Deadly Illusions Is Free for the Kindle

When I set up my tent at an outdoor festival, I can count on a few people to gaze about the array of covers and ask, "Which one do you like best?" My stock answer isn't really an answer at all. It's a statement. "That's like asking which one of my kids do I like best?" That would be partly true, partly a cop-out. It's true I don't have a favorite, but I view some a bit more fondly than others. One in this category is Deadly Illusions. Trouble is, this is the least expensive of my books at $12.95. Like all of my mysteries, though, it's only $2.99 for the Kindle.

And today, December 26, through Saturday, December 29, Deadly Illusions will be free to download from the Kindle Store here.

This is the third book in my Greg McKenzie Mystery Series. I particularly enjoyed writing it since it involved Greg and Jill opening McKenzie Investigations and launching their careers as PI's. The  response from reviewers was encouraging.

Spinetingler Magazine wrote:

"Campbell's engaging style and masterful plotting makes for a fast-paced, thrilling read. His sharp wit left this reader laughing out loud at times, yet the steadily building suspense made for a white-knuckle, edge-of-the seat ride."

Midwest Book Review had this to say:

"Greg McKenzie is a senior investigator who relies on his experience to compensate for the brawn he might have engaged in the past. His wife, Jill, is an accomplished pilot, cook, and is the perfect partner for her husband. Campbell juxtaposes her correction of Greg's "blue language" and her obvious spirituality with her determination when the going gets rough and she has to use some of the private investigator skills that most people would shrink from. All in all, DEADLY ILLUSIONS is another winner in the Chester D. Campbell literary cabinet. Campbell obviously has many stories to share, and he continues to write fabulous mysteries."

In the book, Molly Saint hires new PI's Greg and Jill McKenzie to check into her husband's background, then disappears. It starts them on a tangled trail of deceit. Complicating matters further, Greg gets drawn into a troubling police investigation stemming from the assassination of the Federal Reserve Board chairman at a Nashville hotel. The case resurrects old problems with a Murder Squad detective and his colleages among Nashville's finest. The deeper the McKenzies dig, the more deadly illusions they face. After threats, break-ins, and another murder, the charade ends in a shocking showdown.

I enjoyed writing Jill's character, and the readers appear to approve, as witness the comments of Midwest Book Review's Shelley Glodowski above. Jill does something quite unexpected in this story, but I won't say anymore as I don't want to spoil it for you.

One dilemma mystery writers face is the necessity to continually ramp up the tension by putting your protagonist in progressively more dire situations. If you aren't careful, they wind up facing impossible odds. In this book, Greg and his homicide detective friend find themselves defenseless, confronted by a remorseless killer.

What happens? Read the book. 

What Motivates Assassins

The first book in my Post Cold War thriller trilogy, Beware the Jabberwock, involves an operation designed to eliminate the American and Russian presidents in a highly public assassination. It is code named Jabberwock. The team of assassins is composed of three men with widely different backgrounds. They train for the operation at a tiny island off the Florida Panhandle coast. Those charged with getting them prepared for the job compose an  equally varied group of four men.

What motivates people to get involved in such a reprehensible plot? For the trainers, it's just part of the job. There's a CIA clandestine officer and a KGB lieutenant colonel who have been involved in nefarious activities during the Cold War, each man totally committed to his superiors who devised the scheme. The other two involved in training the operational team are former military officers now in well-placed industrial positions directly beneath corporate chairmen who believe the current  administration is dangerously compromising the nation's position of preeminence.

The team of assassins includes an American ex-Green Beret, Gary Overmyer; an explosives expert with the old Stasi, East Germany's hated State Security Service, Hans Richter; and a Palestinian freelance hit-man, Naji Abdalla. Each man was given $125,000 with a promise of an additional $350,00 at conclusion of the operation.

