Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Double Release: The Ghost Host and The Only Shark In The Sea

TGH and Shark3 Release

You can now purchase both books on Kindle/Paperback OR read for FREE on Kindle Unlimited!!

The Ghost Host

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The Only Shark In The Sea

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Giveaway: KM Riley author of The Spirit Series @thespirit_riley

It's time for a giveaway courtesy of KM Riley, author of The Spirit Series! 

 A little about The Spirit Series... 

Awakening

Adele’s determined to stand against the darkness—at any cost On her eighteenth birthday, Princess Adele inherited the Kingdom of Iden. Willful, strong, and independent, her life changed when she discovered she’s more than successor—she’s heir to a mysterious power hunted by an evil spirit. Chaos covers her lands, forcing Adele to flee its reach. She journeys to unravel the secrets of her abilities, and defeat the enemy shadowing her. Adele refuses to let Iden fall—not without a fight.

BUY NOW
AUDIOBOOK
WEBSITE

 

Reckoning

The Spirit faces the threat of a lifetime and she will protect those she loves — even to the death The kingdom of Iden has reclaimed its hold on the capital. Yet, the Spirit, Adele, has lost the true battle against her enemy, Locien, who has done everything in his power to unravel a nation, destroy a family, and wreak havoc wherever he goes. Desperate to defeat him, Adele readily accepts the help of a mysterious man that only she can see. The Spirit finds herself facing confrontations at every angle: an enemy bent on killing her, a power corrupting her from the inside, and a kingdom on the brink of rebellion. Honor bound to serve, Adele races to save it all before the final fight can end the Spirit legacy forever.

BUY NOW
WEBSITE 



 GIVEAWAY

   a Rafflecopter giveaway

 Meet the Author:

K.M. Riley is an author, game designer, artist, and fan of all things imaginative. If she's not writing, she's daydreaming or doodling about more worlds and characters that will make great tales. With a background in Creative Writing, she's always busy creating new adventures, or taking part in them.

Website: http://www.authorkmriley.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thespirit_riley @thespirit_riley
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSpiritSeries?_rdr=p

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Guest Post: Mary Lawlor @MaryLawlor5

Today I'm pleased to have Mary Lawlor on the blog to talk about her memoir and what it took to chronicle such an important time.


Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War details author and Professor Mary Lawlor’s unconventional upbringing in Cold War America. Memories of her early life—as the daughter of a Marine Corps and then Army father—reveal the personal costs of tensions that once gripped the entire world, and illustrate the ways in which bold foreign policy decisions shaped an entire generation of Americans, defining not just the ways they were raised, but who they would ultimately become. As a kid on the move she was constantly in search of something to hold on to, a longing that led her toward rebellion, to college in Paris, and to the kind of self-discovery only possible in the late 1960s.

A personal narrative braided with scholarly, retrospective reflections as to what that narrative means,
Fighter Pilot's Daughter zooms in on a little girl with a childhood full of instability, frustration and unanswered questions such that her struggles in growth, her struggles, her yearnings and eventual successes exemplify those of her entire generation.

From California to Georgia to Germany, Lawlor’s family was stationed in parts of the world that few are able to experience at so young an age, but being a child of military parents has never been easy. She neatly outlines the unique challenges an upbringing without roots presents someone struggling to come to terms with a world at war, and a home in constant turnover and turmoil. This book is for anyone seeking a finer awareness of the tolls that war takes not just on a nation, but on that nation’s sons and daughters, in whose hearts and minds deeper battles continue to rage long after the soldiers have come home.


Guest Post



My memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield), came out in hardback two years ago and was just reissued in paper.  During the half year after publication I did a number of interviews and guest blogs about the experiences the book describes—growing up with a soldier father, moving every two years, and never having a home.  But I haven’t had much opportunity to talk about the research experiences I went through before and during the writing process.  When DelSheree invited me to write a guest post about these things for her blog, I gladly took her up.

I wanted to structure the “plot” of my family’s life chronologically, with the focus alternating between the larger picture of the Cold War, the more intimate dramas of our gypsy household, and the private convolutions of my own psychological development.  These were very different stories, and each demanded its own kind of research.  

