Set on Christmas eve in Santa Fe, N.Mex., this action-packed novel from bestseller Morrell (Creepers) may not achieve holiday classic status, but it does feature an appealing hero. Wounded and on the run, undercover agent Paul Kagan shelters beneath his jacket a five-week-old infant. Russian mobsters are after the baby, the son of a charismatic Palestinian, Ahmed Hassan, who preaches peace in the Middle East. Those who make their money off that struggle wish to silence Hassan by holding the baby hostage. Paul makes his stand in a house where Meredith and her crippled son, Cole, await the return of his abusive, alcoholic father, Ted. While setting interesting traps to foil his attackers, Paul tells a spymaster’s version of the tale of the magi. This slim volume will make the perfect stocking-stuffer for deserving thriller readers.

With a style reminiscent of early David Morrell and Stephen Hunter, in Bringing Back the Dead, Joe Domenici presents a classic tale of military honor pushed to its outer extreme, and the clash that inevitably occurs when those who use violence to corrupt, meet those who use it to protect.  A place, located dead in the center of the Florida Everglades, where men with skills honed in the jungles of Southeast Asia might prove usefull in getting some answers . . . 

Order your signed book from www.vjbooks.com

The July pub date of THE SHIMMER coincides with the International Thriller Writers organization’s annual gala readers/writers conference, THRILLERFEST (July 8-11).  This year, it again takes place in New York City, where ITW will present David Morrell with its prestigious THRILLERMASTER award for a lifetime of devoting his career to expanding the idea of what a thriller can be.

Some of the featured special guests include David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, Robin Cook, Brad Meltzer, and Katherine Neville.  Lee Child, Steve Berry, James Rollins, Gayle Lynds, and a host of other thriller luminaries will be there for the entire 4 days and very accessible.  For details, please go to ttp://www.thrillerwriters.org.

See all David Morrell titles at www.vjbooks.com

David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer. In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at Penn State and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There, he also met the distinguished fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That “father” of all modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them national bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC miniseries starring Robert Mitchum). Eventually wearying of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full time.

Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate (more…)

(The Sacramento Bee, Dec. 1, Allen Pierleoni)

Is it the start of December already? We’d best get on with rounding up some holiday- oriented books, which include mystery, humor, feel-good and romance:

“Dashing Through the Snow” by Mary and Carol Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages): The mother-daughter (respectively) mystery writers set their fifth yuletide suspense novel in a small New Hampshire town. Two visiting sleuths must solve a puzzle involving a multimillion-dollar lottery ticket and a missing person.

“The Spy Who Came for Christmas” by David Morrell (Vanguard, 220 pages): The award- winning thriller novelist tells a Christmas Eve story about a wounded American spy in Santa Fe, N.M. who is trying to keep a very special baby safe from kidnapping by the Russian mob. He finds help from a distraught single mother and her 12-year-old son, who are themselves in a different kind of danger.

“Six Geese a-Slaying” by Donna Andrews (St. Martin’s, $22.95, 288 pages): The 10th title in the series involves amateur sleuth Meg Langslow’s search for a Santa killer (she’s hoping he won’t spoil the Christmas pageant).

“A Christmas Grace” by Anne Perry (Ballantine, 224 pages): The veteran novelist’s sixth Christmas-themed book is serious, but fast-moving. At a priest’s request, a niece travels to the remote Irish coast to comfort an ailing (more…)