Blog Archives
Echoes of the Veil
Echoes of the Veil, by James Hurst, is a military techno-thriller that starts close to home and steadily widens its field of fire. Major Aaron “Reaper” Wiggins returns to his family in Tennessee carrying the physical and emotional residue of years in special operations, only to be pulled into a chemical attack involving a sabotaged freight train, a covert cleanup team, and a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the initial disaster. From there, the novel moves through contaminated terrain, a fortified port facility, cyberwarfare, an open-ocean insertion, and finally the cramped interior of a stealth submarine. What holds all of that together is the book’s interest in problems that have to be solved under pressure. Aaron and his team are constantly dealing with limited ammunition, failing equipment, toxic environments, surveillance systems, locked compartments, physical injuries, and a clock that rarely gives them enough time.
The novel also gives its action some weight through Aaron’s relationship with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Emily. Aaron can command a team in a crisis almost instinctively, but being fully present with his family is harder for him, and the book understands that tension. His recurring back injury is more than a convenient vulnerability, too. It connects his current mission to the years of damage that came before it and reminds us that competence has a cost. The members of his old team, including Ocelot, Chewy, Spazz, Doc, and the others, bring another kind of warmth to the story. Their humor, shorthand, and trust feel earned through shared history. They know when to joke, when to shut up, and when somebody needs help without asking for it. That camaraderie keeps the extensive tactical material connected to actual people.
Readers of Tom Clancy, particularly The Hunt for Red October, will recognize the fascination with systems, procedures, military hardware, and the dangerous possibilities hidden inside complicated technology. Echoes of the Veil has that same pleasure in understanding how things work, but its viewpoint stays much closer to the operators physically crawling through those systems. A server room can become a battlefield, a ventilation system can become a weapon, and a submarine hatch can create an entire tactical problem. The book is especially compelling when technology and old-fashioned fieldcraft collide. Digital surveillance is countered with analog thinking, cyber tools have to be backed up by people willing to crawl through sewage or swim through black water, and sophisticated plans repeatedly come down to somebody making a smart decision with whatever happens to be within reach. That gives the technical detail a purpose beyond showing off research.
What I enjoyed most about Echoes of the Veil is how committed it is to its particular kind of thriller. The procedural detail is dense, the threats are carefully engineered, and action scenes often unfold as a chain of small tactical decisions. A few late sequences revisit information or tactical moments from overlapping perspectives, which adds density to an already detailed final act, but the payoff is a climax where earlier skills, injuries, relationships, and technical details all matter. Li Wei also works well as an antagonist because he thinks in systems just as Aaron does, making their conflict feel like competing methods of problem-solving as much as a physical fight. The epilogue closes the immediate mission while opening the story onto something larger, leaving Aaron with a more complicated understanding of what protecting his family actually means. Echoes of the Veil feels like a tactical thriller with a family pulse, built around capable people trying to stay human while moving through situations that demand almost everything they have.
Pages: 293 | ASIN : B0HCW4CF8S
Personal Baggage
Bones of Black Saints follows two civil rights attorneys defending a young Black activist accused of shooting a white police officer while confronting racial injustice, police solidarity, and competing versions of truth in Durham, North Carolina. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I represented a young man named Carlos Riley in Durham. Bones of Black Saints is a fictionalized take on his trial.
How did you develop Zenko’s mixture of anxiety, humor, faith, intelligence, and self-doubt?
I wanted a passionate, committed trial attorney who struggled with mental health issues.
Why was it important to portray accomplished attorneys who also struggle with mental health?
I’ve grappled with my own mental health demons. Realistically presenting these issues was a goal of mine in this and in the series of other books, such as The Girl Wore a Hockey Helmet. We trial attorneys bring our personal baggage into the courtroom as much as we try to keep it out. Substance abuse, alcoholism, and depression disproportionately affect lawyers. That’s the reality. One of my clients was sent to Death Row in N.C. because he had a drunk trial attorney. After almost thirty years, the Governor commuted his sentence to life without parole.
What responsibility do you think fiction has when engaging with painful historical events?
Fiction can help us learn and make sense of racial injustice and prosecutorial misconduct. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to confront injustices of the past. That is the first step in combating such inequities in the future.
