In an attempt to gain congressional approval for a top-secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist “Bird” McIntyre teams up with sexy, outspoken neocon Angel Templeton to pit the American public against the Chinese. When Bird fails to uncover an authentic reason to slander the nation, he and Angel put the Washington media machine to work, spreading a rumor that the Chinese secret service is working to assassinate the Dalai Lama.

Meanwhile in China, mild-mannered President Fa Mengyao and his devoted aide Gang are maneuvering desperately against sinister party hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han. Now Fa and Gang must convince the world that the People’s Republic is not out to kill the Dalai Lama, while maintaining Fa’s small margin of power in the increasingly militaristic environment of the party.

On the home front, Bird must contend with a high-strung wife who entertains Olympic equestrian ambition, and the qualifying competition happens to be taking place in China. As things unravel abroad, Bird and Angel’s lie comes dangerously close to reality. And as their relationship rises to a new level, so do mounting tensions between the United States and China.

About Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, “the quintessential political novelist of his time” according to Fortune magazine, is the winner of the distinguished ninth annual Thurber Prize for American Humor. Tom Wolfe has described him as “one of the funniest writers in the English language.” Buckley is the author of twelve books, many of them national bestsellers, including Thank You For Smoking, God Is My Broker, No Way To Treat A First Lady, Florence of Arabia, and the memoir Losing Mum and Pup.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Defense lobbyist Walter “Bird” McIntyre is not having a good day, for his big push for aerospace contractor Groepping-Sprunt to secure a multi-billion dollar contract for drones the size of jumbo jets has fallen through. He retires to his modest home, which he’s dubbed the Military Industrial Duplex, to plot a new direction for his life. Fortuitously, he quickly links up with Angel Templeton, a sexy, frighteningly unsentimental and ultraconservative pundit—so conservative she’s named her son Barry Goldwater Templeton—who has a wacko plan to embarrass the Chinese by claiming their secret service is planning to assassinate the Dalai Lama. Blindsided by the false media campaign, the Chinese are caught by surprise but need to deal with the crisis, artificially induced though it may be. McIntyre has to balance both domestic and political troubles when his wife, Myndi, is named to the United States equestrian team that’s scheduled to have a meet in China, one that might be canceled owing to the newest Sino-American conflict. And things get really complicated when, predictably, Bird and Angel begin an affair—and the Dalai Lama develops pheochromocytoma, and then dies. Buckley handles all of these strange machinations with a breezy style and loves mixing the fictional with the real—for example, by having Angel Templeton engage in a mano a manodebate on Chris Matthews’ Hardball. – Kirkus Reviews

Note to Self About China: Pick a Fight, Any Fight

The New York Times Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Christopher Buckley’s satirical novels do not normally prompt cognitive dissonance. But there’s something jolting at work in his latest, “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” This book means to be funny, but it’s about China, currently one of the least funny places on earth. It’s not a period piece, but it is badly dated. Much of its charm is derived from a heroine who seems modeled on Ann Coulter. Much of its hilarity comes from contemplating how to kill off the Dalai Lama and what to do with his corpse.

This time Mr. Buckley, that reliable source of superbly erudite chuckles, seems to have been body-snatched by a snobbish and lazy twin. It seems impossible that the sly boots behind “Thank You for Smoking” could write dialogue like “Helen Keller could connect those dots” or “They’re more nervous about China than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

To be fair, Mr. Buckley’s vocabularic gifts remain consummate, especially when it comes to elegant Latin versions of less elegant English lingo. So perhaps the problem lies with his decision to depict Sino-American relations as creakily hostile. There are characters in “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” who regret the winning of the cold war, and they don’t entirely seem to be joking. [Read the full article...]

Christopher Buckley’s ‘They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?’: Satirizing U.S. and China

The Washington Post Book Review – May 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Christopher Buckley writing a Washington satire about a defense lobbyist fomenting trouble with China? So this is what baseball players mean by a pitch being in their wheelhouse.

