Today, I met a war hero from World War II and the Korean War

We’re in Singer Island, Florida right now. We sold our house, but our new house won’t be finished and ready until mid-September. We took everything we needed, including Scarlett the cat, and flew from SFO to FLL. It’s truly a different world.

My mom, who lives a few miles away in West Palm Beach, FL, had surgery yesterday to remove a tumor. Her three sons and two daughters-in-law were all with her, and we took her home last night. She’s doing well.

But, that’s not what this post is about.

Mom called this morning and asked if I could bring her a quart of milk, so dutiful son that I pretend to be, I arrived at her door holding the bottle. We spoke for a few minutes. She asked if I’d be willing to meet her neighbor, and I told her, “Sure.”

Her next door neighbor, Murray Young, is probably as old as my mom, probably at least 90 years old. But he appears to be in his late sixties or early seventies. Murray showed me his mementoes from World War II and the Korean War.

Turns out, the man earned eleven medals from those two conflicts. He was a gunny; tail gunner from a fighter-bomber. His aircraft carrier, the USS Boxer, had an explosion that killed a lot of sailors and some pilots on board, and Murray survived that, as well as numerous missions during the two wars.

Murray Young is a true war hero. I’m so glad I met him. It was an honor. Oh, and he read Bloodridge, Book 1 of DS Kane’s Spies Lie series. I’m happy to know another reader.

DS Kane's Bloodridge. Book 1 of the Spies Lie series FREE today and tomorrow

So, maybe you've heard about the Spies Lie series and wondered if they are books you might want to try. Remember George Tenent, Director of the CIA, claiming "weapons of mass destruction" as the excuse to invade Iraq? Well, SPIES LIE! We wage war through disinformation.

For the next two days, DS Kane's Bloodridge. Book 1 of the Spies Lie series, an Amazon Bestseller

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K0029J0) is FREE. Normally priced at just $0.99 as an introduction to the series, this book will embed you in the world of espionage. Filled with hackers, mercenaries, terrorists and politicians, this book contains its own tutorial on tradecraft as you walk in the shoes of Jon Sommers,  a Brit who seeks revenge for the assassination of his fiancé.

Kirkus Reviews:

“A globe-trotting spy thriller dense with intriguing insider's knowledge.” —Kirkus Reviews

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ds-kane/bloodridge/

Read Ethan Jones, a Great Bestselling Thriller Author

I’ve recently become a fan of bestselling international author Ethan Jones, another thriller writer whose body of work is compelling entertainment with serious espionage and military ops chops. This week, from June 14 through June 17, we’ll be co-marketing our books.

I’ve never before agreed to do something like this, and the reason why I’m joint marketing with Ethan is because his books are damn good combinations of espionage and military operations.

Ethan Jones is offering you two FREE spy thrillers: ARCTIC WARGAME and TRIPOLI’S TARGET, the first and the second novels in his Justin Hall series.

In ARCTIC WARGAME, when two foreign icebreakers appear in Canadian Arctic waters, Canadian Intelligence Service Agent Justin Hall volunteers for a reconnaissance mission, eager to return to the field. His team discovers a foreign weapons cache deep in the Arctic, but they are unaware that a spy has infiltrated the Department of National Defense. The team begins to unravel a treasonous plan against Canada, but they fall under attack from one of their own. Disarmed and stripped of their survival gear, they are stranded in a remote location. Now the team must survive the deadly Arctic not only to save themselves, but their country.

In TRIPOLI’S TARGET, Justin Hall and Carrie O'Connor, Canadian Intelligence Service Agents, find themselves in lawless North Africa on the trail of an assassination plot. The target is the US President, and the hit is scheduled to take place during a G-20 summit in Libya's capital, Tripoli. But the source of their information is the leader of one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the area. Ambushes and questionable loyalties turn an already difficult mission into a dark maze of betrayal and misdirection. Forced to return to Tripoli, Justin and Carrie dig up new intelligence pointing to a powerful Saudi prince bankrolling the assassination plan. What's worse, Justin and Carrie realize their plan is fatally flawed. The summit is only forty-eight hours away and they still have to stop the Saudi prince, dismantle the assassination plot, and save the life of Tripoli's target.

 

Enter your e-mail address at this link: http://eepurl.com/b3-eG1 and you will receive these thrillers for FREE! You will also be added to Ethan’s Loyal Readers’ List, so you can be informed of new book releases, special deals, and promotions.

                               

As if this wasn’t enough for readers, DS Kane’s bestselling espionage technothriller, Bloodridge, Book 1 of the Spies Lie Series (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K0029J0) is also available for FREE this week, from June 14 through June 15. Kirkus Reviews called Bloodridge “A globe-trotting spy thriller dense with intriguing insider's knowledge.”

In Bloodridge, to find justice for those he loved, a man finds himself at the center of a dangerous global conspiracy...

