miles in any direction, it was also a perfect place for a UFO encounter—long distances with little traffic, especially at night, settlements few and far between.

“I told them but they wouldn’t listen to me,” Josh said. “They thought I was making excuses and there weren’t any witnesses.”

Greg felt the need to relieve some of the man’s pain.

“Sure there was, Josh; you’re an eyewitness, you were there. You saw what happened. You’re just another witness that gets discredited because you saw something the powers that be don’t want us to know about. That’s how it’s been since the beginning. The government discredits anyone who stumbles onto evidence that we have visitors from the beyond.”

Josh sucked in a breath. “You’re right, you’re right, I saw it, I am a witness. They should have taken my word.”
Greg eased Josh off the air and went through sign-off. He crumbled broadcast notes into a ball and tossed it at Vince. “Let’s shut this place down.”

Soledad came into the room.

Greg said, “You knew he’d be a tough one for me. You should have warned me.”

She gave him a grin. “You’re at your best when you suck in someone else’s problems.”

“The poor guy is consumed with guilt. And you know what, who knows what happened out there? It’s the kind of place where you could set off a nuke and no one would notice.”

“You’re not off the hook yet. Your favorite hacker insists on talking to you.”

She tried to hand him the phone and he waved it off.

“How does he sound?” Greg asked.

“Weird. Frightened. Scary.”

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Sneak Peek: Any Minute Now by Eric Van Lustbader

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