And as with his earlier swing at lobbyists, the hilarious 1994 novel, “Thank You for Smoking,” Buckley gets around nicely on his new novel with an opening burst of cynical humor as inspired as the book’s title, “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” Our antihero this time out is Walter “Bird” McIntyre, who works for the aerospace giant Groepping-Sprunt. He’s proud of making the most recent list of Washingtonian magazine’s “Ten Least Despicable Lobbyists.”

Buckley is at his searing best setting up Bird’s busy life, split between his 110-acre country estate, Upton, or, as he calls it, Upkeep, and the condo in Rosslyn (on the Confederate side), that he calls “the Military-Industrial Duplex.” In his off-hours, Bird is writing a series of thrillers (the wonderfully titled “The Armageddon Exfiltration,” “The Armageddon Infiltration” and “The Armageddon Immolation”) and dealing with his wife Myndi’s expensive quest to become an Olympic equestrian rider. [Read the full article...]

Dragon Bait - ‘They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?,’ by Christopher Buckley

The New York Times Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

Sun Tzu’s Chinese classic, “The Art of War,” gets quite a workout in Christopher Buckley’s latest uproarious political farce, fervently quoted by strivers and schemers in both Beijing and Washington. But while baiting seems to be a highly developed skill on each side, crushing may be only a distant dream — because the disorder in these capitals is hardly feigned. What else could result from a plot that involves desperate aerospace lobbyists, not entirely reliable not-so-secret agents, die-hard capitalist and Communist militarists, the United States equestrian team, a meth lab, Civil War re-enactors and Tibetan Buddhism? Far more apt to cite what one of the Americans calls Rumsfeld’s maxim: “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.”

“Big” is the operative word for the predator drone the size of a commercial jet that’s being flogged by Walter (Bird) McIntyre on behalf of an Alabama-based military-industrial behemoth. So when the unfortunately named Dumbo is shot down by a Congressional committee, Bird and his boss go even bigger, attempting to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment so they can sell the government on Project Taurus, a high-tech weapon system so clandestine its mere name provokes shudders. And yet, as Bird quickly discovers, manufacturing this kind of outrage is a distinct challenge: “It was hard, really, to put any kind of definite face on China. The old Soviet Union, with its squat, warty leaders banging their shoes on the U.N. podium and threatening thermonuclear extinction, all those vodka-swollen, porcine faces squinting from under sable hats atop Lenin’s Tomb as nuclear missiles rolled by like floats in a parade from hell — those Commies at least looked scary. But on the rare occasion when the nine members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the men who ruled 1.3 billion people — one-fifth of the world’s population — lined up for a group photo, they looked like a delegation of identical, overpaid dentists.” [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Dan Emmett was just eight years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The events surrounding the president’s death shaped the course of young Emmett’s life as he set a goal of becoming a US Secret Service agent-one of a special group of people willing to trade their lives for that of the president, if necessary. Within Arm’s Length narrates the story of Emmett’s journey in this coveted job-from the application process to his retirement as assistant to the special agent in charge on the elite Presidential Protective Division (PPD).

Here he discusses some of his more high-profile assignments in his twenty-one years of service, including the PPD and the Counter Assault Team where he provided arm’s length protection worldwide for Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush. This memoir describes the professional challenges faced by Secret Service agents as well as the physical and emotional toll that can be inflicted on both agents and their families. Within Arm’s Length also shares firsthand details about the duties and challenges of conducting presidential advances, dealing with the media, driving the president in a bullet-proof limousine, running alongside him through the streets of Washington, and flying with him on Air Force One. With fascinating anecdotes, Emmett weaves keen insight into the unique culture and history of the Secret Service.

About Dan Emmett

Dan Emmett earned a master’s degree from Troy University. A former captain in the US Marine Corps, he worked twenty-one years as a special agent in the US Secret Service. Emmett is currently an adjunct professor and security consultant. He lives with his family in the southeastern United States.

