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Negotiation and Compromise
Timebomb follows Rick Fernscale into the crosshairs of a ruthless globalist organization behind a new apocalyptic scheme. What draws you to the military thriller genre?
I have always wanted to write books ever since I was 17 years old. And I always knew that one day I would write thrillers, as that is a genre I am most interested in. I have now written five of them plus eleven non-fiction books. Since primary school, I’ve always been fascinated by the military, and I have read thrillers written by the likes of Tom Clancy, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Frederick Forsyth’s books have also been a great source of inspiration. They all depict a world in which problems can be solved by military action without any negative consequences. Of course, in the real world, that never happens, but fictional books often depict a society in which there are no negative consequences to a hero’s actions. Other influences on my Rick Fernscale books have been the 1982 Lewis Collins film Who Dares Win (known in the USA as The Final Option) and the British SAS TV series Ultimate Force from the mid 2000s. The hugely popular American TV series 24 was also an influence, and I have watched every episode on the box set three times. The hero of that series, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has some similarities with Rick Fernscale, as he is ex-special forces, does not suffer fools gladly, and believes he can solve most problems with his fists and his gun, just like Rick.
Is there a part of Rick’s personality that reflects your own experiences or outlook?
I think there is some truth in this assertion. Like myself Rick doesn’t suffer fools gladly and often sees a simple solution to every problem which involves instant action. Like myself, he enjoys Chinese and Indian food and his favourite leisure pastime is cycling but apart from that we are different in personality. Rick is very physical unlike me and believes that a lot of the world’s problems can be solved with high explosive. I am a bit more cerebral than that and believe that negotiation and compromise is often better than military action which often has undesired consequences, particularly for the civilian population.
Do you choreograph major action scenes before writing them, or do they evolve on the page?
They just seem to happen in my mind, and I write them down. My own writing technique is that I picture the scenes inside my mind’s eye as though I were watching a film, and then I describe what I’m seeing. I don’t know much about unarmed combat, so devise moves that seem plausible. I do know a bit about guns, though, as I was once a member of a rifle club.
Do you see more missions ahead for Rick Fernscale?
My original intention was just to write three books featuring the character. But it is always possible that Rick will return at some time in the future. As long as there are bad guys in the world, we’re going to need people like Rick who can take them out quickly and efficiently.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Rick Fernscale, former SAS Sergeant, has already faced the unthinkable and won. The Chameleons, a ruthless global organisation driven by power and control, were supposed to be finished.
But evil doesn’t disappear. It adapts.
Now they have returned with a plan more terrifying than anything before. Project Lucifer, a covert operation designed to reshape the world through fear, chaos and destruction.
As the countdown begins, Fernscale is pulled back into a deadly game where the stakes are nothing less than the future of humanity. Outnumbered, outgunned and racing against time, he must uncover the truth before it’s too late.
From covert operations and high-stakes espionage to explosive combat and relentless suspense, Timebomb is a gripping techno-thriller packed with action, intrigue and heart-pounding twists.
When the clock hits zero… there’s no going back.
Perfect for fans of Tom Clancy and Andy McNab, this is a must-read for lovers of military thrillers and high-tech conspiracy fiction.
Timebomb
TIMEBOMB is a high-velocity military thriller that brings former SAS soldier Rick Fernscale back into the crosshairs of The Chameleons, a ruthless globalist organisation with a new apocalyptic scheme called Project Lucifer. After SAS Trooper Ronnie Anderson is kidnapped and used as bait, Rick is pulled from his hidden life into a chain of hijackings, assassinations, undercover missions, political upheaval, and a final island confrontation where the fate of millions hangs by a very literal countdown. The novel moves with the blunt urgency of a field report, never lingering long before the next ambush, explosion, betrayal, or tactical improvisation arrives.
What I found most striking was the book’s appetite for momentum. Barron writes action as if he is assembling machinery under pressure: guns, aircraft, vehicles, medical procedures, military acronyms, and emergency responses all have weight and texture. There is a fondness here for technical specificity, and while the details can occasionally crowd the page, they also give the novel its particular flavor. I felt the story worked best when Rick was forced to think under impossible conditions, whether in freefall, undercover, or cornered by enemies who have underestimated him.
I also found the book’s political edge impossible to ignore. TIMEBOMB isn’t a neutral thriller; it’s openly argumentative, sometimes polemical, and very much interested in climate policy, state power, media control, and distrust of elite institutions. Some readers will find that bracing. For me, the strongest moments came when the ideological scaffolding gave way to personal stakes: Rick’s loyalty to Maria, the camaraderie among soldiers, and the grim knowledge that survival often depends on nerve, timing, and a willingness to do ugly things quickly.
