NOVELS & NOVELLAS
Late spring, 1945. Berlin has fallen to the Russians. In the wreckage, an Abwehr colonel on the run and a Red Army commissar on the make agree to a devil’s bargain. That secret casts a shadow across twenty years. During the Cold War, KGB mounts a false-flag operation against American military targets, with the blame to fall on radical Left terrorists, Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades. But the hidden past is coming back to haunt the present, and two unlikely allies, a U.S. Army CID investigator and a Russian security service major, find themselves in the crosshairs. Each of them has their own dog in the fight, and not enough trust to go around, while the clock runs out.
THE BONE HARVEST is a Cold War spy story that takes place in the early days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - a grudge match between an American military intelligence op, Dix Apodaca, and the KGB colonel Ilya Vlasov, complicated by the competing interests of the Afghan resistance, the Pakistani security services, the traffic in illegal weapons and drugs, and the inner rivalries of the intelligence community. Dix is caught up in a power struggle, not just with the Russians, but with false friends in the shadows, to whom he’s no more than a pawn on the chess board, in a shifting landscape of betrayal.
Late spring, 1971. Dix Apodaca, a U.S. Air Force sergeant back in Berlin after a tour in Viet Nam, gets sucked into the antiwar movement - and a KGB deception operation. Martina Böhm, a German student and a poster girl for the Revolution, looks like a potential recruit for the Soviet spy service, and Dix suspects she’d be easily led. But the Russians are playing a double game, and Dix and Martina are both disposable assets. Uneasy with each other, and with the parts they’ve been asked to play, the two of them are caught in a trap of their own making - physical desire, duty, idealism, hope. Neither of them are any match in tradecraft for the canny and careful Major Petrokhin, KGB’s troubleshooter, sent from Moscow with the specific brief to lure a moth to the flame. Martina Böhm presents a target of opportunity, and Dix Apodaca an inconvenience.
1944, the Ardennes forest, Belgium. Hitler launches a last, desperate offensive against the Allies in the West. The attack is spearheaded by an SS battle group hardened on the Eastern Front, who bring their own brutal efficiency to the operation, and give no quarter to captured American GI’s. Escaping a mass execution, two U.S. soldiers gather fresh weapons from their own dead, and follow the German column, bent on revenge. The odds are against them. The enemy tanks, heavily armored, and winter weather closing in, the hand of Fate tightening, like an iron fist.
SHORT STORIES
Step on a crack
It’s said things come in threes, a run of good luck at cards, a run of bad luck in love. But the penny doesn’t always drop until the third time around. Come the third time, you snap your mental fingers, and tell yourself, I knew that.
blood money
Blood Money is a collection of the Placido Geist bounty hunter stories, including a previously unpublished novella, "Doubtful Canyon"
Cover of Darkness
McElroy made the dive from a point on the riverbank a thousand yards upstream from the triangulated position of the wreckage. The skin of ice sighed as he slipped under it, and the dark water closed over his head like a shroud.
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Murder neat
Murder, Neat is an anthology from the mystery writers website SleuthSayers, with a new Mickey Counihan story
HOW TO ELECTROCUTE AN ELEPHANT
Topsy killed George Fennady today. She maneuvered him into the corner of her pen and crushed him against the walls. It may have been an accident, of course, but I doubt it. This is the third death she’s caused in three years.