Former Secret Service agent breaks tradition by publishing book about Clinton White House

The Washington Post – March 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

A former Secret Service agent reveals details of the Clinton White House in a new self-published book that has upturned the tradition of taking presidential secrets to the grave.

Former agent Dan Emmett has angered the service with details of the behavior of President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and the White House staff in his book “Within Arm’s Length: The Extraordinary Life and Career of a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service,” according to the Washington Examiner.

“We do stress to all our employees the importance of not sharing anecdotes about the personal, private moments of the protectees,” Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told the Examiner. “It causes concern because we don’t want to erode the trust that we have with our protectees.”

The faults Emmett finds in the Clinton White House seem more the stuff of opinion than fact — and the details are from from profound. He asserts that Clinton put himself and his agents unnecessarily in harm’s way when he went for what Emmett calls a “totally pointless photo op” on the South Korea-North Korea border. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

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Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service. After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time.

•    George W. Bush’s daughters would try to lose their agents.
•    Based on a psychic’s vision that a sniper would assassinate President George H. W. Bush, the Secret Service changed his motorcade route.
•    To make the press think he came to work early, Jimmy Carter would walk into the Oval Office at 5 a.m., then nod off to sleep.
•    Lyndon Johnson gave dangerous instructions to his Secret Service agents and ­engaged in extensive philandering at the White House.

Ronald Kessler on the Updated Paperback Edition of “In the President’s Secret Service”

Secret Service agents are like human surveillance cameras: They see everything that goes on behind the scenes involving the president, first lady, vice president, and their families. At the same time, they are a bulwark of democracy. If a president is assassinated, it nullifies democracy.

In a new chapter to the paperback edition of In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, I reveal that threats against President Obama have become so disturbing that a secret Presidential Threat Task Force has been created within the FBI to gather, track, and evaluate assassination threats that might be related to domestic or international terrorism.

The task force operates within the FBI’s National Security Branch. It consists of twenty representatives from pertinent agencies, including agents from the FBI and Secret Service and operatives from the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Department, as well as analysts.

The hardcover edition reported that threats against Obama rose by as much as 400 percent compared with when President Bush was in office. While threats fluctuate, the level continues to be high enough to call for the threat task force.

At the same time, the Secret Service, which let party crashers into the White House in November, has been spinelessly acceding to requests of the Obama administration officials for Secret Service protection in instances where there are no threats against them. No one outside of the government has heard of most of these officials, but they have one thing in common: They enjoy being chauffeured free of charge by the Secret Service.

This expansion in protection has occurred at the same time that the Secret Service has cut corners because of understaffing and with a management culture that is complacent about potential risks, thus jeopardizing the president’s safety.

Those Secret Service deficiencies led to Michaele and Tareq Salahi’s intrusion at the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The breach occurred because of a deliberate, conscious decision by uniformed officers to ignore the fact that the Salahis and Carlos Allen, a third intruder, were not on the guest list. Those decisions are an expected consequence of the agency’s practice of cutting corners.

The corner-cutting also include: not passing crowds through magnetometers or shutting down the devices early at presidential events; cutting back on the size of counter-assault teams and bowing to demands of staff that the teams remain at a great distance from protectees; not keeping up to date with the latest, most powerful firearms used by the FBI and the military; not allowing agents time for regular firearms requalification or physical training, which the Secret Service covers up by asking agents to fill out their own test scores.

Undoubtedly, the uniformed officers who decided to wave the Salahis into the state dinner were aware of the corner-cutting and were overwhelmed by the workload. In part because the Secret Service refuses to demand funds for adequate staffing, the attrition rate is as high as 12 percent a year within the Uniformed Division alone.

On top of this, the agency bows to political pressure. When agents refused to drive friends of Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary to restaurants, she got her detail leader removed. The fact that Secret Service management does not back personnel when they are just doing their jobs had to contribute to the uniformed officers’ reluctance to turn away guests at the state dinner and thus potentially face repercussions.

