On Home Soil - Sasha Del Mira Thriller #4

In the fourth installment of my Sasha Del Mira thriller series, On Home Soil, CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and her agency cohort, Tom Goddard, have become involved in a steamy romance, and both begin questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game. Then ISIS sends its top battlefield commander in Syria, Omar the Albino, to the States to train and mobilize its underground cells to bring its jihad to the U.S. As a result, Sasha and Tom are thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ terror.

Click on cover to buy

Omar quickly organizes a series of kidnappings, and ISIS videos begin surfacing on the Internet of American hostages in orange jumpsuits. A CIA plan to enlist the American public in a grass-roots effort to help prevent ISIS terror by reporting on any suspicious activities and supporting agents in the field, begins to complicate Sasha and Tom’s work. Part of the program—termed the Patriot Program—gives rise to an armed nationwide group bent on vigilante justice that threatens to target anyone fitting a Muslim profile.

So not only do Sasha and Tom have to track down Omar before he unleashes a wave of beheadings and terrorist attacks on home soil, but they have to stop the rogue Patriots before social chaos erupts.

I started the novel over a year ago after ISIS surfaced as regional terrorist force in Syria and Iraq. I did most of my research from daily news reports, much the same as I did in researching and writing Arab Summer, the third Sasha Del Mira thriller, based on the Arab Spring uprising a few years ago. I believed that by basing On Home Soil on the idea that ISIS would bring its terror to the West, I was creating a fictional story by extrapolating from the news. As I continued writing I saw ISIS unfold from a regional Middle-Eastern menace to a group with global terrorist activities. I finished the novel in August and have been working with my editor since then. Little did I know what would actually happen in Paris last month, and that we would need to gird ourselves for the possibility of similar attacks here in the States.

I hope you’ll read On Home Soil for what it’s intended to be—a fast-paced action thriller based on current events—and not my attempt to predict what might occur here at home.

The Sasha Del Mira Thriller series (click on cover to buy on Amazon):

CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and Tom Goddard, her CIA cohort, are involved in a steamy romance, and are questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game, when they’re thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ plans to bring their jihad and terror to the U.S.

Read Sample

Buy: US UK

Former CIA spy Sasha Del Mira comes out of retirement to avenge her husband’s murder by Islamic terrorists and stop their Arab Spring uprising to topple the Saudi government.

Read Sample

Buy : US UK

A young Sasha Del Mira must stop multiple attempts to topple the Saudi regime by murdering a Saudi prince, who is like a father to her, and replacing him with one of his sons as a puppet of a Muslim terrorist group.

Read Sample

Buy : US UK

Daniel Youngblood, a world-weary investment banker falls in love with an exotic spy and then teams up with her to stop a Muslim terrorist plot to cripple the world’s oil capacity.

 Read Sample
   

Buy : US UK

Arab Summer - Sasha Del Mira Thriller #3

My third Sasha Del Mira thriller, Arab Summer is about an Arab Spring uprising in Saudi Arabia led by fundamentalist Shiite Muslims whose goal is to topple the Sunni Saudi regime and use its oil riches to hold the West hostage.  It's the third installment of the Sasha Del Mira series.  Sasha, the heroine of Trojan Horse and Sasha Returns, is a former concubine to the Saudi royal family who was recruited by the CIA as an informant, and later as an assassin.

The uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt that brought down Ben Ali, Qaddafi and Mubarak—dictators who brutally persecuted, repressed and murdered their citizens—started Arab Spring in 2011.  Since then, over a dozen other Arab states witnessed at least some level of civil unrest challenging their governments, including the ongoing civil war in Syria between the al-Assad regime and opposition forces. 

The darker side of the Arab Spring movement surfaced in the form of murderous acts by Islamic fundamentalists, not against repressive governments, but against innocents.  ISIS grew out of disparate groups of armed fundamentalists, the vacuum created by the fall of some of the governments during Arab Spring, and the civil war in Syria.

Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most stable regimes in the Arab states, but the notion of an Arab Spring uprising there isn't so far-fetched.  Protests, some with 70,000 participants, over anti-Shiite discrimination, labor rights, release of prisoners held without charge or trial, and for equal representation in key government offices began in Saudi Arabia in 2011 and continue today.

Imagine this: a group of disaffected Shiite Muslim extremists seizes the Grand Mosque in Mecca—Islam’s holiest site—during the final days of the Hajj, the annual Muslim holy pilgrimage, and takes thousands of hostages.  Their leader says that among them is the Mahdi, the prophesied “Redeemer of Islam” who will drive out all infidels from holy Saudi soil and lead Muslims into a new era.  They broadcast their demands from loudspeakers on the mosque’s minarets, including ceasing oil exports to the US and the expulsion of foreign civilians and military personnel from Saudi Arabia.  Saudi forces try unsuccessfully for weeks to retake the mosque, sustaining heavy casualties.  The Saudis ultimately enlist the help of foreign military forces to drive out the militants.

That actually happened in 1979.

In Arab Summer something like that does again.  Saif Ibn Mohammed al-Aziz, a ruthless terrorist, leads a Muslim fundamentalist group bent on a bloody coup of the Saudi Arabian government via an Arab Spring uprising.  As a prelude to his plan, he has Sasha Del Mira’s husband, Daniel, murdered.  Sasha comes out of retirement to avenge Daniel’s death and to help Tom Goddard, her old mentor at the CIA, stop the plot, putting her face to face with Saif, her former ally—and lover.

I've just released the fourth installment in the series, On Home Soil, in which Sasha must stop an ISIS plot to bring its jihad to US soil. I hope you'll give all the Sasha Del Mira thrillers in the series a try.

The Sasha Del Mira Series (click on covers to buy on Amazon):

CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and Tom Goddard, her CIA cohort, are involved in a steamy romance, and are questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game, when they’re thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ plans to bring their jihad and terror to the U.S.

Read Sample

Buy: US UK

Former CIA spy Sasha Del Mira comes out of retirement to avenge her husband’s murder by Islamic terrorists and stop their Arab Spring uprising to topple the Saudi government.

Read Sample

Buy : US UK

A young Sasha Del Mira must stop multiple attempts to topple the Saudi regime by murdering a Saudi prince, who is like a father to her, and replacing him with one of his sons as a puppet of a Muslim terrorist group.

Read Sample

Buy : US UK

Daniel Youngblood, a world-weary investment banker falls in love with an exotic spy and then teams up with her to stop a Muslim terrorist plot to cripple the world’s oil capacity.

Read Sample       

Buy : US UK

To John Glenn and Mrs. Slocum

Today was the 50^th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbit of the earth, the first by an American. It was also the 50^th anniversary of the first story I recall ever writing. Mrs. Slocum, my fifth grade teacher at Mt. Tabor School, gave us the assignment to write an essay about Glenn’s historic spaceflight on that day. She wasn’t more specific than that—it just had to be about Glenn’s spaceflight. I remember pondering over what to write for a while without coming up with an idea, then started writing when Mrs. Slocum said we had 15 minutes left, putting down the only thing that came to mind.

It was a story about seeing Glenn sitting on the steps of the Mercury capsule, looking dejected (I’m sure I didn’t use that word). I asked him what was wrong and he told me he’d locked himself out of the space capsule and had no way to get back in, and no way to get home again. I told him not to worry and tossed him a skeleton key. He thanked me, unlocked the door to the capsule and went in. He waved to me through the window as he continued on his way, orbiting the earth and finally splashing down safely.

I remember walking home that afternoon with second thoughts about my “essay,” afraid I’d get in trouble. The Glenn flight seemed to be the only thing anybody talked about on the way home from school, all we talked about at dinner and the only thing on television that evening. I couldn’t get away from it, and kept thinking about Mrs. Slocum sitting in front of the TV watching Glenn on the news, reading our essays, getting to mine and saying to herself, “What’s this? This isn’t an essay.” I had visions of getting my story back the next day with a “C” (that was the worst I could imagine, never having gotten one that I can recall up to that point). I went to sleep thinking, “Oh, man. A ‘C,’ Mom and Dad are going to be mad.”

