A STRANGER AT THE DOOR (Rachel Marin Thriller Book #2) by Jason Pinter is the second book in this intense thriller series featuring single mother Rachel Marin. She has turned her investigative skills and physical training into working as a freelance forensic investigator with the Ashby PD.
Rachel Marin is finally finding a measure of intimacy and peace in her life with her two children and boyfriend, Ashby Detective John Serrano when one of her son’s high school teachers is found dead in a house fire. The teacher was brutally tortured and murdered before his home was set on fire. No one can find a reason for this horrible crime, but just hours before his death he emailed Rachel and asked her for a meeting and her help.
As soon as the investigation begins, Rachel gets a visit from someone she never thought to see again and is warned to stay out of the investigation. At the same time, Rachel’s son, Eric is lured into a group that sets the two against each other and could be tied to not only to illegal activity, but murder.
Rachel refuses to stop investigating and will do anything to protect her son. Will she be able to put the puzzle pieces together in time to save her son and her own life?
I loved this book as much as the first! Rachel is such a strong female protagonist. She has remade herself to protect her children and will do anything for them. These are fast-paced violent thrillers are a cross between police procedural and vigilantism and therefore some belief must be suspended, but Mr. Pinter also adds moments of regular family life and laughter in the mix. This series has a strong push-pull continuing battle between Serrano’s legal justice and Rachel’s vigilante justice and the ramifications, but the two seem to need each other enough to work it out with Serrano pulling Rachel back from crossing that line (again).
I highly recommend this book, series and author!
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About the Author
Jason Pinter is the bestselling author of HIDE AWAY, the first Rachel Marin novel, as well as six other novels: the acclaimed Henry Parker series (The Mark, The Guilty, The Stolen, The Fury, and The Darkness), the stand-alone thriller The Castle, as well as the middle-grade adventure novel Zeke Bartholomew: SuperSpy, and the children’s book Miracle. His books have over one million copies in print worldwide and have been optioned for film. He has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Thriller Award, Strand Critics Award, Barry Award, and Shamus Award, and more
Pinter is the founder of Polis Books, an independent press, and was honored by Publishers Weekly’s Star Watch, which “recognizes young publishing professionals who have distinguished themselves as future leaders of the industry.” He has written for the New Republic, Entrepreneur, the Daily Beast, Esquire, and more. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his wife and their two daughters.
Visit him at www.JasonPinter.com, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @JasonPinter.
Today is my turn on this new Books n All Promotions Book Tour. I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AUSTRALIA (A DS Jason Smith Thriller Book #14) by Stewart Giles.
Below you will find a book blurb, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Book Blurb
Detective Jason Smith is sick and tired of the English weather. It’s February in York and the dark, dreary days are getting him down.
When his wife, DC Erica Whitton wins a holiday to Australia, Smith is reluctant to go. He has no desire to go back home. Against his better judgement, Smith agrees to show his wife and daughter where he grew up.
The perfect holiday soon turns into a nightmare as Smith finds himself in a race against time to save the only people he’s ever cared about.
Children in Smith’s home town are being murdered. There’s something rotten there, an evil Smith has never come across before, and the local police are not what they appear to be.
When his wife is attacked and his daughter is taken, Smith realises he’s on his own. With the clock ticking, and not knowing if his daughter is alive or dead, Smith comes face to face with the worst kind of evil he’s ever encountered.
DS JASON SMITH SERIES Book 0.5-Phobia Book 1-Smith Book 2-Boomerang Book 3-Ladybird Book 4-Occam’s Razor Book 5-Harlequin Book 6-Selene Book 7-Horsemen Book 8-Unworthy Book 9 – Venom Book 10 – Severed Book 11 – Demons Book 12 – Deadeye Book 13 – Motive Book 14 – Australia
DI O’REILLY MYSTERIES Blood on the Island Lies on the Island
Fear on the Island (coming February 2021)
DC HARRIET TAYLOR SERIES Book 1-The Beekeeper Book 2-The Perfect Murder Book 3-The Backpacker Trotterdown a box set of DC Harriet Taylor books 1-3
DS JASON SMITH &DC HARRIET TAYLOR SERIES Book 1 – The Enigma Book 2 – Dropzone Book 3 – The Raven Girl Trilogy: The DS Smith & Harriet Taylor box set
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS Miranda Mistress Medusa
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My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
AUSTRALIA (A DS Jason Smith Thriller Book #14) by Stewart Giles is the latest DS Jason Smith crime thriller. It is an intense race against the clock, edge-of-your-seat emotional thrill ride from start to finish. Even though this is the fourteenth outing for Smith, this book is easily read as a standalone.
DS Jason Smith, his wife, DC Erica Whitton and their five-year-old daughter, Laura are ready to take a vacation from the dreary York February weather. Erica wins a three-week vacation to Australia, but Smith is not happy about returning to his hometown.
When they arrive, they find there are reports of several missing children and some have turned up dead. While at the beach, Erica is stabbed and nearly killed while Laura has disappeared. Smith discovers that not only have the police little to go on, but there seems to be obstruction from above in the local police force hindering any true investigation.
DS Bridge comes to Australia to cover Smith’s back and help recover his daughter. Will Smith and Bridge be able to uncover who has been abducting the missing children and save Laura before she becomes a victim, too?