In recounting what protectees are like behind the scenes, the book describes as well how difficult Jenna and Barbara Bush were with their agents and how Vice President Joe Biden ignores Secret Service advice about his protection. To make the press think he came to work early, Jimmy Carter would walk into the Oval Office at 5 a.m., then nod off to sleep. Lyndon Johnson would order Secret Service agents to drive on crowded sidewalks so he could make an appointment on time. Johnson would urinate in front of the press corps, which included women reporters. He had a “stable” of women with whom he had sex at the White House and at his ranch. In addition, Vice President Spiro Agnew, a champion of family values, had extramarital affairs while in office.

Despite the breaches and corner-cutting, President Obama has said he has complete confidence in the Secret Service, indicating that he sees no need for a change in management. Given the clear warning signs, that is just as reckless as Abraham Lincoln’s and John F. Kennedy’s disregard for security.

Lincoln resisted efforts of his friends, the police, and the military to safeguard him. Finally, late in the Civil War, he agreed to allow four Washington police officers to act as his bodyguards, but on the night of his assassination, only one D.C. patrolman, John F. Parker, was guarding him.

Instead of remaining on guard outside the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, Parker went to a nearby saloon for a drink. As a result of Parker’s negligence, just after 10 p.m., John Wilkes Booth made his way to Lincoln’s box, sneaked in, and shot him in the back of the head. The president died the next morning.

Kennedy told Secret Service agents he did not want them to ride on the small running boards at the rear of his limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

“If agents had been allowed on the rear running boards, they would have pushed the president down and jumped on him to protect him before the fatal shot,” Charles “Chuck” Taylor, who was an agent on the Kennedy detail, tells me.

In the case of Obama, in the view of many current Secret Service agents interviewed for In the President’s Secret Service, the result of the Secret Service’s corner-cutting could be a security breach with deadly consequences.

While Secret Service agents are brave and dedicated, the agency’s management needs to be replaced. On the night of Obama’s state dinner, it was a pretty blonde. Tomorrow, it could be an assassin.

Reader Review

“In the President’s Secret Service” is something of a guilty pleasure for those interested in learning more about our nation’s presidents and first families and those agents who protect them. Yet it also pays tribute to those agents who put their lives on the line every day for their charges, and also seeks to highlight deficiencies in the agency that desperately need to be addressed. Kessler interviewed a number of active and retired agents in order to describe the dangers the agents and their charges face from a myriad of threats and seeks to personalize the history of this agency that often serves in the shadows and in silence for very obvious reasons. In an age when citizens are critical of the government and it’s agencies it is refreshing to read about these genuinely selfless individuals who are literally willing to take a bullet in their line of duty.

Secret Service agents are a favorite topic for fiction and for Hollywood, but their portrayal there is often stilted and two dimensional rather than the nuanced portrait Kessler reveals. Agents endure considerable abuse and difficulty with supreme diffidence and their demonstration of duty, honor, and valor that emerges is very much what you would find in the Armed Forces. Along the way Kessler gives readers a healthy amount of anecdotes about Presidents and their families and how they interacted with the agents assigned to protect them. These stories are by turns funny, interesting, and sometimes downright disturbing. Rather than being a distraction from the more serious messages of the book they help to provide levity when needed. Many of these stories give readers greater insight into the agents and their charges, particular how those protected react to having someone shadow their every move. “In the President’s Secret Service” is also rather topical as it focuses primarily on the more recent history of the service and recent presidents, primarily from George H. W. Bush to President Obama, but it also does occasionally touch on earlier Administrations.