Overmyer had wound up in a psychiatric ward after Vietnam. He then failed at several jobs before succeeding in writing Vietnam War stories for adventure magazines. He enjoyed taking to the woods to practice his stealth skills, scaring the daylights out of people along trails when he jumped out dressed in camouflage gear, features darkened with face paint, carrying an automatic weapon. The reason for his dedication to Jabberwock resulted from falling in love with a young  Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra cellist a couple of years before.

When Overmyer went to Moscow to try and arrange an exit visa for Natasha Grinev, he was thwarted at every turn. He had thought perestroika and glasnost would have softened the Soviet bureaucracy. He sought help from the White House, but got the same story: "These things take time." He returned to Russia to visit Natasha and received shocking news. She had been killed in the collapse of a poorly constructed concrete apartment building. He blamed both presidents for the delay that ended in her death.

As the East German communist government fell from power, the Stasi began burning its documents to hide the records of its misdeeds. The German people fought to halt the destruction, and Hans Richter's records survived. He fled the country and saw no prospects for returning.

Naji Abdalla spent his formative years in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, waiting for the day he could carry a rifle and join in the battle to free  his homeland. But he soon learned the leaders spent more time fighting among each other. He moved from one band to another, learning the use of every kind of weapon, including the curved Bedouin knife an old Arab taught him. He finally broke with the bands and established himself as a one-man guerrilla force available to the highest bidder.

To learn more about these assassins and what happened to them, go to Beware the Jabberwock.

Garden of Beasts - a review of sorts

I'm not much of a book reviewer. I probably have three showing on Amazon.com. A friend has asked me to review an anthology, so I'm currently reading that one. But I just finished Jeffery Deaver's Garden of Beasts and thought I'd make some comments here.

It's a bit larger than most books I read, running 536 pages in mass market paperback. I really enjoyed the book but found it interesting that the publisher put "A master of ticking-bomb suspense." - People on the cover. While the book contained lots of suspense, it wasn't one of those page-turners you couldn't put down. In fact, it took me several weeks in my hit-and-miss reading style.

I suppose one reason the story appealed to me is that I'm a history buff. It deals with a short period before and during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I like intrigue. This one involves a rogue American plot to assassinate a top Hitler aide responsible for preparing Germany's armed forces for a major war.

Deaver obviously did a mountain of research on pre-war Berlin and the Nazi hierarchy. I've never visited the German capital, but his descriptions of the neighborhoods and the people who inhabit them are so realistic you feel you've been there.

Hitler and his inner circle are depicted chillingly with all their little quirks, like Hitler's obsession with drinking hot chocolate. Obese Herman Goring, thin, clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels, and bespectacled Heinrich Himmler are portrayed as edgy schemers, always mindful of Hitler's volatile temper.

The American plot was hatched by a senator and a business magnate working with a small group in an Office of Naval Intellgience hideaway on New York's Upper East Side. The most intriguing part was the killer they chose, a "button man," or hitman for the Mafia. But Paul Shumann was a native German brought to New York as a boy, not a Sicilian mobster. He chose to eliminate the bad guys because of what they had done to his father.

The two most interesting characters, those who hold the point of view, are Paul and his nemesis, Berlin Kripo (criminal police) Detective-Inspector Willi Kohl. Deaver does a masterful job of plotting to keep the path of events inexorably pushing the two men together for the climax.

Unexpected twists and turns fill the book. I did not guess the ending (though I'm rarely that prescient). Did the assassination succeed? Was Paul captured? Did Kohl suffer the fate of Germans who did not share Hitler's hatred of the Jews?

Read Garden of Beasts and find out.

I suppose you could call it "ticking bomb" suspense, but it ticked rather slowly. One reason was the meticulous characterization used throughout to give everyone the feeling of reality. It was accomplished by careful use of thoughts and actions rather than overuse of details.

In an Author's Note at the end, Deaver tells what happened to some of the places mentioned in the book, and he details the fate of the Nazi bigwigs who carry much of the plot. Though it's a work of fiction, it makes you wonder what might have been the outcome if something similar had actually occurred.

Who knows?