WOW! This is my first DS Jason Smith thriller and it will not be my last. The plot is a fast-paced, step-by-step emotional punch to the gut. Smith has to stay unemotional and work the crime all while being obstructed by the local chief of police, deal with his wife almost being killed and his daughter being abducted and not knowing if she is dead or alive. The killers are truly evil and terrifying.
I highly recommend this crime thriller! I could not put it down. I felt an immediate connection with the characters and I believe there will be a Jason Smith thrillers reading marathon coming soon.
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Author Bio
After reading English at 3 Universities and graduating from none of them, I set off travelling around the world with my wife, Ann, finally settling in South Africa, where we still live.
In 2014 Ann dropped a rather large speaker on my head and I came up with the idea for a detective series. DS Jason Smith was born. Smith, the first in the series was finished a few months later.
3 years and 8 DS Smith books later, Joffe Books wondered if I would be interested in working with them. As a self-published author, I agreed. However, we decided on a new series – the DC Harriet Taylor: Cornwall series.
The Beekeeper was published and soon hit the number one spot in Australia. The second in the series, The Perfect Murder did just as well.
I continued to self-publish the Smith series and Unworthy hit the shelves in 2018 with amazing results. I therefore made the decision to self-publish The Backpacker which is book 3 in the Detective Harriet Taylor series which was published in July 2018.
After The Backpacker I had an idea for a totally new start to a series – a collaboration between the Smith and Harriet thrillers and The Enigma was born. It brings together the broody, enigmatic Jason Smith and the more level-headed Harriet Taylor.
The Miranda trilogy is something totally different. A psychological thriller trilogy. It is a real departure from anything else I’ve written before.
The Detective Jason Smith series continues to grow and there are now 14 books including the introduction: Phobia.
Today is my turn on the Harlequin Trade Publishing Mystery and Thriller Winter 2021 Blog Tour. I am very excited to be sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell. This is a thrilling follow-up to the first book in the series, First Cut and I could not put either down.
Below you will find an author Q&A, a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Author Q&A
Q: Please give the elevator pitch for Aftershock.
A: San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can’t let a famous architect found on a construction site be quietly laid in his grave. She digs deep, both in the morgue and outside it, to find out what really happened to him. When she does, the shock waves could be worse than the earthquake that has just shaken up the city and her own life.
Q: Which came first: the characters or plot line?
A: The characters. We introduced Jessie Teska and much of the supporting cast in our debut thriller, First Cut, when Jessie was a rookie at the San Francisco medical examiner’s office. All of our plot lines come from the what-if storytelling toolkit, applying our imaginations and a noir detective story’s narrative structure to Judy’s actual experience as a San Francisco medical examiner, a job she worked for nine years—going to death scenes, performing autopsies, interviewing witnesses, and testifying in murder trials as an expert witness.
Q: Why do you love Jessie and why should readers root for her?
A: We love Jessie because she is smart, uncompromising, fearless—and, good Lord but she gets in her own way sometimes, like we all do. She is a reliable narrator and she calls it like she sees it, and our books are written from her point of view as a first-person narrator. But Jessie is human and impetuous and inexperienced in her job, so she makes mistakes. She is impolitic and blunt, and maybe a little too literal-minded, with a scientist’s naïveté about people and their secrets and their motives. It can get her into trouble. You get into it with her, and she’s the only one who can get you out. It’s just one of the things we love about the privilege of being allowed inside your skull! Metaphorically, that is.
Q: How much research do you do before beginning to write a book? Do you go to locations, ride with police, go to see an autopsy, etc.
A: Judy’s job is her day-to-day research. As a forensic pathologist, she gets called out to death scenes, investigating deaths that are sudden, unexpected and violent. She’s done more than three thousand autopsies. She is the expert the police detectives call upon when they don’t know whether a suspicious death is an accident, a suicide or a homicide. The tasks that Jessie performs in investigating her cases are the same that Judy does in investigating hers, though Jessie has a lot less experience than Judy and is much more willing to break the rules! We do additional research by consulting and interviewing other experts in areas we don’t know about. In Aftershock, this included seasoned building contractors and construction professionals, retired police, DNA laboratory scientists, and lawyers with specific areas of specialization we can’t reveal without plot spoilers. We certainly know what we don’t know, and we’re extremely lucky to have access through collegial networks to many and sundry forensic professionals who can help us work real science into our imagined stories.
Q: What hobbies do you enjoy?
A: Judy loves to paint, craft (embroidery, sewing, jewelry-craft), and hike. T.J. is an avid bicyclist. We also love to travel and discover new foods. T.J. is the cook in the family, while Judy is the baker.
Q: Do you write under one name for all books across genres or do you have other AKA’s?
A: We write under our own names in both nonfiction (Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner) and fiction (First Cut, Aftershock). Together we also write a column called “Working Stiff” for MedPage Today, but that is published under Judy’s solo byline.
Q: Do you have pets?
A: We have a youngish mutt named Winston, a Chihuahua/wirehaired terrier mix, we think. We didn’t choose the name; he’s a rescue from Pets in Need in Redwood City, California, and came with it. T.J., who comes from a New England fishing town, figured that, like with a boat, it was bad luck to change the dog’s given name. We try to get him to model next to our books for online photos and whatnot, if he can manage to sit still long enough—which, generally, he can’t. He’s a very good boy.
