Southland Noir
Egan Walsh fights British security forces in Ireland as a member of an IRA flying column, an elite mobile strike unit during the Irish War of independence in 1919-1921. Walsh participates in some of the bloodiest engagements against special British counterinsurgency forces in County Cork. When hostilities end, Walsh is dismayed by the possibility of civil war between opposing factions of the IRA disputing the terms of the treaty, forcing him to leave Ireland for America to find his own peace.
In Boston, Walsh returns to his prewar career as a newspaper reporter. He publishes a successful novel based on his experiences in Ireland that leads to the opportunity to adapt his novel as a silent movie bringing him to Hollywood.
Southland Noir is a tour de force taking the reader from rebellion in the South of Ireland to Southern California during a unique era of growth, mixed with the glitterati of Hollywood, robber barons, and uncommon criminals.
Moscow Winter
Viktor Neiman was born in Moscow to a Jewish professional family. The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the last Romanoff Tsar and brought the communist Bolsheviks into power. Civil war followed. At the age of nine, Neiman fled with an aunt and uncle to Paris leaving behind his parents to care for his grandparents. As professionals, Neiman’s parents fell victim to Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938, subsequently dying in forced labor camps of the Soviet Gulag.
In 1940, the invasion of France by Nazi Germany forced Neiman to flee his adopted country for the United States. immediately following Pearl Harbor, he joined the U.S. Army as an officer. With fluency in French, the newly created OSS recruited him beginning a career in intelligence.
Following the end of WWII, with the disbanding of the OSS, Neiman moved to Washington remaining in the U.S. State Department in the Bureau of Intelligence & Research. It is from this position that professional circumstances returns him to Paris. He reunites with the Resistance woman that saved his life during the war that also brings him into the circle of the anti-Soviet expatriate community in Paris.
Circumstances combine to draw Neiman into an unofficial adhoc espionage operation working from Paris against the Soviet Union. Spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain play out life and death struggles in this story of suspense set in the early years of the Cold War.
Havana
Havana, Cuba in 1957 was the original gambling sin city. The haunt of the wealthy and famous offering gambling, sex, and drugs in an exotic Caribbean setting only 90 miles from Florida. Luxury casinos with five-star hotels, fine dining, and elaborate floorshows with scantily clad beautiful women. A corrupt dictatorship inviting investment by the American Mafia fuels Havana’s hospitality industry success.
Cuban-American Bart Landeira resigns from the CIA in disgust after working as a field operative following service in WWII. Havana is to be a new beginning. He returns to journalism and unexpectedly becomes involved with the family rum business. Reconnecting with his estranged father, he learns disturbing details of his father’s involvement with the American Mafia and Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Landeira’s father is a lawyer with a consulting practice in Tampa, Florida and Havana. The elder Landeira is also chief financial officer of the family corporation invested in sugar cane, tobacco, and rum. His father’s consulting work centers on creating shell companies to enable money laundering and conceal Mafia investment in Havana. Batista’s corrupt partnership with the Mafia fuels a growing leftist insurgency resulting in violent attempts at repression by the Cuban Army. Events interact to push Landeira into active political resistance against the Mafia and the Batista regime.
The American Spy
With fluency in several languages, the U.S. Army assigns Spencer Fleming to intelligence following graduation from the West Point military academy in 1915. His first assignment, the Mexican border campaign to destroy Pancho Villa in 1916, follows with assignment to General Pershing’s staff of the AEF in France as America enters WWI in 1917.
During his service in Mexico and France, he came to the attention of influential senior officers for his intelligence work from the front lines earning several citations for valor. Subsequent diplomatic assignments following WWI provided the perfect background for eventual assignment as military attaché to Germany in 1933.
Essentially diplomats, military attachés gather only available information of military value from the host country. To acquire secret information requires espionage penetration by foreign intelligence operatives.
Prior to the onset of WWII, the United States did not have a foreign intelligence service. Having risen to power in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s provocative pronouncements threaten German territorial expansion through military means. The result, another great multinational European war. Discovering opportunities to go beyond the narrow confines of gathering military information of interest only to the War Department, Fleming enters the dangerous world of espionage to discover Nazi secrets useful to U.S. policymakers.
