Title: Gulf Winds
Author: J. M. Taylor
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Lee Boyland
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1879043238
Synopsis of the book, submitted by the author.
Title: Missing Sticks
Author: J. M. Taylor
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Larry Purcell
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1879043009
Faces streaked with soot or burnt cork, over six thousand paratroopers and glidermen of the 101st Airborne Division Screaming Eagles jumped or crashed into the swamps, canals, hedgerows and villages of the Cotentin Peninsular of France sometime after midnight on the sixth day of June 1944.
Over four hundred C-47 Dakotas carried the Screaming Eagles through the darkness and into a thick cloud bank that night. One load of pathfinders crashed into the English Channel. Planes were seen to explode in midair. Others crashed and burned past all recognition, probably due to ground fire. Just before dawn, the initial glider serials slammed between the hedgerows, into trees and each other. Many planes safely delivered their troopers to their designated drop zones. However, come dawn eighteen planes, each carrying a stick of fifteen to twenty paratroopers, were missing.
As so often happened that night, many paratroopers found themselves alone. Some quickly banded together, others wandered for hours, evading Germans and capture. Some were all too quickly made casualties, either by the hard landing or German fire. Others were taken prisoner. Some of the real stories are even harder to fathom than the stories in Missing Sticks, a fictional account of a handful of those missing men, representative of those declared casualties in real life.
Title: Terrorism's Shifting Winds
Author: Maurice H. Unger
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Joyce Faulkner
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 160813413X
Islamic terrorists are running hand-in-hand with powerful drug trafficking cartels in the western hemisphere to launch new attacks against the United States. Terrorism’s Shifting Winds is an action/suspense thriller that takes this collaboration between Mid-East terrorists and drug traffickers and weaves a story of intrigue that entails not only drug trafficking but the smuggling of a weapon of mass destruction into the United States. Jackie Randolph, an impetuous but resourceful ex-special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, is rehired for an undercover role. Toss in the antics of some fearsome, erstwhile Tennessee moonshiners, Mexican drug traffickers and some not so innocent white-collar vacationers at a wilderness retreat, and you have a robust tale about heroes and villains.
Title: Bear: Flight to Liberty
Author: Miguel Vargas-Caba
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Rob Ballister
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0595681670
In September 1976, Viktor Belenko defected to Japan in his MiG-25 Foxbat jet fighter, one of the most well-known defections from the Soviet block. But in that same year, there was another defection so embarrassing to the Soviets that its particulars remained a secret for more than twenty-five years. All media accounts of Soviet TU-95 flights participating in the Okean 76 naval maneuvers mention only two planes. Whenever they were confronted in private, however, the Soviets acknowledged that in reality, three planes took off from Russia, with the third aircraft crashing at sea, killing everyone aboard. Since it sank in deep waters, no one attempted to salvage the wreck. But what the Soviet authorities never acknowledged -publicly or privately- was that the third TU-95 made a bold and risky flight from the USSR to Canada. Because its crew defected, the Soviets never admitted that such an event happened. Bear: Flight to Liberty tells the third crew's thrilling story.
Title: The Traiteur's Ring
Author: Jeffrey Wilson
Genre: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery
Reviewer: Bill McDonald
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1936564173
A man who has spent his life defending his country discovers that fate has presented him with an even higher calling. Ben Morvant is not what you would call ordinary and as a Navy SEAL, he never expected an ordinary life. But when a routine mission to protect a local village in a war-torn region of Africa goes terribly wrong, Ben is presented with truths beyond what his military training and experience have prepared him to accept. With his dying breath, a village elder passes to Ben a gift--a simple ring, unremarkable except for its ever changing color and the feeling of power emanating from within.
Soon after accepting the ring dark visions begin to haunt Ben's dreams. Images of pain and death, of evil and destruction. But some of the visions are hauntingly familiar. Soon Ben must return to his childhood home in Louisiana to face a dark secret from his past, one that may explain why he has the power to heal with a touch of the hand . . . or kill with a single thought. After discovering the truth about his family and himself, he comes to realize that he is a soldier in a greater battle than he could ever have imagined. And if he cannot find a way to wield the power concealed within him, the forces that prey on mankind's anger and fear will destroy not only him, but everything he holds dear.