Martin Roy Hill's Blog, page 7

Swashbuckling Action in the Modern Age

When a NASA satellite heading into a polar orbit mysteriously crashes into the Argentine jungle, Juan Cabrillo and his ship, the Oregon, are called in to find it. Cabrillo and his crew succeed in retrieving the satellite, and in the process discover the crash site of a long-missing American airship. That discovery leads Cabrillo and members of his crew  to the treasure pit on Pine Island (a fictitious West Coast version of the famed Oak Island money pit), then to the frigid wasteland of Antarctica and a secret Argentinian oil drilling operation. When the Argentine junta lays claim to the Antarctic Peninsula, with the support of the Chinese government, Cabrillo and the Oregon race to the icy waters to find and destroy an ancient Chinese shipwreck that could give Beijing the power to lay claim to all of Antarctica and its wealth of natural resources.

The Silent Sea is the seventh book in Cussler's Oregon Files, co-written with Jack Du Brul. The Oregon is a modern-day Q-ship; on the outside it seems to be no more than a worn-out tramp steamer; on the inside, she is a marvel of modern shipbuilding engineering and weaponry. Among her crew are some of the best and most brilliant covert operators from the military and intelligence worlds. Cabrillo, himself a one-legged former CIA agent, is their captain and the chairman of the "Corporation" which owns the Oregon.

I grew up reading Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels and as much as I enjoyed those, I find I am enjoying the Oregon Files book more. I am looking forward to my next cruise aboard the Oregon.

"Goliath": A Serious, and Seriously Fun, Thriller

In Goliath,
author Richard Turner takes the reader from the nearly century-old
disappearance of a British airship to the crash site of a WWII cargo
plane in the Philippines to the Black Sea and the luxurious yacht of a
Russian oligarch plotting to reinstate the Romanov dynasty—and that's
just the opening chapters. So I give you this warning: If you sit down
to read this book, remember to buckle your seat belt and prepare for a
globe-trotting adventure that whips the reader from as far south as
South Africa to as far north as the Arctic Circle.

Goliath
was the first in Turner's series of novels featuring Ryan Mitchell, a
former U.S. Army Ranger now working for a private corporation that
provides military training and other services for a price. Mitchell and
his team of military professionals stumble upon and thwart the attempted
kidnapping of Jennifer March by a group of mercenaries. March, a
history professor leading a team of volunteers in finding the remains of
the cargo plane's crew, has information the employers of the
mercenaries wants. What that is, March doesn't know. Back in the U.S.,
another attempt is successful and Mitchell's team is hired to find March
and rescue her.

Turner's bio describes him as a retired soldier,
and it shows in his description of weapons and tactics. Yet while there
is action aplenty in this book, the author doesn't sacrifice plot or
character development for it like some thriller writers do. Turner even
finds time to introduce a love story into the plot.

If you are looking for a serious and, yet, seriously fun read, this is it.

"Eden," New Sci-fi Novella, Available for Pre-order

 My latest book, Eden:
A Sci-Fi Novella, is on its way! The final edits are finished and this
weekend the final production files were sent to the publisher.

Eden was a new experience
for me. While I’ve published sci-fi genre stories in the past — the
latest, “Hitler Is Coming,” was the cover story in the February 2014 issue of Alt Hist: The Magazine of Historical Fiction and
Alternative History — Eden is my first book-sized work in the
genre.

Eden takes place in the Iraqi desert during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
After 10 years of war in Iraq — and apparently more to come — it’s hard to
remember that the country was the birthplace of human civilization. It was in
Iraqi, formerly part of Mesopotamia, that the ancient Sumerians established the
earliest cities and culture. Iraq is also the place where many historians
believe the Biblical Garden of Eden was said to be located.

The cover blurb describes the plot of Eden:

“A sandstorm uncovers a long buried secret in the Iraqi desert,
an ancient Sumerian temple dating back at least 6,000 years to the beginning of
civilization. An American army patrol sent to investigate the ruins is trapped
inside the temple’s eroded walls, first by an insurgent ambush then by another,
even more powerful sandstorm. When an enemy mortar shell blasts an opening into
a hidden burial chamber, Captain Adam Cadman and his soldiers take refuge deep
in the ruins. What they find hidden inside threatens to destroy every belief
about the beginnings of mankind—as well as modern civilization as we know it.”

I originally intended to include two alternative history
short stories with Eden—the short story “Hitler Is Coming” mentioned above, and
“The Last President,” originally published in the Off the KUF Anthology, Vol. 2. However, my editor convinced me that
Eden was such a strong and compelling story, it should stand on its own. How
could I resist such reasoning?