I would recommend TIMEBOMB to readers who enjoy military thrillers, political conspiracy, action novels, techno-thrillers, and adventure stories. It will especially appeal to readers who like their fiction combative and loaded with hardware, strategy, and geopolitical suspicion. Fans of Tom Clancy may recognize the same taste for operational detail and large-scale threat, though Barron’s voice is more pugnacious and less bureaucratic. TIMEBOMB is a hard-charging thriller with a fuse short enough to make every chapter exciting.
Pages: 173 | ASIN : B0GX31229Z
Blood Gilt
Jessica Housand’s Blood Gilt is a dark, sprawling crime novel about inheritance in the ugliest sense: inherited violence, inherited loyalties, inherited countries, and inherited guilt. At its center is Alejandro Whitmore, a Salvadoran-born young man raised through war, abandonment, exploitation, and his father Jared’s cartel-adjacent empire. When Jared sends him back to El Salvador to help secure a narcotrafficking arrangement, Alejandro isn’t just returning to a place. He’s walking straight into the family, history, and pain he’s spent years trying not to look at.
What makes the novel work is how tightly it stays with Alejandro’s damaged point of view. He’s volatile, romantic, cruel, funny, perceptive, and often frightening, but he’s never simple. His relationship with Moni gives the story a charge that’s part attraction, part suspicion, and part desperate wish for escape. Their chemistry feels messy in a believable way, especially because neither of them arrives clean or uncomplicated.
The book is at its strongest when the personal and political are tangled together. El Salvador’s civil conflict, U.S. intervention, cartel routes, police corruption, migration, and family separation aren’t just background details. They shape the way people speak, choose, love, and betray. Housand gives the story the size of a political thriller, but the emotional weight comes from Alejandro’s fractured bonds with Maria, Ana, Jared, JJ, and the ghosts he keeps carrying around with him.
The prose has a hard, feverish energy. It can be brutal, sensual, and reflective within the same scene, which fits a narrator who lives in extremes. The violence is intense, but it’s rarely an empty spectacle. It keeps circling back to the question of what a person becomes when survival has always meant obedience, force, or performance. The result is a novel that feels both intimate and operatic, with family drama, crime, romance, and historical trauma all pushing against each other.
Readers who enjoy the family power games of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather will recognize the pull of blood, legacy, and criminal empire here, but Blood Gilt moves through a different moral and cultural landscape. It’s less interested in making power look grand than in showing what power costs the children born under it. This is a big, bruising novel about a man trying to decide whether he’s doomed to repeat the violence that made him, and that question gives the book its strongest pulse.
Pages: 436 | ASIN : B0H8QKJB1Y
Time’s New Dawn: A Dark Time Novel
Time’s New Dawn, by D. Gordon, is a science fiction novel centered on Rebecca Dawn, a woman caught in a dangerous loop of time, memory, collapse, and responsibility. Set in and around the city of New Hope, the story follows Rebecca as she confronts the consequences of dark matter technology, fractured timelines, and the people who believe they can control time for the good of humanity. What begins as a futuristic story about invention and survival becomes something more personal: a story about family, sacrifice, and the terrible weight of knowing what might happen next.
What struck me first was how much this book wants the reader to feel time as something unstable, almost physical. It’s not just a concept here. It bends, breaks, leaks, and wounds. Gordon builds the science fiction elements with ambition, and while the book has plenty of technical ideas, the strongest moments come when those ideas collide with Rebecca’s emotional life. I liked that the story doesn’t treat time travel as a clean trick or a convenient escape hatch. Every jump has a cost. Every correction leaves a bruise. That gives the novel a grounded tension, even when the plot is moving through big, strange, reality-warping events.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choice to tell the story in a fractured order. The shifting years, timelines, and labels ask the reader to pay attention, and at times that structure can feel demanding. But it also fits the book’s purpose. This is a science fiction time travel thriller about people trying to repair a disaster they only partly understand, so the disorientation feels intentional. I was curious more often than confused, and that matters. The emotional center, especially Rebecca’s relationship to her parents, David, and Richard, keeps the story from becoming only a puzzle box. There is a candid sadness running underneath the action, the sense that saving the world may still leave a person with losses no timeline can fully undo.
Time’s New Dawn will appeal most to readers who enjoy time travel stories with layered timelines, speculative technology, and moral consequences rather than simple adventure. Fans of ambitious, idea-driven sci-fi will find a lot to chew on here, especially if they like stories where physics, politics, grief, and hope all press against each other. I would recommend it to readers who enjoy being challenged by structure and who appreciate a novel that treats time not just as a plot device, but as the heart of the story.