Hunting Odessa
American Marc Fraser and his French wife Fiona Marchand flee occupied France and the Nazi Gestapo to neutral Switzerland in 1943. With their backgrounds and language skills Allen Dulles, head of American OSS intelligence in Europe, recruits them as agents. Marchand goes to Italy to liaison with Italian partisans. Fraser works from Switzerland to recruit Germans willing to become intelligence sources for the Allies as German defeat becomes certain.
Fraser recruits a Nazi SS lawyer managing SS Swiss bank accounts as an intelligence source. Fearing capture and prosecution for war crimes, the lawyer succumbs to pressure to hand over control of the SS money when Germany surrenders in May 1945.
Post-WWII, Fraser and Marchand conspire with a Jewish British Army officer to use the SS money to finance smuggling of Jewish Holocaust survivors to Palestine. Fraser and Marchand then use the SS money to embark on a mission to uncover fugitive Nazi SS war criminals. Violent confrontations follow as they confront former SS attempting to escape to South America using ratlines operated by sympathetic Catholic clergy in Rome.
Endgame
Professor Victoria Prescott receives an urgent request to come to Paris from General Anton Grigoryev of Russian foreign intelligence. 20 years earlier, Grigoryev assisted her in researching WWII Soviet archives during the glasnost period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. That access led Prescott discovering a previously unknown Soviet spy within the WWII Manhattan Project.
In Paris, Grigoryev is now seeking to defect to the United States. In exchange for asylum, he gives her ultra-secret electronic files. The information provides irrefutable evidence of the theft of Russian thermonuclear warheads now in the hands of Iran. Additional documents expose a vast international financial conspiracy by the Putin regime to launder Russian money in the West.
Prescott believes the current administration will confiscate and bury the Russian corruption material under the cloak of national security. Yet she must expose the missing nuclear warheads.
To satisfy both objectives, she turns to investigative journalist, Mark Reynolds who exposed Russian wrongdoing years earlier. They decide to release everything publicly to remove the government’s ability to control the information.
THE IRISH SPY
During WWI Irish-American Army officer, Trevor Sullivan is wounded on the Western Front serving with the famous Lost Battalion. At the end of the war he marries an Irish woman studying art in Paris. Both their families have a history of Irish rebellion against British rule. By 1920, Ireland is again in the throes of armed rebellion. Unlike the Easter Rising of 1916, this time the Irish population supports independence.
Sullivan’s first visit to Ireland ends in personal tragedy drawing him into the conflict fueled by revenge and hereditary resentment to British rule. Experiencing the oppression of ethnic Catholics in Ulster by the Protestant loyalist majority supported by British Crown security forces provokes him to offer his services as a spy for the IRA.
A rogue intelligence unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary emerges as the central enemy in the North of Ireland. Reinforced by a new auxiliary police force, the RIC launches a campaign to crush the Belfast IRA through terror using torture and extra-judicial murder. Sullivan embarks on a singular mission to help the beleaguered republican cause.
PROVOKE THE DEVIL
The time is a cauldron of social and political discord throughout the world brought together in a perfect storm of circumstances. The world-wide Great Depression cause desperate conditions for the world's working classes giving rise to popular movements that threatened old social orders and weak republican govern-. By the late 1930s Europe was again poised to explode into a great conflict.
American journalist and photographer Marc Fraser exposes a scandal of high-level corruption in Los Angeles that leads to a European assignment to cover the rising tensions brewing in Europe in the early 1930s. After covering Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany he covers the erupting civil war in Spain.
Reporting from the National revel side, Fraser is appalled by the murder, rape, and torture of civilians. Unwilling to bend to the military censors he embarks upon a dangerous attempt to inform the world by smuggling out condemning reports and photographs.
Spain becomes the reliminary round to WWII. When France is invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940, Fraser is trapped in his adopted home Paris, once again confronted with a brutal Fascist regime.
FAULT LINES
Victor Castell agrees to spend the summer with his mother in her native El Salvador. He has just graduated from college in the United States. It is 1989.
El Salvador is convulsing in a brutal civil war that has waged for years between the right-wing military backed government funded by U.S. aid, and a populist insurgency. With influential family on both extremes of this political divide, Castell is drawn into the sphere of his left-leaning university professor uncle, an outspoken critic of the ruling regime. Here he meets Patricia Reyes and begins an intense love affair.
Castell becomes personally caught up in the ugly realities of the civil war. Unknown to Castell, Reyes is involved with an anti-American terrorist group headed by the charismatic Santiago Molina. Circumstances entangle him within the murderous realm of international terrorism.