Q: What’s your favorite part of writing suspense?
A: Judy’s favorite parts are going for hikes together where we work out our plot lines, our subplots, our feints and reveals. She also enjoys the serendipity of discovering things in the newspaper or on her real-life autopsy case list that can spark ideas. T.J.’s favorite part is sitting alone in a room, wrestling with commas. We both enjoy getting together after T.J. has had a full day of doing just that. Judy will read back what he has written, usually as T.J. is preparing dinner for the family, and we will make edits together along the way. We also have opposite body clocks, and T.J. will often burn the midnight oil writing so that Judy can suggest edits and revisions in the early morning, when she’s up and alert and getting ready to go to the morgue for the new day’s autopsies.
Q: Do you prefer reading and/or writing suspense with elements of romance? Why or why not?
A: Romance? Maybe. But sex—? For sure. Sex and humor, both. Noir doesn’t mean dour. We really enjoy giving Jessie a love life, or at least a sex life. That said, in our detective stories, sex can often turn into one more way for characters to lie to and manipulate one another. It also makes for great red-herring territory! Get your characters panting a little, and you can lead your readers around by the…nose. It’s tricky, but if you do it right, it can be a lot of fun. Just like—well, romance.
Q: From the books you’ve written or read, who has been your favorite villain and why?
A: A favorite villain for Judy is Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty as written by Arthur Conan Doyle—someone who is smart and Machiavellian, not just evil or crazy. One of T.J.’s favorite villains is Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock—though Pinkie isn’t really the villain of that book, is he? We both tend to gravitate to stories in which the killer is not necessarily the true villain, and in which that villainy isn’t straightforward or single-sided.
Q: What was your last 5 star read?
A: Judy’s latest favorite is the nonfiction Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez. It’s one of those books that makes you re-examine the world as we perceive it—and how we have built it. T.J.’s last five-star read is Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha. It’s hard to add a new great novel to the pantheon of Los Angeles noir, but she has done it magnificently.
Q: What is one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?
A: That it’s a sales job, and a lifetime one. You can write the best book ever, but if nobody reads it, then they will never know. You have to be just as proficient at marketing and selling your book as you have to be in crafting the plot and characters.
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Book Summary
When an earthquake strikes San Francisco, forensics expert Jessie Teska faces her biggest threat yet in this explosive new mystery from the New York Times bestselling authors of Working Stiff and First Cut.
At first glance, the death appears to be an accident. The body is located on a construction site under what looks like a collapse beam. But when Dr. Jessie Teska arrives on the scene, she notices the tell-tale signs of a staged death. The victim has been murdered. A rising star in the San Francisco forensics world, Jessie is ready to unravel the case, help bring the murderer to justice, and prevent him from potentially striking again.
But when a major earthquake strikes San Francisco right at Halloween, Jessie and the rest of the city are left reeling. And even if she emerges from the rubble, there’s no guaranteeing she’ll make it out alive.
With their trademark blend of propulsive prose, deft plotting and mordant humor, this electrifying new installment in the Jessie Teska Mystery series offers the highest stakes yet.
AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery Book #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell is a thrilling second book in this mystery series. I love that the intelligent and persistent Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can never stop questioning with just the autopsy. Even though this is the second book in the series it can easily be read as a standalone.
Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska gets an early morning call for a dead body that appears to be the result of a terrible construction accident. The deceased is a famous architect who appears daily on the construction site and causes problems with the workers. On further inspection at the construction site and at autopsy, Dr. Jessie Teska discovers the accident is a cover-up for a murder.
As Jessie investigates, an earthquake rocks San Francisco and derails her investigation. When she is able to look into the murder once again, an innocent man is being framed. Will Jessie be able to unearth the truth before she becomes another construction site casualty?
I love this series and protagonist! The authors bring you into medical examiners autopsy rooms and lives with writing that brings them to life on the page. Jessie is an intelligent, determined and dogged seeker of truth with a messy personal life that I love to follow and cheer on. The plot of this book throws plenty of twists and red herrings at the reader which keeps the pages turning. While I suspected the guilty individual, it was the “How” that kept me guessing. This is an excellent addition to this mystery series and I am looking forward to many more.
I highly recommend this mystery, protagonist and authors!
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Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A steel band cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” makes for a lousy way to lurch awake. Couple of months back, some clown of a coworker got ahold of my cell phone while I was busy in the autopsy suite, and reprogrammed the ringtone for incoming calls from the Medical Examiner Operations and Investigation Dispatch Communications Center. I keep forgetting to fix it.
I reached across my bedmate to the only table in the tiny room and managed to squelch it before the plinking got past five or six bars, but that was more than enough to wake him.
“Time is it?” Anup slurred.
“Four thirty.”
“God, Jessie,” he said, and pulled a pillow over his head. I planted a nice warm kiss on the back of his neck.
Donna Griello from the night shift was on the phone. “Good morning, Dr. Teska,” she said.
“Okay, Donna,” I whispered. “What do we got and where are we going?”