Pages: 320 | ASIN : B0GZL2Y73T
Raven and the Analyst
John Fennell II’s Raven and the Analyst is an action thriller with espionage and psychological thriller elements, and it follows Raven Anderson after a brutal attack leaves her shaken in ways even she cannot ignore. The story brings her back into the violent world of the Roth, assassins, secret tracking devices, and dangerous enemies, but the heart of the book is Raven’s recovery. With Naci beside her and Dr. Maria Delgado pushing her to face old wounds, Raven has to confront not only the people hunting her but the trauma she has carried for most of her life.
What stood out to me most was how personal this book feels. Raven is still the same lethal, sharp-edged force she has been throughout the series, but here she’s also fragile, angry, guilty, and tired. I liked seeing the story slow down enough to let her sit with that pain. The therapy scenes give the book a different kind of tension from the shootouts and missions. There’s danger in the room even when no one is holding a weapon, because Raven is being asked to face memories she has spent a lifetime outrunning. That choice gives the novel more depth, and I feel like it makes the title matter.
Fennell writes with the pace and intensity of a high-stakes action thriller. There are hidden compounds, private islands, covert teams, assassins with names like the Extractor, and a constant sense that trouble is always one step behind Raven. I enjoyed that big, pulpy energy. It’s dramatic, sometimes blunt, and often larger-than-life, but it fits the world of the series. What surprised me was how well that intensity worked beside the quieter parts of the story. The book is at its best when Raven’s outer war and inner war reflect each other. She can remove a tracker, hunt an enemy, and outthink a killer, but healing her mind is messier. It can’t be solved with a clean shot.
I would recommend Raven and the Analyst to readers who enjoy action thrillers with espionage, revenge, psychological tension, and a strong female lead who is both dangerous and relatable. Fans of the Raven Anderson Series will especially appreciate this entry because it doesn’t just raise the stakes outward. It turns inward, too. Anyone who likes fast-moving fiction with secret organizations, emotional scars, and a heroine fighting to reclaim herself will find a lot to enjoy here.
Pages: 280 | ASIN : B0D5SJ857B
The Phisherman
Steven Marks’s The Phisherman is a crime thriller about scams, anger, family loyalty, and the dangerous comfort of having a target. Dean Rourke is a warehouse worker in Ocala whose life is already worn thin by night shifts, spam calls, and the steady pressure of getting by. When his mother becomes involved with a suspicious man named Martin Hales, Dean’s irritation turns into investigation, and that investigation pulls him into a wider network of fraud, stolen pets, gift cards, burner phones, and people who know exactly how to use loneliness as bait. The book understands scams not just as crimes, but as intrusions. They get into homes, phones, routines, and nerves until ordinary life starts to feel rigged.
What makes Dean such a compelling lead is that his concern is real, but so is the appetite that grows out of it. Marks doesn’t write him as a clean hero chasing bad guys. Dean is tired, sharp, funny in a sour way, and increasingly drawn to the sense of purpose that anger gives him. Early on, the narration says, “pressure worked whether or not it had a name,” and that line captures a lot of what the novel is doing. Dean wants to name the pressure, trace it, hit it, and make it answer for itself. The trouble is that once he starts moving, stopping becomes harder than starting.
The supporting characters give the story its weight. Gloria, Dean’s mother, is more than a victim of a romance scam. She’s lonely, stubborn, embarrassed, and still very much her own person. Deputy Morales is one of the book’s best steadying forces, not because he softens the story, but because he keeps reminding Dean that being right doesn’t make every choice acceptable. Aunt Marlene also brings a needed kind of grounded care, especially when the book turns from investigation into a study of restraint. Even Pickles, Dean’s cat, adds texture to the domestic side of the novel, giving Dean’s apartment a little warmth while everything else gets colder.
Marks’s prose has a bruised, observant rhythm that fits Dean’s state of mind. The book is full of Florida heat, cheap parking lots, county offices, vibrating phones, and rooms where people are waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It’s especially strong at showing how modern crime can feel both faceless and intimate. A scam call can come from nowhere, but it still lands in someone’s kitchen, someone’s bank account, someone’s family. As the story escalates, one line hits especially hard: “Waiting changed him faster than blood had.” That’s the heart of the book. The suspense isn’t only about whether Dean can find Martin. It’s about what the hunt is doing to him.
The Phisherman is a tense, character-driven novel about a man who follows a fraud case so deep that it starts following him back. It’s angry, funny in dry flashes, and deeply interested in the moral cost of wanting punishment to feel personal. The ending doesn’t offer Dean an easy victory, which feels right for this story. Instead, it leaves him facing the people who know his name, especially his mother, and the question of what he’s let himself become while trying to protect her. That’s what gives the book its staying power: it’s a crime story where the real hook isn’t only the scam but the part of Dean that keeps biting.