That was twenty-five years ago. Living in California, Castell realizes the past was not buried deeply enough.
CRITICAL MASS
Would history be changed with the discovery of another highly placed Soviet spy within the WWII Manhattan Project? Such a spy had always been the subject of speculation. The impact of the principle Soviet spy, Klaus Fuchs, would take on new significance with this parallel super spy. What if that spy also continued to provide the Soviet Union with U.S. nuclear weapons intelligence related to the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb development after WWII? History would conclude that Soviet espionage penetration was decidedly instrumental in advancing Soviet nuclear weapons development by years. That would arguably make this newly discovered spy singularly instrumental in advancing what became the Cold War.
Historian Victoria Prescott believes she has identified such a Soviet spy after 50 years. Her obsession follows a pattern of research never before pursued, uncovering irrefutable evidence. If the aging spy can be persuaded to confess once confronted with the evidence, her book will become not only an academic coup but a commercial blockbuster.
This is a story about the making of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of espionage, treachery, and betrayal played out against the backdrop of that extraordinary scientific effort.
EVERMORE
Literary agent Allison Kryszka travels to the South of France to see her longtime author-client Elliot Gaston. He first tells her of his terminal illness, but shocks her with his assertion that he is over 100 years old, born in the United States as Dillan Murphy.
Gaston-Murphy presents her with a manuscript then begins to recount his strange life narrative to her. Spanning the entire twentieth century as a journalist and writer, he attempts to convince her of the truth of his longevity. By reliving events of his life with such detail, he hopes that she will accept what seems impossible in order to publish his manuscript.
The story of Dillan Murphy is a personal saga starting with turn of the 20th century New York City. Through the two world wars and the post-WWll regional conflicts., his personal story is replete with adventure, tragedies, and triumphs. Underlying these adventures is the difficulty of changing identities to disguise his abnormal longevity.
SHELL GAME
While on assignment in Africa, New York investigative journalist Mark Reynolds learns of a disaster in Nigeria. He is the first foreign journalist to arrive at the site of an industrial chemical leak that has killed hundreds.
Digging through a cover of foreign subsidiaries, Reynolds learns that the principal shareholder of the chemical plant is a large U.S.-based corporation, Martinelli Global, Inc. MGI fits perfectly as the poster child for his series of articles on globalization.
But MGI is more than just a multi-national corporation aggressively pursuing profits. MGI has for decades invested in operations in some of the World’s riskiest places to do business using corruption as their business model. To mask their illegal activities from Western regulatory scrutiny, MGI has structured an elaborate web of foreign subsidiaries and tax-haven shell companies.
As Reynolds probes deeper into MGI, his opponent retaliates with its considerable power and influence. The intimidation and violence ratchet upward threatening to destroy Reynolds.
TAKE FIVE
TAKE FIVE is an eclectic collection of provocative stories that will take you down unexpected alleyways …
Dreams is a macabre interplay of reality and the unconscious imagination.
Parfum de Femme is a sexually charged romp through the world of haute couture marketing.
Evermore follows one man’s unusually long journey that starts in the nineteenth century and continues into the twenty-first.
In e-mail, the Internet extends a global reach of elaborate revenge from Washington, D.C. to Central America.
From the Situation Room, the President and his senior staff try to control escalating events as the world moves closer to nuclear cataclysm.
BELFAST
The Republic of Ireland came into being in 1921, at the end of a bloody insurrection against the British. However, the treaty left the northern six counties under British sovereignty. Since that time, the Protestant majority has dominated the poorer Catholic populace. In 1972, British troops fired on demonstrators, launching more than twenty-five years of sectarian violence and acts of terrorism from both sides.
Mason Devereux, an American freelance photojournalist, is drawn into doing a project on the Northern Ireland troubles. Devereux makes contact with the Irish Republican Army and pitches a proposal. The I.R.A. is interested in publicity showing Protestant paramilitaries’ violence against Catholics.
A deal is struck and Devereux is given access to extraordinary photo opportunities. He accepts the I.R.A.’s assistance, but finds his own way to get incriminating photographs of the I.R.A. own terror tactics. As his duplicity unravels, Devereux finds himself locked in a personal life and death struggle with a renegade I.R.A. faction led by a 1970’s legendary gunman.