Both short stories will eventually be published again as
Kindle Shorts.

Eden is scheduled for release in mid-November. However, you
can pre-order your copy right now from Amazon.

Using Technology to Find Time to Write

In interviews I’m frequently asked, “What is the hardest part of writing?” For me, I say, it’s finding the time to write. Like most novelists, I don’t make my living entirely from royalties. I have a full-time job as a military analyst.  Between that and family commitments, I don’t have a lot of free time. I try to carve an hour out of a day to write, but sometimes even that’s difficult to find. That’s why I use technology to help me find the time to write.
I plot out my novels using Scrivener on my laptop. Among other things, Scrivener offers templates for character and scene development. However, I am particularly enamored with Scrivener’s corkboard app. If you’re not familiar with Scrivener, the corkboard emulates an old fashion method of plotting — writing down plot points on 3x5 inch index cards and arranging them on a bulletin board in the proper plot sequence. 
The problem is I hate lugging my laptop around with me. It’s a hassle to pull it out, find a place to plug it in, and boot it up. Instead, I take advantage of a number of apps on my Kindle Fire and iPhone.
When I’m plotting a book, I use two iPhone apps that provide the same functionality as Scrivener. A Novel Idea, by Svacha Software, provides templates for developing scenes, characters, and locations. The app also allows you to link characters to scenes and scenes to locations.  When I’m finished, I upload my work to Dropbox and then download it to my laptop and copy it into Scrivener. The app is available on the iTunes Store for $2.99.
But, you ask, what about my beloved corkboard? For that I use an iPhone app called Index Card Board, by Wombat Apps LLC, which provides the same ability to jot down ideas on electronic cards and arrange them on a corkboard. I currently have corkboards for two novels I’m working on. When I complete a set of cards representing a scene or a chapter, I send the card deck to Dropbox and download it to my laptop. (You can also send it to your iTunes account or email.) Once on my laptop, I copy the cards into Scrivener. Index Card Board is available on the iTunes Store for $2.99.
For writing I use two apps. For smaller projects, such as short stories, I use My Writing Spot, a free writing app that links to your Google Drive account and syncs your writing to all your devices. My Writing Spot allows me to work on a project on my laptop, my Kindle, or my iPhone without the need to export or download files.
What’s nice about having these apps on my iPhone is the opportunity to work on a project whenever I have a free moment. Waiting for a haircut? I can work on my plotting. Waiting for a meeting to start? I can write a few lines of prose for my short story. When others are checking their email or texts, I’m writing. Each time I do so adds to my daily goal of 500 words.
One of my favorite places to write is a coffee lounge like Starbucks or Pete’s. I carry my Fire and a small Bluetooth keyboard in my ruck wherever I go. Together the Fire and keyboard weigh a fraction of what my laptop weighs, and I don’t need to base my seating choice on which table is close to an outlet. (I also carry a small rechargeable power pack just in case.)
I use OfficeSuite Pro by MobiSystems Inc. on my Kindle Fire. OfficeSuite Pro contains apps that are compatible with Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I can move files back and forth using Dropbox or email without the need to convert them. OfficeSuite Pro is also available for iPads and iPhones.
Utilizing these apps helps me remain productive even without having to neglect the rest of my life and responsibilities.

'Blood Oath' a Hitchcockian Suspense Thriller

Peter Houston, an American novelist, travels to France to pay homage to the father he never knew, an American soldier killed in action in the weeks following the Normandy invasion. When he discovers there is no record of his father being buried in any of the American war cemeteries, Houston begins looking for a Frenchman who promised the writer's mother he would look after the dead soldier's grave. Houston's search threatens to uncover long buried secrets, and suddenly finds Houston targeted by unknown forces. Those forces make one deadly mistake, they kill the woman Houston loves and when he swear a blood oath, Houston turns from being the hunted to being the hunter.

David Morrell's Blood Oath is a classic Hitchcockian mystery; that is, a story about an ordinary man who innocently becomes embroiled in deadly enigma and is forced to take action to save himself and those he loves. One can almost imagine Cary Grant as Houston. And like a good Hitchcock movie, Blood Oath soon turns from mystery to thrilling suspense.

Beyond the mystery and suspense, however, this is also the story about a boy who grows up without his father. Father-son relations often play a part in Morrell's novels, and none more than Blood Oath. As Morrell explains in the forward, he grew up never knowing his father, a Canadian pilot who was killed in WWII. Like Houston, Morrell began a search to learn more about the man, a search that eventually led him to a war grave in the United Kingdom. While reading Blood Oath, it wasn't difficult to hear Morrell's childhood pain in Houston's childhood angst.