Pages: 487 | ASIN : B0H3394KCT
Raven and the Jungle
John Fennell II’s Raven and the Jungle is an action thriller with strong espionage elements, following Raven Anderson, a highly trained Foundation agent and assassin, as she moves through a dangerous world of criminal networks, personal loss, human trafficking, and shadowy power struggles. The story begins with Raven caught in conflict with Shamokin and the Roth, then widens into a fast-moving plot involving kidnapped children, old loyalties, covert teams, mind transference, and a final reckoning that feels personal as much as tactical.
What I enjoyed most was the sheer force of Raven as a character. She’s fierce, blunt, damaged, and almost impossible to slow down. The book does not try to make her soft in an easy way, but it does let cracks show. Her bond with Maggie, her memories of Jill, and her connection to Naci give the story more emotional weight than I first expected. I liked that Fennell allows Raven to be both terrifying and tender. One moment, she is calculating every exit, every weapon, every threat. The next, she’s carrying grief that still has a pulse. That contrast made her feel larger than life, but not empty.
The author’s choices are bold and direct. This isn’t a quiet thriller. It moves with urgency, often jumping from one danger point to another, and the world of the book feels packed with secret organizations, hidden money, elite fighters, corrupt leaders, and villains who deserve what is coming to them. The story leans into its intensity. Still, that same intensity is part of the appeal. The book is fueled by outrage, especially around trafficking and the exploitation of vulnerable people, and that gives the action a moral charge. Raven isn’t just chasing enemies. She’s trying to cut rot out of the world.
I would recommend Raven and the Jungle to readers who enjoy action thrillers with espionage, revenge, covert missions, and a powerful female lead who does not hesitate when the stakes are high. Fans of fast-paced, high-impact fiction will find a lot to enjoy here, especially if they like stories where justice comes with grit, risk, and a loaded weapon. It’s intense, emotional, and unapologetically driven by its hero.
Pages: 446 | ASIN : B08T1HYDTS
Rogue Vengeance
Charles Stewart’s Rogue Vengeance is a muscular military thriller about loyalty under fire, the cost of service, and the long shadow cast when governments use warriors and then try to discard them. Colt Hawkins is trying to build a future with Liberty Starr on the Sabre T Ranch, but peace barely has time to take root before a wedding becomes a battlefield; Jesse remains trapped in a brutal Chinese prison, and Task Force 24 is pulled back into a widening conflict that stretches from Montana to Madrid, Hainan Island, and Taiwan. The novel moves with the urgency of an operation already in motion, blending domestic trauma, covert rescue planning, political betrayal, and geopolitical escalation into one restless story about people who keep answering the call even when the call has taken too much from them.
What stayed with me most was the emotional weight beneath all the tactical movement. The opening contrast between Jesse’s suffering in captivity and Colt’s quiet hope at the Raven’s Nest sets the tone beautifully: this is a book interested in bodies under pressure, but also in what people build when they’re desperate to believe they can still have a life. Stewart lets readers feel the tenderness, and that makes the violence feel less like a spectacle and more like a violation. At its best, the novel understands that survival isn’t clean or triumphant. It’s sore, frightened, stubborn, and sometimes quietly beautiful.
The writing has a hard-edged cadence that suits the material. Stewart favors clipped sentences, procedural detail, and scene cuts that mimic surveillance feeds or tactical briefings, and that gives the novel a cinematic, forward-driving rhythm. I found the operational details convincing and immersive, especially when the book follows intelligence gathering, safe houses, cell structures, and rescue planning. At times, though, the sheer density of names, agencies, acronyms, and moving parts can crowd the emotional space. The story occasionally explains when it could trust the moment to breathe. Still, there’s an authenticity in the worldview that’s difficult to fake. The ideas are clear and strongly felt: duty doesn’t end just because politics shifts, loyalty is heavier than policy, and the people who protect a nation are often least protected by it. I didn’t always need every briefing, but I believed deeply in the ache behind them.
I found Rogue Vengeance intense, heartfelt, and deeply invested in the bonds between warriors, families, and the country they serve. It’s a large, ambitious thriller with a bruised heart, one that works best when its action is anchored in grief, devotion, and the fragile possibility of home. The ending opens the door to an even larger conflict, but it also reinforces the novel’s central truth: Colt and his team may be wounded, but they’re not finished. I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy military thrillers with detailed operations, sprawling geopolitical stakes, and a strong emotional core, especially those who like stories about brotherhood, sacrifice, and the private costs behind public missions.
Pages: 429 | ASIN : B0GFXJYSQ2