“In the President’s Secret Service” is a lively page turner that will certainly inspire confidence in the agents, but Kessler also points out alarming deficiencies in how the agency presently operates and how cutbacks have potentially weakened the effectiveness of their protections. Kessler exposes these weaknesses in the hope of shaming the agency and the branches of government to rectify them. Considering the stakes involved and our ongoing “War on Terror” lets hope that this book is reaching the right people! – Todd Bartholomew, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Amazon Exclusive: Olen Steinhauer Reviews “Carte Blanche”

Source: Amazon.Com

Olen Steinhauer’s latest novel, The Nearest Exit features former CIA agent Milo Weaver, whose story began in the New York Times bestselling thriller, The Tourist. His previous work includes a pentalogy of thrillers set during the Cold War, beginning with The Bridge of Sighs and concluding with Victory Square.

How do you bring a character created in 1953 into the modern world without disappointing that character’s millions of followers in the process? This was the challenge faced by Jeffery Deaver when Ian Fleming Publications handed him the responsibility of writing the next official James Bond novel, Carte Blanche. I don’t know how I would have done it, but I do know one thing—Deaver, a specialist in the art of crafting nail-biting suspense, has done it better than I ever could have.

It’s a tightrope walk, balancing the tradition with the requirements of contemporary life, and Deaver handles it with panache. Beautiful women with unlikely but mesmerizing names? Check. (See Ophelia Maidenstone and Felicity Willing.) A top-drawer set of wheels with occasional soliloquies to its grace and power? Check. (The Bentley Continental GT coupé, in this case.) M, Moneypenny, Mary Goodnight, Bill Tanner, Felix Leiter? Check on all counts. A drink on hand that requires extra care from a bartender, but has yet to be named? Check. License to kill? Check, but under a different name: carte blanche.

How about the subtly and unsubtly perverse villains? Naturally, and they come in two sharply defined forms: Niall Dunne, “The Irishman,” a brilliant tactician who brings to mind From Russia With Love’s Kronsteen, and his boss, Severan Hydt, the head of a global refuse-collection empire, whose love of decay in all its forms borders on necrophilia. Time spent with Hydt will make you long for a shower.

But what the Fleming aficionado will inevitably notice here are the differences, which turn this latest escapade into what feels, and should feel, like one of those things that are very popular these days: a reboot.

James Bond, a veteran of Afghanistan, is an ex-smoker. Despite run-ins with an MI5 twit named Percy Osborne-Smith, this Bond is more of a team player than I remember him ever being. But where one really notices the encroachment of the contemporary world is in his relations with women. James Bond has become . . . sensitive?

Actually, yes, but never to the point of priggishness. The hard Bond remains, but it’s a different world than it was in 1953, and the women in Carte Blanche—the Bond girls, if you will—are of equal measure to the men. Ophelia Maidenstone, a coworker at ODG (Overseas Development Group, tenuously connected to MI6), besides being ravishingly beautiful, is indispensible—without her, Bond would be dead in the water. And when romance begins to bloom between them we find that, even after he’s left town, she remains, haunting his thoughts so much that after a night with another woman Bond feels, of all unlikely things, guilt.

If this seems very un-Bond, it is, but it’s a testament to Deaver’s strength as a storyteller that the reader so easily accepts that this is Fleming’s world 2.0, and it’s just as dangerous and exciting as it was when Le Chiffre glared from across a card table.

Don’t run from this new world, aficionado, for you’ll be rewarded. Not only with a gripping installment, but with a fascinating subplot concerning Bond’s parents, one that not only piques the reader’s interest but, by the end of the novel, begs for a continuation in the next Bond adventure. This new Bond may be a modern man, but his roots are deep in the past, and if Carte Blanche is any indication, the past will soon catch up with him. I, for one, will gladly be on hand to witness that confrontation.