For the larger picture of the Cold War, I had, of course, all kinds of books and articles at my disposal.  Studying multiple histories of the many dimensions and geographies of the Cold War as a professor had given me a lot of background material for the book.  Still, I had to go further, read more, think harder, about the particular phases that determined my Dad’s career.  Spending time with the wars of the twentieth century wasn’t pleasant.  Those are bloody stories for anybody, but for me they brought back memories of hard times at home.  With the names—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Diem—and the places—Vietnam, Moscow, Havana—came recollections of base housing, where we waited for Dad to come home and hoped he was alright.  Apart from the emotional edginess, though, this kind of research was relatively straightforward. 
For the stories of my own family, the sources were more complicated.  First of all, my father had never told us anything.  Like other military dads then and now, he was committed to a code of secrecy about the missions he was involved in.  He took those secrets to his grave.  And he chose not share with my sisters and me those episodes he could relate: they were too violent or frightening in some other way that might shock our young (and girlish) ears.  I have reason to think he did tell these stories to my boy cousins and perhaps to my mother; but she too was very circumspect and kept them to herself if she knew them.

What I did have from my Dad was a substantial collection of letters he wrote.  They start during his years in college and in flight school and continue through the later years.  I’m really grateful to my mother for keeping them and to my sisters, Nancy and Sarah, for letting me hold onto them for as long as I have.  And a lot of military records ended up in my mother’s files after my Dad passed away.  Those provided a crucial map of the very complicated chronology of his career and definitive, if cryptic, indications of where he went and what the missions were.

But much was missing nevertheless.  My Dad was a good letter writer, but he would go for long periods of time without communicating anything.  During his first tour in Vietnam, for example, there was a six-month period when we didn’t hear from him at all.  My sisters and I had nightmares and my mother worried constantly.   Eventually we heard from the Red Cross that he was alright.  It was still a while before we heard from him directly.  I describe the effects of all this on my psyche in the book, but for the purpose of building the narrative it meant I had to try to sort out the speculative from the factual in family rumors (still circulating) about where Dad was and what he was doing those months he was in the dark.  

And all the military records aren’t there either.  Big gaps fall between years, and much information about unit missions is absent.  I spent a lot of time trying to get the missing records from the various US Army and Marine Corps archives.  You’d think this would be pretty straightforward; after all, it’s the military, and they’re the epitome of organization, right?  But not so.  There are a number of these archives scattered across the country.  Some of them house certain materials, and others different things.  Archivists don’t all seem to know which facility has what.  And one of them, a large storehouse of military records located near St. Louis, burned down in the 1970s.  All those documents were lost forever.  

I should say, though, that those archivists and librarians who I asked for materials were very helpful and did all they could to steer me in the right direction.  Without their help, I wouldn’t have had nearly as much information to use to build the narrative of Dad’s assignments that was the plot of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter.  

My mother, of course, was another resource for the story of our family.  She was a great story teller.  A striking character herself, she gave dramatic accounts of my Dad, his friends, the extended family, and my sisters and me as kids.  But she was unreliable.  She loved the story more than anything, and the truth sometimes suffered from this.  I interviewed her over a period of several months—this was a few years before I wrote the memoir—and learned a great deal about our early years that I hadn’t known before.  Much of it turned out to be accurate.  When I checked on her versions of the larger history and her tales of my Dad’s work, however, I saw that in some instances she’d picked and chosen scenes and dialogues for their effectiveness in her story rather than as they had actually happened.  I tried to make that in itself part of her portrait in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter—without dishonoring her memory.

For the convolutions of my own psychological development, I had my girl-diaries, journals, and letters to consult.  They brought back some of the crucial details of daily life in our household and in the scattered rooms and apartments I called home after leaving my parents’ care.  The smells of particular kinds of paint or the odd placement of windows—these details can really bring life to a memoir, and I was grateful to my younger self for having kept a record of them.

But the greater pool of information lay in my memory banks.  These in some cases were wide open, but in others not so much.  For the harder memories, I had to sit with whatever I could clearly recall and wait for more to come.  Sometimes it took days of going back and waiting.  It was like courting somebody or, I imagine, being a therapist hoping a patient would come to see something crucial.  Memories of my mother’s anger at me when I came home from college in Paris during a time when I was breaking away from the family ethics and beliefs came slow and with difficulty.  What was even harder to get back was the recollection that finally emerged of her actually fearing me.  She didn’t understand what influences I’d been exposed to in Paris and was frightened to know what they might mean.  In the end, it was all much ado about nothing, but it was a hard picture to look at: my own mother, afraid of me.