I didn’t need the GPS navigation from my one extravagance in this world, the BMW 235i that I had brought along when I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because muscle memory took me there. The death scene was right on my old commute—a straight shot from the Outer Richmond District, along the edge of Golden Gate Park, then the wiggle down to SoMa, the broad, flat neighborhood south of Market Street. The blue lights were flashing on the corner of Sixth Street and Folsom, just a couple of blocks shy of the Hall of Justice. I used to perform autopsies in the bowels of the Hall, before the boss, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Howe, moved the whole operation to his purpose-built dream morgue, way out in Hunters Point. Along the way, Howe made me his deputy chief. The promotion came with a raise, an office, and a ficus, but I hadn’t sought it and it wasn’t welcome—I was only a year and change on the job and didn’t have the experience to be deputy chief in a big city. Howe needed someone to do it, though. So the gold badge and all its headaches went to me.
The death scene address Donna had given me over the phone was a construction site. From the outside, I couldn’t tell how big. They’d built a temporary sidewalk covered in plywood, and posted an artist’s rendition of a gleaming glass tower, crusted in niches and crenellations and funky angles, dubbed SoMa Centre.
I double-parked behind a police car and walked the plankway between a blind fence and a line of pickup trucks with union bumper stickers. The men in them eyed me with either suspicion or practiced blankness while they waited for their job site to reopen. A beat cop kept vigil at the head of the line. He took my name and badge number, logged me in, and lifted the yellow tape. He pointed to a wooden crate. It was full of construction hard hats.
“Mandatory,” he said.
“You aren’t wearing one,” I griped.
“I’m not going in there, either.”
“Good for you. Give me a light over here.”
I sorted through the helmets under the cop’s flashlight beam. Sizes large, extra large, medium. I am a woman, five feet five inches, a hundred thirty-four pounds, and not especially husky of skull. I certainly wasn’t husky enough to fill out a helmet spec’d for your average male ironworker, which seemed to be all that was on offer.
I tried out a medium. Even when I cinched the plastic headband all the way, the hard hat swallowed my sorry little blond noggin.
“Yeah, laugh it up, Officer,” I said, while he did.
“Sorry, Doc. You look like a kid playing soldier!”
“Laugh it up,” I said again, because I wasn’t equipped, at that hour, to be clever.
Not all the workers were stuck outside in their pickups. A few men in hard hats stood around, waiting for work to get going. They shied away from me, in my medical examiner windbreaker, polyester slacks, and sensible shoes, like I was the angel of death collecting on a debt.
I found Donna. She’s hard to miss: more than six feet tall, eyes and beak like a hawk. Her hard hat fit just fine. She was leaning against the medical examiner removals van with Cameron Blake, her partner 2578—our bureaucratic shorthand for death scene investigators—on the night shift. Cam is round-faced and ruddy, half a foot shorter than Donna but just as brawny. He greeted me.
“Any coffee?” I said.
“The site superintendent says it’s brewing. First shift is just getting here. That’s how come they found the body. You want to talk to him?”
“The body?”
“The superintendent.”
“Let’s find out what the dead guy has to say first.”
Donna chuckled in a dark way. “Just you wait and see, Doc.”
The pair of 2578s led me across the construction site by flashlight. Work lights were coming on, but they left big dark gaps.
“Who found the body?”
Donna consulted her clipboard. “Dispatch says a worker named Samuel Urias, opening up after the night shift.”
The construction site by flashlight was a spooky place, even by my standards. Dirty yellow machines loomed in the beams, and plastic sheeting fluttered from the shadows. Our feet crunched on gravel, then whispered over packed dirt. The only thing that was well lit was a mobile office trailer, on a rise to our left, surrounded by silhouettes in hard hats.
Donna led us toward a detached flatbed trailer, parked with its landing-gear feet pressing into the dirt. It was loaded with long metal pipes, six or eight inches in diameter, in bundles of twenty or so. The bundles were bound together with tight black bands at either end and had been stacked four high on the flatbed. One of the bands securing the top bundle had snapped. It waved drunkenly in the air—and half a dozen pipes lay tumbled in the dirt.
Underneath them was a body.
It was a man. He was on his back. His head and shoulders were crushed under the pipes. He wore a business suit and black wingtip shoes, the left one coming off at the heel. His arms were flung out. I determined his race to be white from his hands, which offered the only visible skin. They were clean and uncalloused, fingernails manicured, wedding band on the left ring finger, a college ring on the right.
I shined my flashlight at the pipes. They had done a job on him. We walked around the body, looking for a pool of blood. There wasn’t one.
When I pointed this out, Donna elbowed Cameron and smirked. He scowled back.
“What?” I said.
“I noticed that too,” Donna said. “Cam thinks it’s no big deal.”
“Can we just get this guy out of here?” Cameron said. “The superintendent is antsy. He’s worried about press, and I don’t blame him.”
I crouched to take a closer look at that left shoe. The leather above the heel was badly scuffed. Same for the right one. The dead man’s pricey wool dress pants were torn at the hems. My flashlight picked up a faint trail in the dirt running away from his feet. I warned the 2578s to watch their step until the police crime scene unit had photographed the area.
“What—?” said Cam. “CSI isn’t here. This is an accident scene.”
“Get them. This is a suspicious death.”