In the end, Blood Oath is a fine mystery thriller, one of Morrell's best.

"Scavenger" a Reality Show Gone Awry

[image error]Scavenger is David Morrell's sequel to his highly
acclaimed 2005 thriller Creepers. The protagonist of that earlier
novel, Frank Balenger, and his girlfriend, Amanda, are forced to participate in
a life-or-death search for a century-old time capsule. They soon learn their
search is little more than a test run for a television game show created by a
psychopathic video game designer who calls himself the Game
Master.

Morrell is one of my favorite thriller authors, and I've never
read a book of his I didn't enjoy. However, I wasn't as enthralled by this novel
as I was by its predecessor. That is probably entirely a subjective response,
however. Creepers was centered on an activity that greatly interests me—urban
exploration, which involves exploring historic abandoned
buildings.

Scavenger, on the other hand, is centered around
video games (never play them) and the sport of geo-caching, in which
participants compete by following Global Positioning Satellite coordinates to
specific locations. Due to my many years of experience in maritime and
wilderness search and rescue operations, I am trained in coastal, land, and air
navigation. After using those skills to search for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
lost or injured people, geo-caching just doesn't sound like fun to me.


Morrell, however, fills Scavenger with a myriad of action
scenes interspersed with the findings of his usual detailed research. The author
does an outstanding job of characterization of the mentally-scarred Game Master.
And Morrell's message in the novel – that the Game Master's life-or-death
scavenger hunt is the logical extension of idiotically dangerous reality TV
shows like "Survivor" and "Naked and Afraid" – is, unfortunately, dead on the
mark.

Tag, I'm It! I'm On a Blog Tour!

I was tagged for this blog tour by my good friend Jay Allan
Storey, the Canadian author of the inspirational novella Chopper Music and the cautionary dystopian novel Eldorado. I’ve enjoyed reading both
works —
I couldn’t help but finish Chopper Music
in one seating, it was so riveting — and I’m looking forward to reading his
next work in progress. (Check out my reviews of both books in my blog’s
archives.) You can read more about Jay and his work at his own entry in this
blog tour. You can it find by clicking here.

Now, on to the tour's interview questions!

What am I working on?

My latest book, Eden,
is in production and should be out this fall. It‘s a new twist for me because
it’s a science fiction novella rather than a mystery thriller. A group of
American soldiers in Iraq stumble onto an ancient secret about the origins of
mankind. I call it Eden because Iraq
is believed by many to be the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden.

I’m also writing the first draft of a sequel to my novel, The Killing Depths. It’s call The Butcher’s Bill and features NCIS
agent Linus Schag trying to stop a good friend and fellow agent from going
rogue.  Another sea-going adventure
involving a new military investigator is currently in the plotting stages.

How does my work
differ from others work in its genre?

I like to think my work has an edge to it. My thrillers are
more than just action scenes. They include a good amount of social observation.
The short stories in my collection Duty
deal with the stresses and sacrifices of military service. The Killing Depths explored the social pressures of having men and
women serve together in the military. My latest novel, Empty Places, is set amid the political and social corruption of
the 1980s. My books also look at the psychological motivations of the
characters, such as the life events that created the serial killer in The Killing Depths, and the PTSD
experience of the main character, war correspondent Peter Brandt, in Empty Places. In The Butcher’s Bill I’m exploring two highly controversial but
largely unknown subjects coming out of the Iraq war.

Why do I write what I
do?

First, I enjoy the physical act of writing. It focuses my
thoughts and centers me.

Second, it gives me a way to write more truth than I can by
writing nonfiction. I spent 20-some years as a newspaper and magazine
journalist. In journalism you’re restricted to a lot of he-said, she-said. It’s
nearly impossible to say, “Here are the facts. This guy is lying.” In fiction
you can say that.  If you spark a reader’s interest, they can go
on to look things up on their own.

How does my writing
process work?

To call it a “process” is flattering. It’s really
helter-skelter. Between my full-time job as a military analyst, family
obligations, and reserve commitments, I have very little time to write. Add in
the time it takes to promote my work, time is even more restricted. But I try
to log an hour of writing a day producing about 500 words. I carry my Kindle
Fire HD and  a small Bluetooth keyboard
in my backpack everywhere I go — together they’re lighter than a laptop — and I
do most of my writing on those whenever I can.

Next Up

I call Jay my friend from Up Over, a play on the Down Under
location of the author I tagged to follow me on this blog tour. My good mate, Liam Saville, is an Australian writer who pens an authentic and enthralling mystery thriller
series featuring the Australian military investigator Sam Ryan. (Check out my
reviews of Liam’s Predator Strike!
and Resolute Action in my blog’s
archives.)  I know Liam is working on a
new mystery with a new investigaror. You can learn more by reading his entry on
this blog tour next week at his website.