Editorial Reviews

“Deaver, as fans of his Lincoln Rhyme and Kathryn Dance thrillers would expect, has clearly done his homework. . . . the most impressive feature of Carte Blanche is the ingenuity of the breathless, blood-thirsty plot. A master of misdirection, Deaver manufactures more surprises than anyone flogging an old warhorse can be expected to produce. . . . Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Sebastian Faulks are among those who have tried to bring Bond back to life. Deaver, though, is in a class of his own: nobody’s done it better.”—The Evening Standard (London)

“There have been other Fleming impersonators, including Kingsley Amis and Sebastian Faulks, but the author of The Bone Collector is the biggest international name to take the job. He is also one of the world’s smoothest, most devious, thriller writers – a far better craftsman than Fleming, in fact. So could he assume Fleming’s identity rather than write another Jeffery Deaver novel only with a hero called Bond? And could he, for that matter, resist thriller publishing’s current obsession with relentless action inspired by the success of the Bourne movie franchise – and indeed Quantum Of Solace? The answers are emphatically “Yes.” Deaver preserves his book’s timeless feel by largely ignoring modern geopolitics and pitting Bond against a traditionally barking villain . . . [and] adds a series of twists that reveal a Bond with more Sherlockian intelligence than Fleming’s.”—The Telegraph (London)

“Fleming was a master of succinct plotting and deft characterization, his books deceptively slim but containing so much. Deaver too is a genius and this publishing marriage was truly made in heaven. Bond fans will enjoy Deaver’s slightly mischievous take on Ian Fleming. Deaver fans will enjoy the taut plotting and the action scenes and, by the way, it is going to make a great movie.”—The Sunday Express (London)

“Carte Blanche,” Jeffery Deaver’s James Bond novel

The Washington Post Book Review – June 17, 2011 (Excerpt)

When we think of James Bond, we picture the cinematic version: a man parachuting, guns blazing, into exotic locations; fancy clothes, big breasts, hard biceps, shiny diamonds; and untrustworthy roulette wheels spinning amid an intoxicating blend of sexiness, sophistication and danger. Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming (1908-1964), unwittingly laid the foundation within his novels for the movies’ bombastic interpretation of Bond’s character, though his writing presented a more reflective and at times darker protagonist. Even so, Fleming’s Bond and the cinema’s version of him did share a playful approach to the world of espionage. In Fleming’s case, this was derived from his career as a Naval Intelligence officer in World War II, when he was involved, albeit at a distance, in the reckless, frequently barmy and often victorious escapades of real British spies. No doubt he also saw the gritty and grimy side of spying, though he chose to eschew that in his books in favor of delivering playboy espionage to a shell-shocked and impoverished 1950s readership.

Jeffery Deaver’s “Carte Blanche” — the latest installment in the immortal franchise — brilliantly captures Fleming’s bitten-off, occasionally distracted, Boy’s Own style. The opening chapters take us straight into the action. A thirty-something Bond is in Serbia, monitoring a nasty piece of work (an Irishman called Niall Dunne) and a dangerous piece of machinery (a train carrying a deadly cargo). When the operation goes wrong, Bond has to escape from the country and get back to London. [Read the full article...]

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Product Description

Few outside the security services have heard of 14 Company. As deadly as the SAS yet more secret, the Operators of 14 Company are Britain’s most effective weapon against international terrorism. For every bomb that goes off 14 Company prevent twelve. The selection process is the most physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding anywhere in the world. Trained to operate under cover, Operators have at their disposal an arsenal of techniques and weapons unmatched by any other UK government or military agency. This is the true story of one Operator and of some of the most hair-raising military operations ever conducted on the streets of Britain.

Review

My reason to buy this book was the hope that it would contribute interesting insights for my research on the Irish Troubles. To put it in a nut-shell: I hope the author didn’t quit his day job over writing this book. What caught my attention was the sub-title “On the streets with Britain’s most secret service,” which proves yet again how important, but also how terribly misleading a title can be.

Little did I know how immature the writer deals with a serious topic like the Irish Troubles. The book starts with “Standby, standby. Zero, Oscar. I have Bravo 1 foxtrot from Alpha 2 towards Charlie 2,” and it doesn’t get much better from there. There is not much to say other than reading this book was a huge waste of my time.