“Oh, come on…”
“It’s fishy.” I pointed my flashlight around. “Where’s all the blood from that crush injury? There’s drag marks and damage to the clothing to match. Soft hands, expensive suit. Where’s his hard hat?”
“Maybe it’s under the pipes.”
“Maybe. But does this guy look like he belongs on a construction site, after hours? No way I’m assuming this was an accident.”
“Told you it was staged,” Donna said to Cam.
“Whatever,” he muttered back. He pulled out his phone, said good morning to the police dispatcher, and asked for the crime scene unit.
The sky was lightening behind the downtown towers a few blocks away, and more construction workers were starting to trickle in. “We need a perimeter,” I said. “And I want to talk to the man who found the body. Do we have a presumptive ID?”
“We found this just like you see it, and didn’t run his pockets yet,” Donna said.
“Let’s wait till crime scene documents everything before we touch him.”
Donna smiled. “Because this is fishy, right?”
I couldn’t help smiling back. “You won the bet. Leave Cam alone.” I started toward the lit-up office trailer.
“Where you going?” Donna said.
“Coffee.”
A figure in the small crowd huddling at the trailer saw me coming and met me halfway. He was a late-middle-aged white man with a gray mustache, dressed like a soccer dad in blue jeans and a collared shirt. No tie, no jacket, heavy work boots. He had a fancy hard hat. It said site super.
“Where’s the hearse?” the construction superintendent demanded.
I introduced myself and told him we were waiting for the police crime scene unit to arrive and document the scene.
“How long will that take?”
Fuck if I know, I thought. “It could be a while,” I said.
“What’s a while? We have work to do here.”
Bałwan. I grew up outside of Boston, but Polish is my first language. Sort of. My mother is from Poland and my father is a son of a bitch. Mamusia taught me and my brother Tomasz the mother tongue—which Dad doesn’t speak—and the three of us stuck with it inside the four walls of our three-decker flat on Pinkham Street in East Lynn. Mamusia said it was to preserve our heritage. It was also useful for hiding things from the old man.
Polish has a lot of terms for a son of a bitch. Bałwan was Mamusia’s word for her husband Arthur Teska on a good day. If he had been drinking, he was a sukinsyn. So far, the site superintendent was turning out to be a bałwan, but the day was young.
“First the police will do their job, then my colleagues and I will do our job, and then you can get back to yours.”
“But the police are already here, and they aren’t doing anything!”
“We’re waiting for the homicide division.”
The superintendent went pale and stammery. “Homicide—? But this isn’t… This is…”
“This is a death scene. It might be a crime scene. That’s for the police to determine before I can continue my investigation as the medical examiner, and certainly before we can remove or even touch that body.”
The superintendent said nothing. He dug into his pocket for a phone and walked away, dialing. Not an unusual reaction. People freak out when they hear homicide is coming.
Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell are the New York Times bestselling co-authors of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, and the novel First Cut. Dr. Melinek studied at Harvard and UCLA, was a medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. T.J. Mitchell, her husband, is a writer with an English degree from Harvard, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad to their children.
Today I am sharing on the blog tour for an action-packed new technothriller in the Net Force series originally created and written by Tom Clancy and Steve Pierczenik and now being written by Jerome Preisler. This Feature Post and Book Review is for NET FORCE: ATTACK PROTOCOL by Jerome Preisler which is the third book he has written for the series.
Below you will find an author Q&A, a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Author Q&A
1.Would you tell us more about the main characters from NET FORCE: ATTACK PROTOCOL?
Well, after introducing a rather large ensemble cast of characters in the first novel of the NET FORCE reboot, I focus on four or five in this book, including grey hat hacker Kali Alcazar and manhunter Mike Carmody in one major storyline, and John Howard and Julio Fernandez in a second. I also introduce two of my favorite characters ever, Mario and Laura, my two lovebirds. My bad guys are … mysterious. There’s a lot of character development, and Mario Perez and Laura Cruz, who came to me in a dream—complete with their introductory scene—add some light and humor to a sometimes dark, almost Gothic tale.
2. What should those new to the series know?
This isn’t their father’s NET FORCE. It propels the original concept of a cyber-security force into a modern, gritty new era full of slam-bang action. Think John Wick meets NET FORCE. I’m universe-building here and riding with my foot off the brake pedal. This is a COOL, contemporary series. Also, one of my strengths as a writer is characterization, and the characters on this series are among the best I’ve ever created. They are human and diverse and representative of the real world. I work hard to develop heroes that aren’t recycled stereotypes. The same is true for my villains.
3. What have been some challenges and some rewards from taking over a series originally created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik?
The challenges and rewards are often one and the same. The original series was a perennial bestseller, so I know I have to deliver on a big way. I know I have to satisfy old fans and simultaneously bring in new ones. To elaborate on that … I’m deeply appreciative of having a built-in readership. As someone who has worked with Tom and the Clancy franchise for long stretches over two or three decades, I feel a great responsibility to them. But I also want to grow the franchise. I want to open it up to a whole new audience. It’s a tough job—but somebody’s gotta do it!
4. What part or aspect of this series do you love the most?
The concept and characters are so rich, I can tell virtually any kind of story I want.
5. What are three things you have on your writing desk?
My computer, a cup of coffee, and a cat.
6. What character in the book really spoke to you?
All of them!