 Check out some of the
other authors who contributed to this blog tour:

Maureen Brownlee * Kathy Para * Theodora Armstrong * Eufemia
Fanetti * Kathy Page * Janie Chang * Lorna Suzuki * Barbara Lambert * Matilda
Magtree * Alice Zorn * Anita Lahey * Pearl Pirie * Julie Paul *Sarah Mian *
Steve McOrmond * Susan Gillis * Jason Heroux * Angie Abdou
 

Looking for Justice in an Unjust War

An occupied country racked by sectarian violence. The night
is shattered by gunfire and the blast of improvised explosive devices. Burning
buildings and barricades light up the darken sky.

Sounds like a description of Iraq in the past decade,
doesn't it? But this is Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1981 during the
"Troubles." It is the setting for Adrian McKinty's brilliant mystery,
The Cold, Cold Ground, the first in a trilogy featuring Detective Sergeant Sean
Duffy, a Catholic cop with the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary.

An over-educated but relatively inexperienced investigator,
Duffy faces what he believes to be a homophobic serial killer. But Duffy
wonders why, in a country where psychopathic killers simply need to choose a
side to satisfy their murderous urges, a serial killer would go it alone?
Duffy's investigation finds him in conflict with the Catholic Irish Republican
Army and the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, as well as the British Army
which occupies Belfast.

McKinty, an Irish-born writer now living in the United
States, does an extraordinary job of describing life during the turmoil of the
Troubles, a time when simply out of habit you had to check your car for bombs
every time you got in. Beyond the twists and turns of the masterful plot, The
Cold, Cold Ground is a lesson in the hopelessness of waging war over religious
beliefs— a lesson many in Iraq as well as McKinty's adopted country need to
learn.

A Subtle but Power Tale of Horror

Author Richard Matheson was an amazingly prolific author and screenwriter best known, perhaps, for his novel I Am Legend which was the basis of multiple movies and is considered the granddaddy of the zombie genre. While I enjoyed Legend so much that I read it twice, I think Shadow On the Sun was even better.In the late 1800s, an uneasy truce has been achieved between the western town of Picture City and nearby Apaches. The peace was the achievement of Indian agent Billjohn Finley despite hostility from the U.S. Cavalry and a representative of the Indian Bureau. What should have been a cause of celebration, however, suddenly threatens to reignite the war between the Apaches and the settlers when the horribly mutilated bodies of two white men are discovered. The deaths are initially blamed on Apache raiders, but when a stranger shows up in town wearing the clothing of one of the victims, Finley begins to suspect the stranger. But as he investigates, the Indian agent starts to wonder if the stranger is even human.Matheson builds suspense slowly as the truth about the stranger is revealed. An author who frequent crossed genres between horror and westerns, Matheson creates a vivid sense of place with his description of the Old West environments. The horror is built into the suspense rather than vivid descriptions of violence.This short book was published in 1994 and never got the attention Matheson’s other work, such as Legend and The Incredible Shrinking Man. That’s too bad because Shadow on the Sun is a subtle but powerful book both as a western and a horror novel.
 

"Nightstalkers" a Rip-Roaring Military Sci-fi Adventure

Take an elite group of soldiers, place them against a mysterious and deadly phenomenon, add a precocious, blue-haired 16-year-old girl, and laced freely with wit and humor, and you’ve got a rip-roaring military sci-fi adventure called The Nightstalkers. 
Best-selling author Bob Mayer combines two of the most popular fiction genres — military special operations and science fiction — in this story of an ultra covert operations team called the Nightstalkers trying to contain the spread of glowing balls of energy called “Fireflies” from dimensional rifts created by foolhardy scientists. A West Point graduate and former Green Beret, Mayer writes knowingly of spec ops and weaponry, but avoids the false machismo found in many “commando” books. He not only laces his story with wry observations and outright laughs, he creates characters who, despite being highly trained killing machines, are still a bit vulnerable and even whacky — pretty much as you would find in real life. Plus the leader of this group isn’t some macho guy, but a tall, attractive woman nicknamed Moms. 
In the first of a three book series, the Nightstalkers find themselves trying to contain the spread of Fireflies in an extremely wealthy suburb called the Senators Club. Failing at their attempt to blend into such a rarefied atmosphere, the Nightstalkers unwillingly adopt a neighborhood teenage fireball named Scout who opens their eyes to the alien lifestyle of the uber-wealthy one percent. The result is a fun and thrilling reading experience.