When I got to school the next day I was still anxious.  Mrs. Slocum went about our lessons the usual way, never referring to the essay on Glenn.  It wasn’t until after lunch that she handed them out.  I sat about halfway back in my row, and the wait was excruciating as the kids in front of me passed them back. When it arrived I was thrilled: an ‘A.’ Mrs. Slocum even mentioned my story to the class, saying she thought it was a clever approach or something like that. I took it home and proudly showed it to my Mom, who also thought it was great.

Mom saved it for years, every once in a while showing it to a neighbor.  Mrs. Hutchinson, as I recall, pretended not to have read the story when Mom showed it to her the second time. It got to the point that I started to cringe whenever Mom brought it up with one of the neighbors around. Even so, as I write this I remember thinking back to that story many times over the years as the first evidence that I might have the inclination to be a writer one day.

Vaccine Nation--In the Tradition

Click cover to buy on Amazon

My new thriller, Vaccine Nation, is a fast-paced action thriller designed to entertain, but it also explores the very real issues in the current debate over vaccine safety in the mandatory U.S. National Immunization Program.  The book is now available on Amazon for pre-order for delivery November 22^nd.  Please click on the book cover to order.

In Vaccine Nation, Dani North is a filmmaker who just won at the Tribeca Film Festival for her documentary, The Drugging of Our Children, a film critical of the pharmaceutical industry.  She’s also just started work on a new documentary on autism.  When a pharmaceutical industry vaccine researcher hands her smoking gun evidence about the U.S. National Immunization Program seconds before he’s murdered right in front of her, Dani finds herself implicated and pursued by the police.

Dani realizes what she’s been handed could have crucial implications on upcoming hearings by a Senate committee.  A key issue the Senate committee will consider is whether Congress should continue the immunity it granted in 1986 to the pharmaceutical industry for claims by parents on damage to their children from the U.S. National Immunization Program. That puts Dani on the run in a race to understand and expose the evidence.  That is, before the police can grab her, or Grover Madsen, a megalomaniacal pharmaceutical industry CEO, can have her hunted down by his hired killers.  Madsen knows exactly what Dani has and how explosive it is for the pharmaceutical industry: it has the potential to make the tobacco industry’s lawsuits and subsequent multi-billion dollar settlements seem like routine slip-and-fall cases.  Madsen uses all his company’s political and financial resources to track Dani.

The book’s pace is intended to be reminiscent of Six Days of the Condor (and the film it spawned, Three Days of the Condor), or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.  The action of Vaccine Nation occurs over four breathtaking days.

The current debate in the U.S. on vaccine safety portrayed in the novel is real.  My primary inspiration for writing Vaccine Nation was my exposure to the vaccine debate through my fiancé’s work as a documentary filmmaker in the health-related field, including films on ADHD and related drugging of children, and on vaccines and autism.  The facts in Vaccine Nation are accurate, based on my exposure to them through Manette’s films and my own research.  People will find some of them shocking.  For example, in 1986, Congress granted immunity to the pharmaceutical industry for liability related to their vaccines for the National Immunization Program.  Vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule contain toxic substances like aluminum, formaldehyde and the chemical compound in anti-freeze.  The flu shot still contains thimerosal, a preservative that is 49.6% mercury.

The controversy represented in Vaccine Nation surrounding the safety and side effects of vaccines, and vaccines’ suspected relationship to the autism epidemic are still real.  The debate on vaccine safety is ongoing and increasing: recent CDC statistics show that 10% of parents (up from 2% to 3%.) are avoiding or delaying vaccinating their children because of concerns about vaccine safety.

As such, Vaccine Nation is a dramatization of this debate, presented in the form of a thriller that will hopefully both entertain you and make you think.