When Jon Sommers finds out his fiance Lisa Gabriel died in a terrorist bomb attack, he is visited by spymaster, Yigdal Ben-Levy, who throws Jon's life into chaos, when he tells him that Lisa was not a fellow graduate student but a Mossad spy sent to bring him to Israel. Ben-Levy convinces Jon to seek justice for Lisa's murder by joining Mossad and going after Tariq Houmaz, her killer. Shortly after training, Jon's entire new team is executed by the bomb maker, who murdered Lisa, and only Jon escapes the massacre. As he leaves the scene, Jon finds himself captured, threatened and turned into a double agent for MI-6. When his Mossad handler, Ben-Levy learns this, he wants Jon dead as an example to other Israeli coverts. If being a hunted double agent isn't enough, Jon comes across information in his spying for MI-6 that suggests Israel is in impending danger from Houmaz. To stop this catastrophe, Jon must put together his own team, one he can trust with his life. Can Jon bring justice to Lisa's murderer, or will millions of lives be lost?

My Political Position on Tech, Truth and the Future

You probably don’t know who I am. I don’t pretend to represent anyone else. But, I have been reading others opinions on social media and it seems my opinions are growing more common.

Why should you be interested in my opinions? Because I write technothriller fiction, and people read my books. Last year, nearly 40,000 books distributed. This year, that number should triple. My opinions are embedded in my fiction, although I present these opinions through plot points and character behaviors.

If you have political beliefs, yours are probably based in what has happened in your own life. Same here. So, here are the facts that inform my fiction:

I am a Type 1 diabetic, and am grossly disappointed in the medical community’s interest in curing the disease. Doctors, for the most part, stop learning the day after they begin practice. New technology requires time to learn, and using it without prior experience is risky. Doctors hate risk since that might expose them to malpractise. Example: Cancer. There are dozens of working cures for cancer, but most doctors still use medieval treatments instead of cures. In one of my books, GrayNet, I’ve depicted what actually happened to a cancer cure designed by a medical start-up company, but, of course, I fictionalized it. Needless to say, a big pharma corporation acquired the company and the cure disappeared.

I taught economics in one of the best graduate business schools. One of the things I researched was what happens to any empire when the gap between the richest and poorest grows too large: Armed uprising, revolution, and the fall of the empire. Happens to every empire, and no government ever learns the lesson. This theme is also found within my books. See ProxyWar.

I've worked in tech for decades before writing fiction. Tech changes everything. And the changes always happen slowly at first, with the speed of change increasing and accelerating until nothing remains as it was. The music industry, the publishing industry, and, most interestingly, the tech industry itself. Law can never keep up. Government is always subject to the changes before it can react. The result always tends toward chaos. In reacting to tech without any understanding of tech, elected and appointed government bureaucrats make colossal mistakes. All of my books carry this theme: Bloodridge, DeathByte, Swiftshadow, GrayNet, Baksheesh (Bribes) and ProxyWar. Failure to understand tech caused the Soviet Union to fall. It caused the rise of terrorism to be misunderstood and not tactically countered.

I read history books, lots of them. History teaches us nothing. It’s an old saw, but it’s true. Across the Spies Lie series, from book to book, the story starts with one seemingly small error of judgement by an intelligence service that continues to escalate through five more books, growing more dangerous every moment until the end of the sixth book. This mirrors my own life experience. A small mistake often has implications that are easily misunderstood and poorly estimated. Remember America’s ten year war based on the lie “weapons of mass destruction?” A trivial mistake when it was made, a mistake no one understood for over a year. A trillion dollars wasted. Thousands of lives lost, tens of thousands of lives destroyed. And, worst of all, we have learned nothing and might easily be convinced to do the same crazy thing again. All of my books are based on this human failing. Spies Lie, and people die.

I have served as an elected official for two terms in office. I can see things through the eyes of a politician. I believe that the entire planet is precariously wobbling on the verge of a major war right now. Russia seems intent on providing evidence that it has been underestimated as a world power, China is circling the drain economically and wants to show that what is happening there is inconsequential to its position as a world power, Europe is trying to recover but the recovery is too slow to suit its citizens, Africa is still an undeveloped land mass, and the United States has gone bat-shit crazy in its attempts to recover from the disease that battle between the poor and rich has triggered. I’ve read history when I’m not writing, and bits of the causes of World War I and World War II seems to be reemerging as potential causes of another world war. We won’t be careful enough or able to adjust our behavior fast enough, I fear.

Now, I write fiction so I don’t have to think too hard about what I see coming at us very fast now. If you’re reading my fiction, it might give you something to think about…

What it Means to Live as a Fiction Writer

I'm a member of a writer's group called BookPod. This week, one of our members, Yi Shun Lai, was featured on an episode of Joy Sandwich, publicizing her book, Not a Self-Help Book, soon to be released. I listened to the podcast. Very chatty, and great fun. Good to see another writer I know so well succeed. The aftermath of the podcast included  a discussion among BookPod members about marketing of books.

Marketing... the bane of every writer. Before I started writing fiction, I knew writers were a tad schizo. All those voices inside my head, screaming "Write ME!" But after nearly three years of 'authoring' I find we're also bi-polar: writing is so quiet and solitary, then marketing is so noisy and messy. Argghhh.