Living in memory as continuously as I did during the writing of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter introduced a rich practice in my life.  The more I remembered, the more I remembered;  and writing was an important vehicle for drawing it out.  I’ve tried to keep that going in the months since the book first emerged.  Not that I’m plotting another memoir (I’ve turned to fiction now and have a novel ready to go…), but the whole experience of going into the deep past of my youth has given the self-portrait I carry around with me a lot more dimension than before.  You’d think that somebody who took on the project of writing a memoir would know a lot about the self being narrated there.  On the other hand, all this the research—into the histories, letters, journals, interviews, and my own mind—not only made the book possible, but it worked like a kind of self-therapy: and a lead to several new understandings of myself as a fighter pilot’s daughter.

 

 Available now from:


Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Pilots-Daughter-Growing-Sixties/dp/1442255943/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441318391&sr=8-1&keywords=Mary+Lawlor+Fighter+Pilot%27s+Daughter

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighter-pilots-daughter-mary-lawlor/1116598567?ean=9781442222007

About the Author

Mary Lawlor grew up in a military family during the Cold War.  Her father was a decorated fighter pilot who fought in the Pacific during World War II, flew missions in Korea, and did two combat tours in Vietnam. His family followed him from base to base and country to country during his years of service. Every two or three years, Mary, her three sisters, and her mother packed up their household and moved. By the time she graduated from high school, they had shifted homes fourteen times. These displacements, plus her father’s frequent absences and brief, dramatic returns, were part of the fabric of her childhood, as were the rituals of base life and the adventures of life abroad.

As Mary came of age, tensions grew between the patriotic, Catholic culture of her upbringing and the values of the countercultural sixties. By the time she dropped out of the American College in Paris in 1968, she faced her father, then posted in Saigon, across a deep political divide.  Inevitably, the war came home.  The fighter pilot, without knowing it, had taught his daughter how to fight back.
Years of turbulence followed.  Then, after working in Germany, Spain and Japan, Mary went on to graduate school at NYU, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of literature and American Studies at Muhlenberg College.

She and her husband spend part of each year on a small farm in the mountains of southern Spain.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fighterpilotsdaughter
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaryLawlor5?cn=cHN0Zg%3D%3D&refsrc=email
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/lawlor0836/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/marylawlor37/
Website: http://www.marylawlor.net/

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Pre-Order: The Only Shark In The Sea (Date Shark #3)

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!



THE ONLY SHARK IN THE SEA by DelSheree Gladden
- SYNOPSIS -
Vance Sullivan has always been the rock everyone turns to for help…

His work with patients recovering from traumatic events makes him the perfect person to help his friend, Guy Saint Laurent, with one of his Date Shark appointments. When Vance meets hesitant, frightened Natalie Price, he suspects she’s hiding the truth behind her fears, and he’s drawn in by a need to help her.

Haunted by a terrible event from her past, Natalie can’t even endure being touched without suffering a crippling panic attack… 

She doesn’t know why, but Natalie feels Vance might be the only one who can help her put the pieces of her life back together. Despite the tension their arrangement causes with his girlfriend, their bi-weekly sessions seem to be helping…as long as he keeps his promise not to push her to reveal more than she’s ready to share.

Suddenly the tables have turned…

When Vance suffers his own unspeakable tragedy, asking for help is the last thing he wants to do. Drowning in grief and guilt, crushed by betrayal and lies, Vance needs a lifeline. 

Natalie has no idea why anyone thinks she can help him, given her own deep-rooted fears—but she knows she has to try. 

A twisted notion of justice makes the danger all too real, 
and Vance and Natalie realize it might take one broken soul to mend another…




Available for pre-order on Amazon! 
Read it for free with KINDLE UNLIMITED!


- DELSHEREE GLADDEN -

DelSheree Gladden was one of those shy, quiet kids who spent more time reading than talking. Literally. She didn’t speak a single word for the first three months of preschool, but she had already taught herself to read. Her fascination with reading led to many hours spent in the library and bookstores, and eventually to writing.

She wrote her first novel when she was sixteen years old, but spent ten years rewriting and perfecting it before having it published.
Native to New Mexico, DelSheree and her husband spent several years in Colorado for college and work before moving back home to be near family again. Their two children love having their seventeen cousins close by. When not writing, you can find DelSheree reading, painting, sewing and trying not to get bitten by small children in her work as a dental hygienist.