Read first chapter of Vaccine Nation

Buy Vaccine Nation:  Buy US   Buy UK 

Visit David Lender's website

Vaccine Nation's Characters

I had a dream the other night about a Martian easing the door to our bedroom open from the adjoining guest bedroom. It got to the point I felt I had no choice but to go in there and confront him before he entered. I had to protect Manette; as I started to pull the door open I also realized that Superman was off dealing with some other emergency, so it was all up to me. I don't remember whether Styles was there, and I don't know if Martians are afraid of pitbulls. Styles isn't much of a watchdog anyhow, and we've never seen him attack anyone or anything (he chases squirrels, but we're convinced he wouldn't know what to do with one if he caught up to it), although I like to think that if he saw Poppy in hand-to-hand combat with a Martian that he'd rise to the occasion and help me out. As I stepped around the moving door, my heart pounded. I awoke, gasping, to Manette shaking me and calling my name.

In a way it was refreshing, because I've been living--and sleeping--with the characters from Vaccine Nation, my upcoming thriller, all summer. I conked out on the sofa in the library the other day, and, half asleep, told Manette, "I need to get some drackume from Dani's ducks." She thought it was so funny she wrote it down on a blue post-it and stuck it to the top of the kitchen island. I saw it when I came down the next morning for my run, vaguely remembering it, and certain Manette didn't understand the profound significance of the words. Whatever.

Now it's fall and Dani North, Grover Madsen, Hunter Stark and Richard Blum are still inhabiting my brain. I've spent the last three days grinding through my editor's line-edits on Vaccine Nation. Now the hard part comes, muscling through his broader comments. That will involve reworking or completely rewriting key scenes, manipulating some plot elements, and, most importantly, pulling things out of the characters. I say pulling things out, because at this point I can't make anything up about them, or change them, because they are who they are, as evidenced by their visitations--waking and sleeping--throughout the summer. Tomorrow I'm heading up to the weekend house in Milford to isolate myself with them for 12 to 16 hour workdays. I still have things to record about their pasts. They need to tell me more about their passions. They need to reveal more of what their souls ache for and why. They have to show me why you should care about them as much as I do.

I'll be back when I'm done.

Read a sample of Vaccine Nation

The Blue Ball Incident -- Part One

It was early March and Manette and Zac had gone away for some vacation while I stayed home to finish writing The Gravy Train and take care of Styles, our 9-month-old rescue pit bull puppy.   The weather had warmed up; the yard was sloppy with water, half-melted snow and mud.  And the driveway was too wet to play catch with the ball outside.  So I took Styles into the basement to play with his blue, rubber pull-toy ball.  It was an eight-inch hollow ball constructed of a series of hexagons.  It bounced great and it gave him lots of surfaces to sink his teeth into, allowed me to get my fingers through it for a good grip, and stretched to about a foot long for some serious tugging and exercise.  After about a half-hour of it we both got tired.  It was around 4:30 p.m, and low blood sugar also got the best of me so I napped on the sofa in the basement while Styles continued to work on his blue ball on the floor.  He'd done it hundreds of times before and the thing was indestructible.

Or so I thought.

About a half hour later I awoke to the sound of Styles chewing on his ball, then looked up to see a few pieces of it on the floor.  Damn.  I got up and pulled the loose pieces away from him, then grabbed the ball and saw that about 40% of it had been gnawed away.  I looked around the floor; the pieces were nowhere to be found.  He had to have swallowed them.  I sighed.  Styley-Wiley up to his tricks.  He'd eaten pens, notebooks, TV remotes, tissues, smaller chew toys and CD cases when he was younger, but by nine months-old was growing out of it.  I gave him a little extra dinner, thinking it would help him pass the pieces of the ball.