7. What is your favorite type of character to write about?
I like writing about men and women who are complex and have in many instances overcome—or are in the process of overcoming—some tough situations in life. They’ve wrestled with or are wrestling with demons. My heroes and villains are real human beings to me. They’ve experienced certain things and made certain choices. Where those choices lead them fascinates and occasionally surprises me.
8. How did you get into writing?
I picked up a pen and started writing my first novel at age 10. By the time I was eleven, I was typing it all out. And I was doomed.
9. Who is your writing inspiration?
I have a whole lot. Tolkien, Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Chandler, Ed McBain, Pete Hamill, Harper Lee, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein (while we’re doing the “Roberts”) … the great thriller writer Charles Godey. Tom Clancy, of course! Barbara Tuchman, who made history readable. Stan Lee! Ian Fleming! Bob Dylan! Charles Bukowski! The list goes on and on. And on …
10. What theme or message do you hope readers will take away from your ex book?
There’s hope. With love and faith and courage, there is always hope.
11. What drew you into this particular genre?
I’ve written in almost every genre, maybe in part because I’ve enjoyed books in every genre. For me a story is a story. While I understand as a craftsman that every genre has its requirements, the main thing is that the writing has to be good.
12. If you could sit down with any character in your book, what would you ask them and why?
“Kali, may I have this dance?” ‘Nuff said! (Now I’m even SOUNDING like Stan Lee!)
13. What social media site has been the most helpful in developing your readership?
I think Goodreads is pretty good …
14. What advice would you give to aspiring or just starting authors out there?
You have to invest yourself. Write with commitment and discipline. Write hard. Don’t do it to get rich, because you probably won’t. Write to be good.
15. What does the future hold in store for you? Any new books/projects on the horizon?
My next Net Force novella, then my next NET FORCE novel, then the NET FORCE novella and novel after that… hopefully for a while to come. Also, GAME FACE, the autobiography I co-authored with Hall of Fame basketball great Bernard King was optioned for film a while back and just acquired an incredible producer … but I can’t say who that is till it’s officially announced. Finally my new historical nonfiction, CIVIL WAR COMMANDO: William Cushing and the Daring Raid to Sink the CSS Albemarle, was published in November and I’m hoping people will check it out. Oh—I want to sleep in. Someday. Just for a few hours.
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Book Summary
The cutting-edge Net Force thriller series, created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik and written by Jerome Preisler reveals the invisible battlefield where the war for global dominance is fought.
In the wake of stunning terrorist attacks around the world, Net Force jumps into action. The president’s new cybersecurity agency homes in on a dangerous figure operating in the shadows of the Carpathian mountains. And he’s ready to strike again, using the digital space to advance his destructive goals.
But before Net Force can get boots on the ground, the master hacker and his cadre mount a devastating high tech assault against the agency’s military threat-response unit. Has a Net Force insider turned traitor? The stakes are suddenly ratcheted higher when a global syndicate of black hat hackers and a newly belligerent Russia hatch an ambitious scheme to plunge the United States into a crippling war—one that will leave Moscow and its Dark Web allies supreme.
Their attack protocol: to seize control of the Internet, and open the door for a modern, nuclear Pearl Harbor…unless the men and women of Net Force can stop them
NET FORCE: ATTACK PROTOCOL by Jerome Preisler is the latest book in the continuation of the technothiller series created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. The series is set in 2023 and follows Net Force, a government cybersecurity agency established to fight against on-line terrorism and for internet control. This book can be read as a fast-paced standalone thriller.
Net Force is established and attacked simultaneously in New York City as the President of the United States is announcing their creation. The agents are now on the hunt for a dangerous cybercriminal deep in the Carpathian mountains. As one team is chasing this shadowy figure, he has mounted a high-tech attack against the agency’s military threat response base.
Unless the men and women of Net Force can stop this syndicate of terrorists, they will seize control of the internet and open the door for a modern nuclear Pearl Harbor.
This thriller starts off at a fast-pace and never lets up. The plot twists and danger to the main characters kept me turning the pages. I love all the high-tech gadgets and even though this series is set in 2023, I believe much of the tech is probably used now and is not as futuristic as when the original series began. The author does a good job of balancing exposition and dialogue. Even though the overall plot arc and characters are continued from book one, Net Force: Dark Web, this book can still pull you in and you never feel lost.
I recommend this new technothriller and I am looking forward to more books in this series.
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Excerpt
1
Satu Mare District, Romania
The first snowfall of the season was dusting the banks of the Somes River when a catastrophic failure struck the power grid, plunging the western third of the country into darkness.
Nicu Borgos was just an hour into his midnight shift when things went wrong. An operator for Satu Mare District’s Electrica Power Distribution Center, he was tired from caring for his daughter, who was seven and sick with the flu. His wife, Balia, a sales clerk at a clothing store, was also miserably under the weather, and he had been doing his best to help her as well. But money was tight and, like him, Balia needed to work and bring in a paycheck.
The night before, she had come home from the shop, put chest rub on Angela, tucked her in, showered, and climbed into bed with her dinner untouched. Nicu normally slept until 9:00 p.m. or even a little later, but the sounds Angela was making in her room concerned him. He had lost his dear mother to the pandemic three years ago, and the outbreaks still could be vicious.