DelSheree has several bestselling young adult urban fantasy series, and her first contemporary romance, Date Shark, will be released with Limitless Publishing in 2014.



Friday, September 11, 2015

Book Trailer: The Ghost Host (coming soon)

Want to know a little more about Echo Simmons and why the FBI has taken an interest in her? 

Check out the new book trailer for THE GHOST HOST.





The Ghost Host 

is available now for pre-order on Kindle and available for purchase in paperback

KINDLE
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B014Q8F25E  

 PAPERBACK
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Host-Episode-DelSheree-Gladden/dp/1517268389/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1441816008&sr=8-20&keywords=delsheree+gladden


Blog Tour: Mammarazzi by Brooke Williams

Mamarazzi Release Promo Post

Mamarazzi

By Brooke Williams
Release Date: September 11, 2015 from Prism Book Group
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Order HERE
Join the Sept. 15th Release Day Party on Facebook HERE
Enjoy giveaways with a dozen different authors!

Danica Bennett isn't sure what she hates more...her job or the fact that she's good at it.  As one of the many Hollywood paparazzi, she lives her life incognito and sneaks around trying to get the best shot of the latest star.  When she is mistaken for an extra on a new, up and coming TV show, her own star rises and she becomes the one being photographed.  Add that to the fact that she's falling for her co-star, Eliot Lane, and Danica is in a whole heap of trouble.

Add “Mamarazzi” to your Goodreads list HERE


Guest Post from the Author
Mamarazzi Research Guest Post by Brooke Williams

Mamarazzi is a book I’ve been preparing in my mind on and off for a good 15 years. I first came up with the idea in college when I had to write a portion of a screenplay for my Screenwriting class. I titled the piece “Paparazzi” and had the same basic premise, only with a male lead character. Once I began writing romantic comedy novels, the idea came back and started haunting me. I threw it around in my mind and decided to change the lead to a female and change the name to “Mamarazzi.”

I have my fair share of favorite TV shows and movies as well as favorite actors and actresses, but I can’t say that I did any intentional research before or during writing the book. I do read People Magazine weekly and most of my national news comes from those articles. And I, like many people, have always been fascinated by the lifestyle of the Hollywood stars. I personally find it hard to imagine and it’s not something I would ever want for myself. But what if it happened unwittingly?

Several stars proved inspiring when it came to the novel. I was thinking of Colin Farrell when I wrote about one actor, who only has a bit part in the novel. I needed the character to have rugged appeal and a bad boy reputation. I didn’t base the main male character, Eliot Lane, on anyone, really. But if I were to cast him, I would put Ryan Reynolds in the role. He has a charming appeal that makes me think he would be down to earth in person, just like this character.

So in a way, I’ve been researching this book non-stop in my magazine reading and movie and TV watching. I’ve been preparing all of my life. Haha. I did visit Hollywood once about a decade ago, but I can’t say I remember much and I didn’t have any star encounters. I did literally run into Kevin Costner once at the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, though. It was an odd experience because he was completely surrounded by people clambering for his attention at all times. And here I was just returning from the bathroom and somehow managed to ram right into him.

Mamarazzi was a result of me asking myself a number of questions like, is the grass really greener on the other side of the fence? What if you get to the other side of the fence on accident? And what if you have huge secrets that could toss you back to the other side? It’s a fun, light-hearted book that I hope puts a smile on reader’s faces.
About the Author

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Brooke Williams writes in a sleep-deprived state while her daughters nap. Her romantic comedy is best read in the same state. Brooke has twelve years of radio in her background, both behind the scenes and on the air. She was also a television traffic reporter for a short time despite the fact that she could care less about hair and make-up. Today, Brooke stays at home with her daughters and works as a freelance writer for a variety of companies. When she isn’t working for paying clients, she makes things up, which results in books like “Accept this Dandelion.”  Brooke is also the author of "Accept this Dandelion," “Wrong Place, Right Time,” “Someone Always Loved You,”  “Beyond the Bars.” She looks forward to her first children's book release “Baby Sheep Gets a Haircut” in June 2016. Brooke and her husband Sean have been married since 2002 and have two beautiful daughters, Kaelyn (6) and Sadie (2).

