As you may remember, I reviewed Kerry Patton’s first book, Contracted: America’s Secret Warriors, and enjoyed the hell out of it. It wasn’t much of an action novel, but more of a novelization of real-world operations in Afghanistan. Well, I have to say, for his second book, Kerry has dialed things up a notch. This is more of a globe-hopping espionage novel, though it retains the same authenticity and realistic tone of the first book. This time the target is not the Taliban, but rather Hezbollah. US intelligence has become so Al Qaeda fixated in recent years that Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist group prior to 9/11, has largely dropped off the radar. I won’t go into the twists and turns of the plot, mainly because I don’t want to give anything away. It is twisting and turning, too. Determining who is friend or foe, or simply dealing with foes out of necessity is constant throughout the story. There’s not a huge amount of action, but there’s tension a-plenty. Kerry has a way of hitting the reader with sudden changes in the situation, hard and fast. The mission also becomes personal for
A Silver Cross and a Winchester Snippet 3
I uploaded the interior file for A Silver Cross and a Winchester to Createspace today. We’ll have a cover soon, and shortly after that, it will be out. In the meantime, here’s another short snippet. ********************************* The Senator’s body hitting the grass didn’t let down her sacrificial victim. He still hovered in the air, bound with the unnatural cords, his eyes still rolled back in his head. Only now his head lolled around to stare at me with unseeing eyes. “Too…late…” croaked out of his open mouth, without any movement of his lips or jaws. “Mine…now…” I levered another round into the Winchester’s chamber, and leveled the gold bead sight on his heart, reciting a prayer of exorcism. The body jerked and danced like a puppet, but did not lower, and the black tendrils only tightened. “No…mine…” “Go back where you came from,” I demanded. “Or I’ll send you there with a quickness, and it’ll hurt a lot more.” I didn’t really want to shoot the poor sucker who was the chosen vessel for this thing, but if that was the way to keep the demon in the Abyss, you’d better believe I’d drop the hammer on him.
You Can Preorder My First SOFREP Ebook
My first SOFREP ebook, “Operation Red Wings,” about the recovery effort for Marcus Luttrell and his team in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in 2005, is now up on Amazon for preorder.I wrote this for SOFREP about a month ago. It’s short, but to the point. There’s some stuff in here that hasn’t been told before. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Red-Wings-Survivor-ebook/dp/B00F8HCAQW/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_d_1
A Request
Okay, folks, I’m really not all that good at asking for help. It took two weeks to force myself to write this post. But here it is: I can’t sell these books by myself. I need you guys to help out. Now, I’m not asking for you to trumpet this post to the four corners of the earth, or buy extra books (though if you haven’t bought my books, you totally should). No, I just need some help with Amazon. You see, as an independent author, I get the most visibility on Amazon through reviews. The more reviews, the more it fits into Amazon’s algorithms, and the more visible it becomes. Since this blog and the FB page are really the only outlets where I promote my stuff, you can see how important those reviews can be. So here’s all I’m asking: if you’ve read my books, and liked ’em, please take five minutes, go on Amazon, and write a review. It’ll help me out a lot, and help get more Praetorian ass-kickery coming down the pipe in the future.
A Silver Cross and a Winchester, Snippet 2
I finished the first draft of A Silver Cross and a Winchester last night. So, in honor of finishing, here’s another snippet. ************** The cliff curved around the back of the house, with about a hundred yards of tall firs between it and the yard. Firelight was flickering through the tops of the firs. I could just hear voices on the wind, unintelligible but definitely there. I didn’t dare stop and listen yet, though; I had to put some distance between myself and the skinny’s corpse. If our suspicions were correct about what was going on tonight, though, I didn’t really want to hear what was going on down there. Actually, the presence of skinnies did a pretty good job of confirming our suspicions. You didn’t have skinnies as watchdogs unless you were already pretty far down the wrong road. What had brought me out here in the first place was an unexplained death. One of the Senator’s constituents stood up in a town hall meeting and accused the Senator of corruption and misuse of public funds. What’s more, she had the documents to prove it. Two days later, the constituent, by the name of Linda Robinson,
An Interview
My friend Hank Brown, over at Two Fisted Blogger, has just put up an interview we did a month or two ago, going into a little more depth on the development of the American Praetorians series. Go check it out. http://twofistedblogger.blogspot.com/2013/09/interview-with-peter-nealen.html Hank’s a hell of a writer himself; I’ve read and enjoyed both of his paramilitary thrillers, Hell and Gone and Tier Zero. If you enjoy my books, go and check out Hank’s. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
First Look at “A Silver Cross and a Winchester”
I realized I’m almost finished with this project, but haven’t put much out about it. It’s a bit of a departure from my earlier stuff–more horror/fantasy. Think Larry Correia‘s Monster Hunter series with a little bit of Dresden Files, all with my own touch. So, without further ado, the first snippet from A Silver Cross and a Winchester. ***** Leaving my old truck parked a half mile away, I slipped through the dappled shadows toward the house. The woods were thick, which under most circumstances would mean I had plenty of concealment to make my way unobserved. Tonight, I had no such illusions. The house (house, hell, it was a multi-million-dollar mansion set in the hills above the tiny town of Morton) had state-of-the-art security, both electronic and human. This was only to be expected, since it was, after all, a Senator’s private getaway. Yes, you heard that right. I was on my way to break into a Senator’s vacation home. Wait until you hear the good part. The physical security wasn’t what I was worried about. I was a ghost in the woods even before I started this job, and that was a long time ago. The alarm systems