The next morning Styles was completely himself: energetic, and alternately picking up one of his Chuck-It balls and licking me so I'd take him outside to play.  I gave him a bigger than normal breakfast.  By mid-morning he'd pooped twice but hadn't passed anything.  That was when I started to worry.  I called Dr. Buchoff's office and they told me to bring him in.  I brought the ball and the extra pieces with me to show him how much Styles had eaten.  He listened, then took one of the pieces into the x-ray room.  He came back with a smile on his face.  "We're in luck," he said.  "It shows bright white on the x-ray."  When he commented that the rubber must have some metal in it to show up that well, I thought, Great.  Wait till Manette hears about that.  Dr. Buchoff went on to say that Styles should be able to pass the pieces easily, unless because of their structure they could clump together in the bottom of his stomach so they couldn’t enter his intestines, causing a blockage.

I didn't ask what would happen in that case.

It took four of us to position Styles on the stainless steel table in the x-ray room.  Shelley and Diane, Dr. Buchoff's assistants, and I lifted him up and held him while Dr. Buchoff manned the x-ray.  They didn't have enough lead protective vests and Dr. Buchoff suggested I leave.  No way:  I figured I could take a few for the team while I stroked Styles’ head and muzzle, and whispered to him to keep him calm.  He's a good boy, but he was being forcibly held down and I could see him eyeing the equipment above him; he was freaked out, struggling against Shelley and Diane, panting.  Then he was making eye contact with me, his eyes wide as if appealing to me for help.  I felt like someone was clamping my heart, like I was betraying him, now gritting my teeth and just praying he'd lay motionless so they could take the x-rays.  I continued stroking him, telling him, "It's okay, it's okay."  And then either he believed me or gave up.  He went still.

I saw Dr. Buchoff's face after the first x-ray and knew it wasn't good.  And even an investment banker-turned-novelist could see the clump of white in the monitor at the bottom of Styles’ stomach, with nothing in his intestines.  When we got back to Dr. Buchoff's office, Styles was himself again.  Sitting on the stainless steel examination table, he licked Dr. Buchoff's hand every time he got near enough, wagging his tail, panting, his tongue sticking out of that broad pit bull mouth.  I got my share of licks, too, so he obviously wasn't holding it against either of us.

Dr. Buchoff said, " It's the worst-case scenario.  We'll have to wait and see how it goes this weekend.  I'll give you my cell number, but if he starts becoming lethargic, vomits or has any diarrhea, you'll need to call me."

I felt my stomach muscles tense.  "What do we do then?"

"We'll have to surgically remove the pieces."

"Is it risky?"  My legs were starting to tingle.

"Somewhat.  If it stays in his stomach, it's pretty easy.  If some of it gets lodged in his intestines and I have to go fishing around for it, the risks are greater."  When I didn't respond right away, he added, "But I've done this more times than you can imagine."  He smiled.  "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff these guys can swallow."

He instructed me to feed Styles more than usual, add some olive oil to his meals and give him extra water.  He also gave me a little vial of an oil to apply to Styles’ stomach a few times a day.  He said it was like Pepto-Bismol, that it would loosen him up.  I got Dr. Buchoff’s phone number for over the weekend and walked Styles out to the car.

When Styles and I got home, I gave him a small meal even though it was only early afternoon.  He hated it when I rubbed the oil on his tummy, probably because it had a pungent scent like the herbal oils some of the artsy-fartsy girls wore in college.  We played ball and he was as obsessed with it as usual.  Afterwards he slept and hung out until dinner.  I put extra bowls of water around the house: his regular one in the kitchen, one in the library, and one by the back door.  I even lifted the basement and first floor toilet seats so he could go have at it whenever he wanted.  After his dinner it was raining, so I put him on a leash and walked him in the yard with a golf umbrella over both of us.  And then he finally squatted, and Eureka!  A piece of turquoise blue showing in the mound in the grass.  My heart started pounding as I brought him back inside, put on rubber gloves and went out with a Maywood's Market plastic bag to pick up the poop and retrieve the piece.  There was only one, but it was a start.  I had already put a plastic bucket of bleach water on the gas grill standing next to the back door.  I dropped the retrieved piece of the ball in it to soak.  I walked back inside, humming to myself, elated.