Taking no chances, he’d resolved to stay up to check on the child, poking his head through the doorway every fifteen or twenty minutes. It was a while before she settled in.
So Nicu was worn out and bleary, which might have been why he doubted his eyes when he saw the cursor suddenly drifting across his screen. The computer was networked into the energy grid, and the numbered blue buttons on its display controlled the circuit breakers for ten substations throughout the county—an area of almost seventeen hundred square miles, with some three hundred thousand residents.
The cursor landed on the switch for Substation One. Clicked. A dialogue window opened below the button:
Warning: Opening the breaker will result in
complete shutdown. Do you wish to proceed?
YES NO
Reaching for his mouse, Nicu tried to drag the cursor out of the window, thinking its driver might have developed a minor glitch. But it remained there…and slid to Yes.
He quickly swiped the mouse across its pad, wanting to move the cursor to No.
It stayed on Yes. Clicked. The dialogue box vanished, and the button for Substation One changed from blue to red.
Nicu inhaled. He had been an operator at the distribution center for half a decade and did not need to bring up a map to see the region each substation covered. The map was already in his head.
Substation One was Lazuli, a rural commune of six villages to the extreme north, near the Ukrainian and Hungarian borders. Its six thousand residents had now gone off-line. Even as Nicu registered this, the on-screen cursor jumped to the Substation Two button.
He snatched up the mouse in desperation, lifting it above the pad. It made no difference. The cursor clicked. Opened another dialogue window requesting confirmation. Went to Yes again.
Click.
Blue turned to red, and Nicu Borgos watched Substation Two go down in an instant.
“Draga meu Domnezeu,” he rasped. “My dear God.”
Substation Two was the city of Satu Mare itself. With a population of one hundred thousand—a full third of the county’s inhabitants—it was now completely dark.
Nicu tried to think clearly. During the day, the operating station would have two people on shift. There was a second computer to his left, with a separate monitor. Possibly the problem was only with his machine. If he could log in to the system using the other computer, he might prevent more breakers from tripping open.
He rolled his chair in front of it, tapped the keyboard. The computer came out of idle showing the operator log-in screen. He entered his username and password.
A Wrong Password notification flashed on-screen.
He slowly retyped the password, thinking he might have entered a wrong character in his haste.
The notification appeared again. He was locked out of the system.
Nicu sat up straight, his spine a stiff rod of tension. His original machine showed that Substation Three, which provided power to Negresti Oas’s twelve thousand citizens, was down. He glanced at its screen just in time to see the cursor move to Substation Four…the distribution station for the commune Mediesu Aurit’s seven villages. The two stations combined served more than twenty thousand customers.
He remembered that tonight’s temperature was forecast to drop below freezing in the mountain areas, and felt suddenly helpless. Whatever was causing the shutdowns, he could not deal with the growing emergency himself.
His heart pounding, he reached for the hotline to call his supervisor.
The black BearCat G3 bore north on the unmarked strip of macadam that linked Satu Mare City to the tiny farming village of Rosalvea in the Carpathian foothills. Its windshield wipers beating off fat, wet flutters of snow, the vehicle moved smoothly and quietly for a big four-tonner armored with hardened ballistic steel panels.
At the wheel was Scott Dixon of the CIA’s elite manhunting Fox Team, recently placed under operational detachment to Net Force. Kali Alcazar sat beside him. In her late twenties, she had short silver-white hair and wore a black stealthsuit and lightweight plate vest. They were standard organizational issue. A Victorian English adventurer’s belt and a vintage film-canister pendant hanging from her neck were personal additions.
“How we doing timewise?” Dixon asked.
Kali looked at her dash screen. On it was the same controller’s interface Nicu Borgos was struggling with at the power distribution center. A moment ago she had seen the circuits trip in rapid succession.
“Pickles,” she said. Using the unfortunate name given to the vehicle’s AI by its architect, Sergeant Julio Fernandez.
“Yes, K?”
“Outlier,” she corrected. Using the dark web handle she had long ago created for herself.
“Yes, K.”
“Bring up the Satu Mare power grid.”
“Yes, K.”
She clicked her tongue. Fernandez had infused the AI with one too many of his stubbornly aggravating personality traits. But the upside was that, like Julio, it was also smart, nuanced, and intuitive. She could live with it.
In front of her now, the panel on-screen was replaced by a sector-by-sector map of the region, its cities and towns numbered according to the substations that supplied their electricity. The five already off-line were black, the rest red.
She watched as a sixth went dark.
“Over half the stations are down,” she said. “Total blackout in about five minutes.”
“Bitter cold out, a quarter million people without light or heat,” Dixon said. “Women, children, seniors. All for the sake of bagging one guy.”
She glanced over at him. “The hackers—the technologie vampiri—are the local economy. The government protects them. The polizei, the citizens, everyone.”
He shrugged with his hands on the wheel. She was right. Suspicions definitely would have been raised at the syndicate’s current headquarters— the Wolf’s Lair—if they only cut power to its surrounding village.
“I get it,” he said. “Still tough.”
“Tougher than it was on New York?”