Connect with Brooke:
Facebook
Website
Blog

Note from the Author on the book's inspiration:

I've always been fascinated by the Hollywood life and the idea that "they" are different from "us." The idea for Mamarazzi has been with me for a long time. I'm not even exactly sure when I came up with it, but in college, I had a screenwriting class and I had to write a portion of a screenplay. I wrote "Paparazzi," which was the same general idea only with a male lead character. When I began writing romantic comedy, the idea came back to me and I decided to chance the main character to a female and call it "Mamarazzi." I even had a naming contest so that facebook fans and blog readers could name the characters in the book. Every character in the novel is reader named and approved! Overall, I wanted to examine what happens when you take someone from one side of the fence and plop them on the other side. In the end, famous or not, we're all just people. And in this book, they all have secrets...
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And next from Brooke Williams....

"Dandelions on the Road"
releases November 5, 2015...
pre-order today by clicking below
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Thursday, September 3, 2015

New Release and Interview: In Sheep's Clothing by LD Beyer

Today I'm pleased to welcome L.D. Beyer to the blog to talk about his new book IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING!



 A little about the book...


Caught in a game of chess he didn't know he was playing until it was too late, the President makes the only move he can, plunging Washington and the nation into chaos. Stunned and reeling, Vice President David Kendall takes the oath of office and tries to heal a nation in mourning.
But what the new president doesn't realize is that things in the White House aren't always what they appear to be, and sometimes what looks like the best option may turn out to be the worst. When one fatal decision triggers
consequences he never envisioned, President Kendall finds himself caught up in the same game that cost his predecessor his life.

Although there was nothing he could have done, Secret Service Agent Matthew Richter is haunted by the death of the man he had vowed to protect. When his girlfriend leaves him and his boss tells him that his job is on the line, he thinks his life cannot get any worse. He soon realizes how wrong he is when he finds himself fighting to save another president from the deadly forces that he has unwittingly unleashed.

In Sheep's Clothing is a gripping, action-packed political thriller that will leave you on the edge of your seat.


Interview with L.D. Beyer



1.     What inspired you to begin writing?

When I was 12 or 13, I remember seeing an ad that said something like, “Get Paid to Write Children’s Books.”  I was intrigued and actually wrote a few things but I never did submit them.  A few years later, I wrote a short story for a high school English assignment. My story was well received and was published in a school anthology.  In college, I wrote another short story, again for a literature class, and it too was well received and published in a school anthology.

But after graduating, I guess I did the expected thing and followed a more traditional career path.  I met my wife a few years later and we got married.  A few years after that, we started a family.  Frankly, between career and family, I forgot all about writing for a while.  But the desire to do something different—to write—was always there, just below the surface.

It wasn't until several years ago that I finally muscled up enough courage to make a drastic change in my life: to give up my corporate career, to spend more time with my family and to pursue my dream of being a writer. 

There's something cathartic about writing.  Writing allows me to be creative and to express myself in a unique way.  It’s really cool to start with a blank page and watch as the story unfolds, sometimes taking twists and turns I never expected. I know that sounds like I'm not in control when I write but, after giving them a nudge, the characters and the plot tend to evolve on their own and go in directions I never envisioned when I first began typing. 

You know, I wish I could find some of my early writings!  That would be really cool!


2.     Would you classify your writing more as plot driven or character driven?

Although I believe my main character is fairly compelling, I think my writing is more plot driven.

3.     Can you tell us a little about your main character?

Matthew Richter is 30 years old and single.  He is a competent and dedicated Secret Service Agent.  He is the classic Type A personality: driven, always in control.  But when the President suddenly dies on his watch, Richter’s world is turned upside down.  Although there was nothing he could have done, he is haunted by the death of the man he had vowed to protect.  The burden of failure weighs heavily on him and he wrestles with resigning from the only job he ever wanted. 



4.     Without giving away too much, tell us a little about the main conflict in this book.

In Sheep’s Clothing is the story of three men.  One man holds the reins of power.  One man vows to protect him.  One man vows to destroy him.

Caught in a game of chess he didn’t know he was playing until it was too late, the President makes the only move he can, plunging Washington and the nation into chaos. Stunned and reeling, Vice President David Kendall takes the oath of office and tries to heal a nation in mourning. But what the new president doesn’t realize is that things in the White House aren’t always what they appear to be, and sometimes what looks like the best option may turn out to be the worst. When one fatal decision triggers consequences he never envisioned, President Kendall finds himself caught up in the same game that cost his predecessor his life.