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Bones of Black Saints
Alex Charns’s Bones of Black Saints is a legal thriller and courtroom drama rooted in the politics, history, and racial tensions of Durham, North Carolina. The case centers on Marcos Salazar, a young Black Lives Matter activist accused of shooting a white police officer during a traffic stop. His defense rests with veteran civil rights attorneys Star Gwiazda and Zenko Luczek, who believe the officer shot himself and that the police department has closed ranks around him. From jury selection through closing arguments, the novel turns legal procedure into a contest over whose version of reality will survive.
Zenko’s first-person narration gives this crime novel its distinct personality. He’s anxious, funny, devoutly Catholic, obsessed with hockey, and deeply shaped by his Polish family’s experiences during World War II. His thoughts move freely among the trial, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the Greensboro Massacre, old wounds, and elaborate hockey metaphors. Those digressions make the story feel intimate and politically alert, though I did feel that their frequency can slow the courtroom suspense at times. They also reveal how history lives inside Zenko’s daily choices, especially his determination to recognize fascism and institutional abuse before they’re allowed to hide behind respectable appearances.
The courtroom scenes are the strongest part of this police corruption thriller. Charns, a civil rights attorney, writes with a practitioner’s command of motions, evidence, jury selection, witness preparation, and cross-examination. Star is especially memorable, confronting hostile witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct with theatrical nerve and sharp legal instincts. Her relationship with Zenko brings humor and affection to proceedings charged with danger. Their shared mental health histories add further depth, showing two capable advocates who rely on medication, routines, friendship, faith, and hockey to remain steady under extraordinary pressure.
As social justice fiction, Bones of Black Saints connects one contested traffic stop to racial profiling, white supremacy, economic inequality, police solidarity, and the limits of courtroom justice. Its humor keeps the political argument lively, while its detailed trial strategy makes the eventual verdict feel earned. The final development lands with particular force because it exposes acquittal as one moment in a much longer struggle. This is an impassioned legal thriller about lawyers fighting for a client while wrestling with their own histories, blind spots, fears, and stubborn faith in justice. I recommend Charns’s novel to readers who enjoy thought-provoking legal thrillers that explore racial injustice and the complex pursuit of justice.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B08F75MNK2
Misplaced Trust
The Climb follows a grieving attorney and an international missionary team whose journey into a politically unstable nation becomes increasingly dangerous and deadly. What inspired the idea behind The Climb and the larger series you’re beginning with this novel?
I joined a mission trip to South America in 2018. That trip was preceded by several years of court work as a lawyer, along with the experiences of my early life. Together, these influences sparked the idea behind The Climb. However, while they shaped the framework of the story, their role provides more context than consequence. The real mission trip was very different from the one portrayed in the novel, and although the main character borrows elements from my life, many aspects diverge—such as the death of Sarah.
The true driving forces behind The Climb and its plot were several, including, inter alia, a human‑trafficking seminar I attended in 2017 and various influences from film, music, literature, and news. The motivational tone of the novel grew out of two long‑standing aspects of my personality: motivation and faith. I have always viewed hardship as a platform for growth. But the only way to truly achieve that is through Christ, and the best way to show that to others is by using the talents He has given me.
My walk with God has been far from perfect. Very often, it feels as though the things I want to do, I do not. Interestingly, that struggle became a thread stitching pieces of the novel together. Many of the characters in The Climb reflect that reality. They come from imperfect backgrounds and lead imperfect lives. Their struggles mirror my own walk with God.
The novel explores trust on several levels, including trust in other people, leaders, institutions, and God. Why was trust such an important theme for this story?
Trust is something many overlook, yet it can have tremendous impact. When attempting a difficult journey, misplaced trust can derail us and prevent us from completing it. Sometimes that comes from an overreliance on others or on things. Other times, it comes from the overconfidence we place in our own abilities. The book uses this theme to remind us whom we should truly trust. We are imperfect creatures—failing even ourselves. How could we expect others not to fail us?
What do you hope readers take from the idea that faith doesn’t necessarily prevent hardship but can influence how someone moves through it?
“Faith doesn’t prevent hardship” is a takeaway in and of itself. Faith is one of many approaches a person can take when facing difficulty. Some always run. Some place trust in themselves. Others place trust in things or people. Choosing faith ensures God is present when hardship comes. However, no matter what choice we make, life quickly teaches us—we must choose.
Will future books continue exploring Santiago and its political and criminal conflicts, or will the series broaden into other settings and challenges?
The story will remain rooted in Santiago. However, the geographical settings continue to change as the narrative moves forward, and new challenges will emerge.
