Stand-Alone Suspense Thrillers

The earlier, stand-alone novels below are not directly part of the Nitework.net series, but represent top quality suspense-thriller fiction.

Lethal Journey (Noir 1892 True Crime/Ghost Story)   [F] [B&N]  [P]   ...read more:
The Generals of October (Suspense)  [F]  [B&N]  [P]   ...read more:
Neon Blue (Suspense)  [F]  [B&N]   [P]   ...read more:
Umnitsa (WW2 Suspense) [F]  [B&N]  [P]   ...read more:

The Generals of October is considered so prophetic and important a work, touching on fundamental Constitutional themes in times of national crisis (what if we had a Second Constitutional Convention? Would the military take over?) that several major law schools have accepted copies for their research library collections. It may be compared to such thoughtful works as Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, and other enjoyable but serious works about a very possible collapse of democracy in the USA.TOP

Lethal Journey is a 1892 noir period piece, a suspense thriller based on the first-ever plausible explanation of one of San Diego's most fascinating and remarkable stories. A mysterious and beautiful young woman checked into the Hotel del Coronado (now a national landmark on the Coronado shore, overlooking the Pacific Ocean) on Thanksgiving Day that year, and never checked out. The Beautiful Stranger, as the hotel's official Heritage Department book calls her, was found dead of a gunshot to the head just five days after she checked in. Soon, it was a national scandal, with rumors of dark conspiracies, crimes, and romantic dalliances with powerful men. My scholarly, nonfictional analysis is titled Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado, 2nd Edition, and covers this ancient cold case in granular and precise detail.TOP

Umnitsa is a sophisticated, panoramic novel of espionage, grand-scale conspiracy, and passionate love centering on the development of the atomic bombs of World War II. It is a novel of both tragic loss, sordid betrayal, murder, and limerent love. The hero, young U.S. Navy Lt. Tim Nordall, is thrown ashore on the legendary South Atlantic coast of Africa, and escapes death by joining a pair of German deserters who run blackmail operations between Mauretania and the Congo. From the radium mines of the Congo, Tim ends up in Blitz London as an intelligence officer, and later in 1945 San Francisco that brings us a limerent love triangle while ending on a Chinatown note. In the end, Tim and his two women save the world, and their own small corner of love, but there is no paradise on this earth—only a coin of two sides, the other of which is steeped in loss and tragedy. Not all stories end happily, but most of us live in the moment, and we can almost hear swing music live at the Drake in San Francisco as tens of thousands of young military men and women meet and hold hands in wild dances.TOP

Neon Blue is an intriguing, enjoyable read. DEA Special Agent Laurel 'Blue' Humboldt has an important witness to a Colombian drug cartel assassinated in her care, in broad daylight on an icy winter day in Manhattan. The trail takes her to a small town in Connecticut and across the country to San Diego. Along the way, she finds the latches and keys of her carefully boxed and repressed love life torn open. In the past, her love affairs have included several abusive husbands and the strange but loving painter Maggie. Now she finds herself not only chasing down major leads on the Colombian drug cartel, but tries to make sense of her heart as she meets two stunning, utterly unrelated new people in San Diego, who each take a strong interest in her. Will her heart go to handsome, millionaire importer John Connor, or to exotically beautiful Chinese-American detective Martha Yee? She doesn't have much time to ponder, because a deadly assassin wielding a straight razor is stalking her and drawing ever closer to her pale, beautiful throat.TOP

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