Although there was nothing he could have done, Secret Service Agent Matthew Richter is haunted by the death of the man he had vowed to protect. When his girlfriend leaves him and his boss tells him that his job is on the line, he thinks his life cannot get any worse. He soon realizes how wrong he is when he finds himself fighting to save another president from the deadly forces that he has unwittingly unleashed.

5.     What do you hope readers take away from your book?

My books are pure escapism.  If I’ve done my job right, you will escape, for a short while anyway, into the lives of my characters, vicariously sharing their thoughts, their challenges, their struggles, their dark moments, as well as their triumphs. Hopefully you’ll root for the good guys and loathe the bad guys. Ideally, I’ll keep you up well past bed time because you want to find out what happens next!  At the end, I want you to close the book with a satisfied smile.

6.     Now for a few fun questions! What song best describes your writing style?

Boy!  That’s a tough one!  Can I plead the 5th? 

If I have to answer, I guess it would have to be a song that describes a journey.  But I’m not sure I can think of the one that fits perfectly.  How about Sheryl Crow’s Every day is a winding road.

7.     Night Owl or Early Bird?

 I’m definitely an early bird.  My kid’s laugh at me because I often go to bed before 10. 

8.     Skittle or M&Ms?

M&M’s, of course!  Preferably Peanut M&Ms!

9.     Who are your favorite authors?

I tend to cycle through authors and my favorite is usually the one I’m reading at the moment.  I’ll get hooked on a particular author and I’ll spend several months or more reading every book they’ve written.  David Baldacci, Steve Berry, Michael Connolly, Mike Lawson, Vince Flynn, Brad Meltzer, Brad Thor—they’ve each been my favorite at one point in time.  Patricia Cornwell is another great writer; I really like her Kay Scarpetta character. 

Although I usually read thrillers, every now and then, I’ll pick up something different for a change of pace.  JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series was fun.  So was The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.  Right now, I’m in the middle of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Throne series.  Ask me tomorrow and I’ll probably give you a different answer!

10.  Can you tell us about your future projects?

Sure.  My next book is An Eye for An Eye.  This is the sequel to In Sheep’s Clothing and is set to release later this year or early next year.  A powerful drug lord threatens to bring America to its knees.  Only one man can stop him.  This is the second book in my Matthew Richter Thriller series. 

I also have a historical thriller titled The Devil’s Due, which is based loosely on my grandfather.  He served in the IRA at the time Ireland was fighting for independence from Britain, in 1919-1921.  I spent some time in Dublin and Limerick researching military archives and the War for Independence, meeting with historians, tracing my roots, and, of course, enjoying a pint or two because, after all, I was in Ireland!  The cool thing is that the Irish Army was able to locate my grandfather’s military records and I was able to confirm that he did indeed serve in the IRA during the war.  It’s there that the history gets a little murky.  He does appear to have left Ireland in a hurry, but as to why, I can only speculate.  Still my research paints a picture of a very tenuous time where the temporary alliance cobbled together to defeat the British crumbled easily under the weight of ancient divisions; where suspicion of disloyalty often resulted in death; and where past sins were rarely forgiven.  It’s in this context that the story of my protagonist, Frank Kelleher, comes to life…and almost to his death! 

Meet the Author


I spent over twenty-five years in the corporate world, climbing the proverbial corporate ladder, so to speak. This meant a lot of time away from my family, extensive travel, a half-dozen relocations, and the opportunity to live and work in Mexico for several years. I’ve had the desire to write for a long time but my job left little room for much else.  In 2011, I decided it was time for a change—I was tired of moving every few years, I wanted to spend more time with my family and I wanted to chase my dream of being a writer.  

I am an avid reader and although I primarily read Thrillers, my reading list is somewhat eclectic.  For me, I would much rather spend a few hours with a good book than a few hours in front of the TV.

I live in Michigan with my wife, three children and a dog named Tope (pronounced Toe-Pay), which we adopted in Mexico. I enjoy cooking, hiking, biking, working out and fixing just about anything that breaks in the house.  With 3 kids and a dog, a lot of things seem to break!

 Author Links:



 Book Links: