Praise for The DeValera Deception
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"Dev's Dread Disciples; the Big Fella as Hero," by David Freeman, Finest Hour
"The Last Apostle Comes to Life," PixiesDidIt
"A fast-paced story that keeps readers' attention…a cross between John Buchan and Robert Ludlum."
Finest Hour
Journal of the Churchill Centre and Museum in London
"Crisply written and meticulously researched, The DeValera Deception is a remarkably well-crafted adventure story."
Mysterious Reviews
"A thriller in the same tradition as Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed and Ken Follett's The Eye of the Needle…the thriller plot smoothly blends with historical events and historical characters."
Over My Dead Body Online
"An intense and intriguing read. Few authors can create believable historical fiction, and even fewer can create a page-turning thriller within that genre. The DeValera Deception is an excellent novel, woven with rich historical detail that breaths vitality and life into the people of an often overlooked era."
Book Trailer Lady
"A fast-paced historical thriller. The historical aspects of the novel are especially true to life, giving a strong factual feel to this fictional story."
Suspense Magazine
"A definite page turner. A combination of creative historical fact, speculation, and political controversy. The DeValera Deception adds a new dimension of international intrigue, terrorism, conspiracy, and personal revenge to the genre of historical fiction which is entertaining and highly informative."
Reader Views
"Entertaining, fun, fast paced and laced with just enough facts and real people to force any reader to imagine…what if?"
Anne Sebba
Author of American Jennie, the Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (Norton)
"A 'what if' political/espionage/sabotage thriller with a solid factual basis. The protagonists, strong characters themselves, do Winston's bidding because he is Winston, and they do not come through unscathed. Few who worked for Winston did."
The Intelligencer
Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies
"I was amazed and delighted with the amount of research. It may be fictional but it contains many true facts confirming DeValera's treachery that have been ignored or deflected by Irish writers.
John Turi
Author of England's Greatest Spy, Eamon de Valera (Stacey International)
"A fascinating view of the most complex and riveting period in the twentieth century. Mysterious and sexy protagonists with action that goes beyond Bond and Bourne! A high-class page-turner."
Les Roberts
Past President, Private Eye Writers of America and
The American Crime Writers League
The DeValera Deception
In the summer of 1929, on the eve of a long holiday in North America after his party has lost an election, Winston Churchill receives a clandestine assignment. British Intelligence, having learned the IRA is about to buy a massive amount of arms in the US for a coup d’état in the Irish Free State, is sending a team of SIS agents to investigate. Churchill is to persuade President Herbert Hoover to stop the arms from leaving the US. But a cautious Churchill assembles his own private team, unaware that the IRA is also plotting his assassination.
One Churchill recruit is a former US military intelligence officer, Bourke Cockran Jr., a law school professor and the son of Churchill’s own Irish-American mentor. Another is Churchill’s god-daughter, Mattie McGary, a risk-taking Scottish photo-journalist and the rising star in William Randolph Hearst’s media empire.
Magnetically attracted to one another, the Celtic tempers of Cockran and Mattie often clash as they follow a trail filled with danger from Manhattan to Montreal, Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where they discover that the arms deal is backed by a conspiracy bent on achieving revenge for Germany’s defeat in the Great War.
But Mattie is keeping secrets from Cockran about her true loyalties while Cockran has his own hidden agenda—revenge for the IRA murder of his wife. And time is running out if they are to save Churchill’s life and prevent the outbreak of another world war.
Praise for The Parsifal Pursuit
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"Hitler's Holy Grail", by David Freeman, Finest Hour, Autumn 2011
Reviewed by Richard R. Blake for Reader Views, February 2012
"Winston Churchill meets Indiana Jones! The triumvirate of protagonists in The Parsifal Pursuit are sexy, adventuresome, imaginative and endlessly fascinating. You'll not put this one down until it's over --- and then maybe read it again."
Les Roberts
Author of The Cleveland Creep (Gray & Co.) and the forthcoming The Strange Death of Father Candy (St. Martins). Past President, Private Eye Writers of America and The Crime Writers League
"Evocative of Ken Follet and Steve Berry at their best, The Parsifal Pursuit is a thrilling ride through pre-World War II Europe. Rich in historical detail, this book brings you into the conflict between the Kaiser's allies and Hitler's zealots, and gives you a front-row seat to see Churchill's gambit to wrench away the symbol of power both sides desire. The Parsifal Pursuit is a masterful page-turner that packs a wallop you won't soon forget!
D.E. Johnson
Award-winning author of the historical mysteries The Detroit Electric Scheme and the forthcoming Motor City Shakedown (St.Martins Minotaur)
"Vivid portrayal of Churchill and unusual insights into Hitler's character accompany a fast-paced thriller that is hard to put down."
Richard Langworth
Author of Churchill By Himself (Public Affairs) and Editor of Finest Hour, Journal of the Churchill Centre and Museum in London
"...I found it enjoyable and very captivating. I would definitely recommend this one."
Everyday Life
"Parsifal Pursuit is a fantastic read. If you like historical thrillers and anything related to Germany and its past then this is a must read for you."
Linkies
"Fast paced and kept my attention from start to finish – I can’t wait to read the next one in the trilogy! Definitely a page turner!"