At the conclusion of The Climb, the characters aren’t necessarily safe. Many events in the book carry deeper significance than readers may initially realize. The origins of certain characters—and the reasons they find themselves in this dangerous situation—take on greater meaning as the larger narrative unfolds.
As for timing, I can’t yet say when the next installment will be released. I only write when I’m able to, and I take my time, because writing should be enjoyable.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
After the death of his fiancée—three months pregnant—Mark Crosby lost sight of the life he once knew. He performs his 9-to-5 job and returns home to his elderly grandmother, occasionally attending a nearby church, if only just. But the invitation of an old presbyter changes everything: a mission trip to the breakaway territory of Santiago—the last place on Earth he wanted to go.
Joining a team of eight volunteers—alongside three missionaries, a bus conductor, the driver, and his family—he embarks on a journey through a country caught between escalating civil unrest and a strained dictatorship.
When their trip to the remote village of Puerto Palermo takes a wrong turn, the tour bus crashes off the road near a deep precipice, and Crosby makes a troubling discovery—the accident wasn’t an accident.
Nimble, Restless Intellects
World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?
WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.
Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?
Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.
The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?
The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.
What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?
It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”
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The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.
Fatal Consequences
Deadly Dial follows a radio host who takes a chilling late-night call that opens the door to a civic nightmare. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I began developing the novel, the country was on the verge of another government shutdown. Approximately 1.4 million people (670,000 federal employees and another 730,000—including personnel from the TSA, NASA, OSHA, and the EPA) were forced to work without immediate pay. With roughly $14 billion in wages temporarily withheld, localized consumer spending collapsed. The politicians orchestrating this crisis appeared entirely insulated from its fallout, detached from the reality of citizens struggling to afford basic necessities.
Simultaneously, public discourse was fracturing; people grew increasingly brazen, invoking their First Amendment rights while remaining blind to the consequences of their words. While no single event inspired this book, the collective anxiety and social friction of that era heavily shaped the narrative. This atmospheric tension is also why I chose to leave the setting unnamed—I wanted to capture a universal cultural climate rather than anchor the story to a specific location or headline.
Were there particular crime novels, political scandals, or media events that influenced the book?
Although I intentionally steered clear of writing the story based on direct current events, reality had a way of bleeding into the pages. A mere week into writing the manuscript, a well-known conservative commentator was assassinated during a Q&A session on a university campus as he fielded questions about violence. Ironically, he was a man of faith who prided himself on unfiltered speech, and his sudden death served as a chilling, real-time validation of what I was exploring in my fiction. It proved, in the most tragic way possible, that our current culture of reckless speech carries heavy, sometimes fatal, consequences.
Did you want readers to fear the Prophet as a person, or as a symptom of something larger within the city?
I wanted readers to fear the Prophet as a symptom of a much larger, systemic issue within society. On a personal level, the Prophet simply mirrors the dark realities we see every day: politicians driven by corruption, self-interest, and a complete disregard for the “ordinary person.” The true horror stems from the reality that, in our world, these figures rarely face consequences for the devastation they cause. In my novel, however, that immunity is stripped away. While I am certainly not advocating for real-world assassination, within the heightened dramatic stakes of the book, these corrupt actors are finally exposed and forced to face the ultimate reckoning for their actions.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Writing has truly become something I simply cannot put down; creating these worlds and sharing them with readers is incredibly therapeutic and fulfilling. Right now, I am juggling several exciting projects. I am currently finishing a medical-dental suspense thriller titled A Deadly Extraction. Additionally, I have three completed, fully edited novels ready to go for The Dante Villehart Files series, along with a few standalone projects. My main focus right now is deciding whether to continue down the self-publishing route or pursue traditional publishing for these next releases. Either way, there is a wealth of new material coming very soon!
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Amazon
In a world where words can wield deadly power, talk show host Riley Anderson finds herself at the epicenter of a possible political storm. When an anonymous caller, later dubbed “The Prophet”, rants about government corruption, his chilling threats suddenly turn into reality as the politicians he names, along with some of their associates, begin to turn up dead.
As fear grips the city, Riley struggles with the weight of her role in amplifying the chaos. Teaming up with seasoned detective Alex Thompson and tech whiz Eleanor “Ellie” Mitchell, Riley embarks on a harrowing quest to uncover the truth behind the calls. But when they discover that the number used by the caller belongs to a man who has been presumed dead for years, the lines between reality and conspiracy blur.
With each shocking revelation, Riley must confront the haunting legacy of a man driven by vengeance and the dark secrets that could change everything. As the clock ticks down to the next assassination, Riley and the team must race against time to unravel a deadly game that could cost her–and everyone in the city–everything.
Perfect for fans of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and fast-paced suspense, Deadly Dial delivers a pulse-pounding ride where the truth is the deadliest weapon of all.
Deadly Dial: A Political Thriller
In Michael H. Balfour’s Deadly Dial, radio host Riley Anderson takes a late-night call from a chilling anonymous voice known as the Prophet, and that call becomes the first note in a larger civic nightmare. As political murders, public confessions, hidden corruption, and copycat violence ripple through the city, Riley joins Detective Alex Thompson and forensic analyst Ellie Mitchell in trying to understand whether they are hunting a killer, a movement, or the city’s own diseased conscience made audible.
I was pulled in by the book’s atmosphere first. The city feels perpetually fluorescent, rain-smeared, and morally overheated, a place where every institution has a locked drawer and every public statement sounds half-rehearsed. Riley is a strong center for that world because she is not simply brave or clever; she is complicit in the strange machinery of attention. Her microphone gives her power, but it also makes her vulnerable, and the novel is at its best when it asks whether exposing rot is the same thing as feeding it.
The strongest scenes have the tension of a broadcast where no one can find the off switch. The Prophet’s voice is grandiose, sometimes almost baroque, but that theatricality works because the book understands spectacle as a weapon. I also enjoyed the uneasy partnership between Riley and Alex, which gives the story a human voltage beneath the larger political conspiracy. The prose leans into noir darkness, but its best images have a serrated beauty, turning offices, studios, courtrooms, and evidence rooms into haunted civic organs.
This book is best suited for readers of crime thrillers, conspiracy thrillers, and noir mystery fiction, especially those who like investigations tangled with media ethics and institutional decay. Readers who enjoy the grim procedural pressure of Michael Connelly mixed with the paranoid civic sprawl of James Patterson’s darker thrillers will find familiar pleasures here. Deadly Dial is a tense political thriller about what happens when a city finally hears the sound of its own corruption calling back.
Pages: 265 | ASIN : B0GHPW46JL
Lifelong Traveler
Balance of Evil follows a retired mining executive who happens upon a titanium USB on a Cabo beach and finds himself involved in a conspiracy involving a secret Cold War pact. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I’m a walker. On vacation, I walk every day, preferably on a beach. Years ago, on one of those walks, I started asking myself, What if? What would it take to upend an ordinary man’s life with a single object in the sand? That question kept building, walk after walk, until I had a book.
Scott Barton is not a typical action hero; he’s older, reflective, and recovering from a major health scare. Why did you choose to center the story on a protagonist at this stage of life?
Thrillers usually hand the world to people in their thirties, but I wanted someone with more depth, confidence, and means, which meant someone older. Scott is close to my age, so I knew the ins and outs of his head. I wanted a person with a history, a heart that had betrayed him, and enough energy and wit to fight back.
The novel moves across multiple countries and political landscapes. How did you research and construct such a global setting while keeping the narrative cohesive?
I’m a lifelong traveler. At eighteen, I spent a year crossing Europe and reached as far as Turkey, and I’ve been traveling ever since. I’ve stood in most of the places in this book. The rest I researched the way I travel: through blogs, local writers, food, and history. Skip the guidebooks. They never tell you what a city actually feels like at three in the afternoon.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I just finished my third nonfiction book on branding, and I’m well into the sequel to Balance of Evil, called LIES. The first book ended with the conspiracy only half-uncovered and several characters still unaccounted for. LIES picks up there. The pact didn’t end at Camp David in 1959—and it isn’t ending now, either.
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Driven by shocking discoveries that challenge his resolve and health, Scott teams up with his estranged daughter and a brilliant rogue hacker. Together, they work to expose the terrifying depths of a shadowy operation manipulating world events. As their mission intensifies, Scott faces devastating betrayals, unimaginable sacrifices, and deadly forces far greater than he ever imagined.
Balance of Evil delivers a fast-paced, thought-provoking political thriller packed with high-stakes action, chilling conspiracy, and brutal moral conflict. Fans of Baldacci, Ludlum, or Flynn will love this gripping tale of resilience, justice, and the fight against corruption.
Can one man tip the scales against a powerful shadow government? Or has evil already won?
Don’t wait—grab your copy today and immerse yourself in this edge-of-your-seat thriller!