Dixon didn’t answer. Four months ago the vampiri had launched a cyberattack that left the East Coast a shambles, killed hundreds, and almost took out the President. Now his team’s pursuit of the Wolf had led them out here to the Romanian boonies, making them key players in the first fully integrated operation conducted by the various elements of America’s new Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement. Net Force, in bureaucratic government shorthand.
He really did get it.
The BearCat rolled between the gigantic evergreens standing sentinel on either side of the road. In the rear compartment, Gregg Long, Fox Team, sat with a small detachment on loan from Task Force Quickdraw—six men in tactical gear with Mark 18 CQBR carbines strapped over their shoulders and short-barreled Mossberg 590 combat shotguns racked to the sides of the passenger compartment.
“Distance to the target?” Dixon asked after a few minutes.
This time Kali skipped the AI, tapping her computer keyboard for the GPS sat map. “Thirty-two miles.”
Dixon nodded and checked the speedometer. He was doing about fifty. So a little over half an hour.
Taking his hand off the wheel, he adjusted his earpiece and hailed Carmody on the ground-to-air.
Jerome Preisler is the prolific author of almost forty books of fiction and narrative nonfiction, including all eight novels in the New York Times bestselling TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS series. His latest book is DARK WEB, the first novel in a relaunch of the New York Times bestselling NET FORCE series co-created Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Forthcoming in November 2020 is his next NET FORCE novel, ATTACK PROTOCOL. Jerome lives in New York City and coastal Maine.
VENOMOUS (Adam Black Book #3) by Karl Hill is the latest fast paced thriller in the Adam Black series by this new to me author and I cannot believe I have not read this series before now. Similar to a Jack Reacher archetype lone wolf, one-man justice system, Adam Black is back. Even though this is the third book in the series, it is easily read as a standalone and I am looking forward to going back to read books one and two.
Adam Black is a retired SAS officer recruited by the Colonel for a secret operation to save the life of the Prime minister’s daughter who has been abducted.
The abduction is identical to the serial killer, The Red Serpent’s previous abductions and murders, but the psychopath has been convicted and in prison for the last six months. Adam Black is tasked with infiltrating Shotts prison and finding out what the Red Serpent knows about this new abduction.
As Black works to get closer to The Red Serpent, he is betrayed. Now he must find a way to escape.
On the run from authorities, Black is determined to save the Prime Minister’s daughter and discover the identity of the current killer.
I love this type of thriller for the pure escapism. The strong main character who is a killing machine with his own set of morals. This book does contain a lot of blood and violence as others in this sub-genre. The author’s writing effortlessly pulled me in and I just fell into the story with all the action, secrets, plot twists and a hero to cheer for. I love Adam Black and I hope to be reading many more of his adventures.
Karl Hill is the pen name of Kenny Hill, a Scottish lawyer, living in the village of Eaglesham, on the outskirts of Glasgow.
During winter, the weather can be harsh, the snow sometimes falling over two feet deep. He had a chihuahua called Rambo, who hated the snow. Sadly, Rambo died, and is greatly missed. When it snows, Kenny thinks about Rambo. Kenny’s protagonist, Adam Black, doesn’t worry about the snow. Nor does he have a chihuahua.
TRAUMA by Dylan Young is a new medical psychological suspense/thriller by a new to me author that I could not put down! You see the entire story through the eyes, fugues and minimal memories of the protagonist who is working to recover from a severe brain injury.
Cameron Todd and his live-in girlfriend, Emma are on vacation in Turkey when his entire world changes forever. Emma is found dead after falling from a cliff and Cameron is found almost dead having severe head trauma and multiple broken bones after falling. Cameron is pulled from the marina waters and returned to London for recovery.
The Turkish and English police have many questions, but Cameron has no memories. The doctors all believe Cameron’s amnesia is real due to his extensive brain injury, but the police and Emma’s family are skeptical.
The more Cameron recovers, the more he wants to find out what really happened on that cliff. Did he hurt Emma, or is his injured brain trying to tell him he is not responsible for Emma death and the sinister truth is in his fugue memories of that day in Turkey?
I loved this book! It starts off with a prologue that pulls you right in, but you do not know if it is a real memory or not. Then the remainder of the story’s pace is a slow burn that keeps building towards the surprising climax. Cameron is a protagonist that is written with a deep understanding of his brain trauma and its limitations without getting too technical and bogged down in medical terminology. The brain trauma is what makes you question every bit of information Cameron gives the reader. Cameron’s family and his few friends are fully fleshed secondary characters. This is also the first book I have read to include the Covid-19 pandemic and it does not take over the story.
I can highly recommend this suspense/thriller by Mr. Young! Keep a few hours free because you are going to find it difficult to stop turning the pages.
Dylan Young was born in a mining village in the Swansea valley in Wales where he attended primary and secondary schools. In 1974, he was offered a place at Medical school in London and qualified in 1979. Medicine and a family followed, but writing as Dylan Jones, he published 4 novels in the nineties, two of which were filmed by the BBC. In 2011, Random House re-released two of the books in the Natalie Vine series as ebooks.
Dylan Jones now writes children’s fiction as Rhys A Jones and contemporary urban fantasy as DC farmer. But crime never went away. The first in his new series featuring Detective Inspector Anna Gwynne, is due for release in January 2018. Two more books will follow.
Dylan Lives with his wife in West Wales where the landscape (and the weather!) provide ample inspiration for his books.