When I got started, I had a publicist who worked her tail off to get me known. It worked. Then I moved to a marketeer, one who knows exactly where to place ads, at just the right time to trigger maximum sales. And that's what surprised me. Having Rebecca Berus of 2 Market Books changed everything for me. Now, all I do is write fiction, write blog entries, and, on the promo days, send out messages to my email list, Twitter and Facebook. I'm active on Facebook and Twitter, dropping links to news about computer hacking, politics, technology and... my own books and how those topics relate to my fiction. Busy days, every one of them. As an older (gonna be 69 in three weeks), thoroughly used-up former spy, I thought retirement would be three rounds of golf every week. Nope, it's fifty hour weeks. Twenty-five hours of fiction writing, five hours of research on medicine, computer hacking and programming, politics and facts about locations I'll have to visit so I can 'vibe' them into my stories, fifteen hours of editing what I've written and what my critique partners have written, and five hours of social media.

 

As song writer Joe Ely says in one of his songs, "The road goes on forever and the party never ends." So, there are lessons to be learned, yes, but the half-life of their applicability to whatever you do is very limited. On the Internet, no one knows you aren't a dog. On the Internet, things are simple. In a writer's reality, we're all dogs sometimes, and other things at other times. In reality, writing is never simple. It's why no one knows when they've achieved success. There's always another obstacle to mount after this one is conquered. 

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Who knew becoming a writer could be such great fun? (Then again, maybe I'm just a masochist...)

April Promo for DS Kane's bestselling technothriller, DeathByte, Book 2 of the Spies Lie series

So, let's say you read Bloodridge, Book 1 and haven't yet read the second book in my series, DeathByte. Well then, your chance to get DeathByte for just $0.99, a price reduction of 75% will come on April 19th through April 21. It's my Kindle Countdown promo.

All the books in the Spies Lie series have been Amazon Bestsellers. DeathByte was inspired by a speech from Leon Panetta on nanotechnology. Panetta worries that nanotech could disrupt or destroy the United States and states quite clearly just how dangerous it is.

I wondered, "What's the worst that could happen? Who would develop such a weapon?" And, it became the reason and the basis for DeathByte. Legendary cypherpunk Steven Schear helped with some of the details:

What is DeathByte about?
When the plans to a new device that could change the course of world politics forever is stolen, every country goes looking. It’s going to be a free-for-all.

When someone breaks into William Wing's Hong Kong apartment and steals the hard drives from his computer, it sets several intelligence services searching for the plans to a new device that could change the course of world politics forever.

Wing's worst fears, that he might become hunted for what they think he knows, is the least of the issues at hand for his friend, Jon Sommers. Sommers will have to leave his deep cover assignment to help his friend, and he'll need a team. The Mossad wants what Wing lost, and so do the Americans, the Chinese and the Brits. It's going to be a fight to see who finds the plans first...

Kirkus Reviews Loved DeathByte:
"In the second installment of the Spies Lie thriller series, a covert agent reunites with his allies as intelligence agencies battle over a revolutionary tracking device.
 
Master hacker William Wing discovers that someone has broken into his Hong Kong apartment and stolen all the secrets on his computer—secrets that belong to clients such as Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. Afraid that he’ll be killed as a result of the breach, he reaches out to his friend Jon Sommers, a former Mossad assassin who’s now working undercover in a German bank (and having a hot-and-heavy romance with fellow spy Ruth Cohen). The thief is revealed to be Cassandra Sashakovich, an agent with an unnamed American intelligence agency who had been ratted out by a mole, raped by a terrorist and is now running for her life. The data she made off with includes plans for a tiny tracking gadget that allows one to see through the eyes of the person who swallows it; naturally, many people would kill to get their hands on it. Sommers brings together his few trusted allies, including hardened soldier Avram Shimmel, to help Wing and prevent the plans from falling into the wrong hands—but whose hands are the wrong ones? Kane (Bloodridge, 2014) purports to be a former spy himself, and his extensive knowledge of the ways that the world’s governments wage covert war on one another shines through in his incredibly detailed prose. At times, however, these details grow overwhelming and make it hard to keep track of who’s spying on whom and why. However, readers who adore action-packed thrillers in the vein of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series will enjoy its many double-crossings. However, some readers should be warned: There are graphic scenes of torture excruciating enough to possibly make one’s stomach turn. Indeed, so many upsetting things happen to the main characters that it may be easy for readers to grow despondent about the state of the world by the time the story reaches its firestorm of a conclusion.

A dizzying spy story for readers with clear minds and steely constitutions."

Amazon Giveaway of ProxyWar, Book 6 of DS Kane's Spies Lie series

Love a good spy novel? I am running an Amazon Giveaway on my newest Spies Lies novel, ProxyWar. Enter now for a chance to win an ebook copy of ProxyWar. When a former Mossad spymaster stumbles across a Chinese-Russian plot against the U.S, he must make the journey through a blizzard and his enemies to present his suspicions to the UN General Assembly. When you’re an international spy, who said dying was easy? Enter here: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/bd6c50494d7dc302