The Twelfth Commandment

by Gary Paul Corcoran, Rob Williams

The year is 2012, the location, the mountains of northern Iraq and Army Ranger Blake Peters, the leader of an elite strike force, has just risked his career by saving a band of Kurdish soldiers from certain slaughter at the hands of the Turks. With the Kurdish soldiers safely on the Iraqi side of the border, Captain Peters stands face to face with Colonel Arslan, the commander of the Turkish patrol, his refusal to turn the rebel Kurds over to his Turkish counterpart an act of betrayal that Colonel Arslan vows one day to avenge.Three years later, Captain Peters is now retired and on a completely unauthorized special ops mission into war torn Syria. An ISIS thug named Saleem al-Ramadi has beheaded someone dear to Blake and Blake has gone there to seek his revenge. When Blake’s CIA contact teams him up with a Kurdish guide named Faisal, Blake cannot help but fear the worst. Colonel Arslan’s parting threat still rings in his ears. The last thing Blake needs is a Kurd bringing him unwanted attention. Worse still, as a refugee and once college professor, Faisal appears to be totally incapable of using a gun.In what evolves into a touching odd-couple/buddy story and tale of redemption, Blake’s mission has long descended into an orgy of blood, death and destruction by the time he learns that Faisal’s entire family has also been brutally murdered by Saleem, with his wife and daughter having been used first as chattel by all of Saleem’s men. So why isn’t Faisal filled with hatred and revenge like me, Blake is left to wonder? From the tragic young woman that Blake vows to rescue back in Istanbul, down through the war torn devastation of Syria and on to the moment when Colonel Arslan believes he will have his revenge, The Twelfth Commandment takes you on a spellbinding journey, with Blake’s feverish search to find Saleem stripping him of his own humanity, but with Faisal’s long suffering wisdom becoming Blake’s touchstone, a thread by which he claws his way back from his personal descent into hell.

260 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 2021

About the author

The product of an Irish/Italian family, Mr. Corcoran was transplanted as a boy from the clapboard New England of his youth to the cookie cutter, stucco subdivisions that began to litter the disappearing ranches and orange groves south of Los Angeles in the 1960s.

True to his rebellious nature and the folk music/coffee house idealism that helped shape his early worldview, Mr. Corcoran chose to resist the Vietnam War, was a man without a country for several years and can count incarceration in a Mexican prison as one of his many colorful experiences during that era.

Having pursued a love of reading and writing in various forms all his life, Mr. Corcoran finally took this passion seriously around the turn of the millennium and has dedicated the remainder of his days to authorship.

The author of eight previous novels, Mr. Corcoran’s rough and tumble early experiences animate all of his literary works, from his Michael Devlin crime series to his special forces adventures to his tales of romance. Mr. Corcoran is currently working on a sequel to Afghan’s Lipstick Warriors and expects to publish it by the end of 2021.

In completing the karmic circle, the author recently returned to the New England of his youth and now resides along the coast of Rhode Island.