Couponer 101
The Parsifal Pursuit
"I intend to form my religion on the Parsifal legend. It is more than a religion. It is the collective will of a new race of men, a bold, imperious, violent, cruel generation—that is what I want."
Adolf Hitler,1931
Joachim Kohler, Wagner's Hitler
Germany, 1931. A shadowy plot by reactionary industrialists to assassinate President Hindenburg and elevate the Kaiser's son to the German throne threatens the peace of Europe and sets off an epic quest to discover the secret hiding place of an ancient Christian artifact—the Spear of Destiny, the lance which pierced the side of Christ on the cross.
Kaiser Wilhem II insists that the missing spear—a talisman of bloodthirsty conquerors from Constantine to Charlemagne to Frederick the Great—must be found and restored to his family as Frederick's heirs. But Frederick the Great is also deeply revered by Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany's second largest party, who wants the spear every bit as much as the Kaiser.
So does Winston Churchill, out of power and growling in the political wilderness. Through his private intelligence network, he has gotten wind of the two German tyrants' obsession with the spear and is determined to deny them a symbol that has led in the past to so much bloodshed.
Churchill enlists Mattie McGary, an adventure-seeking Scottish photojournalist for the Hearst media empire, to embark upon a quest to locate the spear and vindicate the vision of her late, grail-scholar father. At the same time, he persuades Mattie's lover, Bourke Cockran Jr., a law professor and former counterintelligence agent, to represent a US company being victimized by a Nazi extortion racket run in Munich by the SS, Hitler's praetorian guard.
Mattie's quest leads her to a mysterious villa in Egypt and then to a mountain stronghold high in the Austrian Alps, attacked repeatedly by the SS as well as religious fanatics sworn to protect the secret of the spear's location. Unknown to Mattie, the ruthless and charismatic leader of her expedition is intent on delivering the spear to the Kaiser and leaving her for dead.
Learning Mattie's life is in danger, Cockran races against time to save the woman he loves while Mattie, in turn, must resist her growing attraction to the Kaiser's man if she is to succeed in her quest to find the Spear of Destiny and deny it to both the Kaiser's reactionaries and Hitler's SS zealots.
Rich in period detail, The Parsifal Pursuit is an historical thriller evoking the era of the early 1930s when Hitler, Churchill and Mussolini were all under exclusive contract to write for William Randolph Hearst. It recalls a time when fledgling European democracies created in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles were under attack from authoritarian enemies on the left and the right alike while the fate of western civilization hung in the balance.
Praise for The Gemini Agenda
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"This series set in America and Europe during the 1930s gets better and more suspenseful each time out. The three leading characters are as fascinating as ever and the story about secret experiments on twins is both chilling and irresistably entertaining."
Les Roberts
Author of The Strange Death of Father Candy (St. Martins) and Past President, Private Eye Writers of America and The Crime Writers League
"The McMenamins once more have successfully woven together history and fantasy in a dramatic thriller, one which forces Americans to confront the ugly truth about their country's invovlement with eugenics."
Finest Hour
"An excellent read and a brilliant follow-up to THE PARSIFAL PURSUIT"
Beck Valley Books
"This book is yet again an extraordinary book about love, loss, thrills and dangerous quests."
Linkies
"A mix of history, intrigue and romance...a fast-paced story that has a grip on you from the beginning."
Couponer 101
"The Churchill Thrillers are some of the best historical fiction out there...If I didn't know THE GEMINI AGENDA was fiction, I would believe it actually happened exactly as written."
Rhe's Bookshelf
The Gemini Agenda
In the Spring of 1932, Winston Churchill receives ominous intelligence from a confidential source in Germany. Across the United States naked bodies, drained of blood, their eyeballs extracted, are found at ten remote locations. Is it a serial killer? Or something worse? Churchill's source believes that the answers lie in Germany.
The out-of-office British statesman passes on the information to his American publisher, William Randolph Hearst who assigns Mattie McGary, his top photojournalist and Churchill's god-daughter, to investigate the strange deaths. Aided by her lover Bourke Cockran, Jr., a former Army counterintelligence agent, they learn that all ten victims were twins. Five sets of fraternal twins. In doing so, they become the target of an international conspiracy reaching from the canyons of Wall Street to the marble corridors of the Barlow Palace in Munich, home to the fast-rising Nazi Party.
In a deadly encounter at laboratories on Long Island's fabled Gold Coast, Mattie and Cockran discover that there are ten more missing twins—identical twins—on their way to Germany. They are still alive but for how long? With additional information from Churchill's private intelligence network, the two embark upon a rescue mission which leads them to a sinister clinic deep in the Bavarian National Forest near the small border town of Passau where Adolf Hitler lived as a child.
In their quest to rescue the twins, the risk-taking Mattie and the ruthless Cockran find their own often rocky relationship tested. And never more so than when they join forces with two of Mattie's former lovers. Together, the unlikely allies risk their lives to expose the financial backers behind a secret project where Nazi scientists kidnap and conduct lethal experiments upon American twins in hopes of unlocking the secret to creating a master race.
The Gemini Agenda is an historical thriller that explores the true horrors of the eugenics movement in the United States where science in the service of politics delivered the state-sanctioned sterilization of 50,000 American women and led directly to Dr. Josef Mengele's mutilation of twins during "scientific experiments" at Auschwitz.