That evening, Styles actually barked (he almost never does), and ran around the house like a wild man.  But then after another nap he woke up antsy and whiny.  I started to feel that same pressure on my chest I’d experienced when he looked up at me, scared, in the x-ray room.  The rain had stopped and I let him outside, then found him eating sticks and some of the ornamental grasses, which he usually only does when he has to throw up.  When he came back inside he was still whiny.  Not like him, but at least he isn't lethargic, I thought.

At about 10 p.m., early for him, he stood by the stairs.  I asked him, "Up, up?" but he didn't want to go up to sleep, just sat there, looking antsy, then started pacing.  Finally, he trotted upstairs, banged the master bedroom door with his nose, went inside and jumped up on the bed.  I wanted to keep an eye on him, so I kept one of the bedside lights turned on, bent low so as not to disturb him, and worked on my Mac for a while.  He was restless.  At 1 a.m. he got down off the bed.  I opened the door and got ready to take him downstairs to go outside, but he wouldn't come down with me.  He looked back at me over his shoulder where I stood in the hallway, then tried to jump back up on the bed.  He slipped off.  After that I had to help him up.  I'd never seen him do that before.  Either he was completely exhausted, or something was wrong.  I felt a wrench in my stomach and that pressure in my chest again.  Now I was really worried.

Read The Blue Ball Incident -- Part Two

Writers

At 6:45 this morning it was cool enough, 70°, that I was able to run my 3 miles.  I needed it; this heat wave has kiboshed my exercise regimen: over 80° every morning.  I recorded my time, changed, and by 7:30 was outside in front of the pool, muscling the second half of my scene-by-scene outline for my latest novel, Vaccine Nation, with Styles, our pit bull, sharing half the lounge chair.  I had at least a few hours to work before the landscapers, a hoarde with weed whackers, leaf blowers and lawnmowers, would drive me inside from the two-cycle engine fumes and noise.  I'm halfway through the book at about 40,000 words.  Writing before I’ve finished the detailed outline of the whole book is an unusual way for me to work.  But months ago I had my benchmark critical points in the outline thought through, planned out all the scenes in the first half and wanted to get writing.  I've gone back to some of my old movies for ideas on structure, but I've still struggled with some holes in the second half of my story.


By late morning I'd made good progress with my outline, so I came back inside and dictated about 1,500 words into my Dragon voice-to-text software on my computer; critical scenes in chapters 9 and 10.  A decent day’s work.  At about 12:30 I walked into the kitchen.


Manette and Zac were walking back up Summit Avenue with Styles when they saw Peter mowing his lawn across the street.  He waved, made a display of shutting off the mower to emphasize the importance of the moment, known only to him, and started toward them, boney legs in shorts, glasses askew in his haste, his work gloves now in hand.  Manette was thinking Peter had obviously written something new he wanted to tell us about.  She watched him work his way through traffic across Summit Avenue like Woody Allen dodging lobsters while in pursuit of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.  They talked for ten minutes, then Manette invited him for coffee.  He looked back at his idle lawnmower and said, "Just a little,” displaying an inch and a half between two fingers.


We’re currently reading Peter’s third-person memoir of his now-respectable friend, Santo, who wants to tell his saga, yet keep his distance from his Soprano-esque upbringing on the mean streets of Jersey City and Newark.  Santo’s story is told in independent vignettes, so shocking and starkly real that we know Peter didn't make them up because you can't make up stuff like that.  Santo relates each vignette to Peter over coffee at Starbucks one at a time, and then Peter goes to the public library to channel Santo longhand onto the page as clearly as he can remember. I'm helping Peter prepare the memoir for uploading a dozen vignettes at a time into Kindle.  Peter and his wife, Felicia, are successful, traditionally published children's book authors and illustrators.  Peter is also the guy who came up with a now famously ubiquitous ad campaign (Got Peter?).  So Peter and Felicia still do stints of advertising work for selected clients.  And Peter writes things that come into his head, as they come into it, like a dark children's book about scheming squirrels that plot to take over Easter (it ends badly for the Easter Bunny).  Like another book I'm helping him upload into Kindle, with the working title "Snapper," about a giant snapping turtle that terrorizes a town.  I can't figure out if it's young adult, paranormal or just creepy.


When I walked into the kitchen, Peter, Manette and Zac were seated around the marble-topped island.  I noted Peter’s shabby shorts, T-shirt and the fact he hadn't shaved.  Then I remembered my own appearance and smiled to myself.  When Manette offered coffee, Peter said, "No, really, I can't stay," and continued talking.  Zac prepared the coffee—we keep fresh-ground beans from Whole Foods wrapped in plastic in the freezer and use a French press—and the kitchen filled with the aroma of Brazil.  Peter's eyes went wide as Manette pulled out our "Abner" heavy cream, almost as thick as sour cream, prepared from raw, unpasteurized milk.  Abner is an Amish farmer who ships the stuff down from upstate New York once a week to our food guild.  "Well, maybe just a little coffee," Peter said, again showing an inch and a half between two fingers.  Manette poured him a full cup and he loaded two luxurious spoonfuls of Abner cream into it.  We talked about Santo’s memoir, Vaccine Nation, "Snapper" and other things.  Forty-five minutes later Peter asked if Manette's cell phone could make outgoing calls (he and Felicia don’t have a TV, on behalf of the kids—although they do love Mad Men and watch it on DVD—but Peter has a cell phone, so I don't know why he asked the question) and left a message for Felicia saying he'd be home in a few minutes.  He refilled his coffee cup, added more Abner cream. We kept talking.


Another forty-five minutes later Peter stood up and said, "I need to get home.  I think I'm probably in trouble."  As we stood saying our goodbyes, Peter launched into a description of another story he's writing, about a futuristic society where everyone is dumbed-down by taking some pill every day, and the quest of his hero to burst out of it.  He slowed down for a few moments and then got more animated, his eyes going wide behind his glasses, arms circling and hands gesturing.  "Have you finished this?" Manette asked at one point about fifteen minutes into the story.  I smiled to myself, knowing by that point Peter was making it up as he went along, because that was how he worked.


After I finished my coffee I went back to my outlining.

Reflections on the Past Months

It's now been over four months since I launched Trojan Horse. My attitude at the time was "What have I got to lose?" after deciding to commit myself to writing full-time and seeking out an agent to take the traditional publishing route. Since then a lot has happened for me. Trojan Horse made it to #1 in Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue and to the top 15 in Kindle books. I released The Gravy Train, a 50 thousand-word novella, which is now #14 in Suspense Thrillers, and a week ago I released Bull Street, another thriller set on Wall Street during the financial crisis. Bull Street is now #29 in Suspense Thrillers. So I now have three books in the top 40 in the overall Thriller category on Kindle. I've had an offer of representation from a top-notch New York literary agent and, separately, have been offered a publishing deal. I'm at work on my next thriller, the first chapter of which is excerpted at the end of Bull Street. I consider it's been a successful few months.

As a result, I'm reflecting on my situation. I'm grateful to be in this position, one I never could have scripted back in mid-January when I released Trojan Horse. And that means I'm grateful to those who've read my books. Those of you I've heard from have been incredibly supportive and generous with your comments and reviews.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface in my education on the epublishing world, but I do know that it's here to stay and will undoubtedly dominate the publishing world reasonably soon, in years, not decades. It's made it possible for me to have three books out in less time than I would have needed to find a publisher--and then start the 12 to 18 month process of getting one book out. The advent of the Kindel, Nook, Smashwords and Kobo platforms allows an efficient mechanism for authors to get their work in front of readers quickly.

I don't know where all this takes me but I have a pretty good idea: I'm working as hard as I ever have in my life, and as an investment banker I worked hard; it's a punishing career. But now I have a constituency out there--readers--that I don't want to let down, so I feel like I need to deliver more you'll enjoy reading. I'm excited about Bull Street; it's my favorite of the books I've written so far. It's been a great few months and I'm looking forward to what comes next.