Amongst My Enemies

The cover art for this new international suspense thriller is “hot off the press,” designed by Rick Capidamonte.  The novel is now out on Kindle in e-book format and will be out on Nook, Sony, Kobo, IBook, and the others by Feb 1.  It has already received 6 Five-Star Amazon reviews and 1 Four Star out of 7.

Amongst My Enemies is a fast-paced story of action and international suspense  that plumbs the depths of brotherhood, honor, a debt that can never be repaid, and one man’s revenge.   Beginning in the closing days of WW II, it deals with horde of stolen Nazi gold and art, a missing German U-boat, Russian spies, Nazi hit men, and a secret that could shatter NATO. In February 1945, two young Americans, Mike Randall and Eddie Hodge, door gunners on an American B-24, are shot down on an ill-fated bombing mission over Berlin.  Instead of a Nazi POW camp, however, they find themselves in a forced labor battalion in the frozen hell of Konigsberg in East Prussia.  With the SS inside and the rampaging Red Army outside, the old port city and everyone in it are doomed.  When Hodge dies in his arms, Randall swears he will have his revenge.  Assigned to a work detail loading mysterious crates into a German U-boat, Randall manages to hide in the hold as the SS. massacre the other laborers.  In the end, he owes his life to Eric Bruckner, the U-boat Kapitan, and perhaps the last honorable man left inGermany.  When Bruckner to set Randall free on the coast of Sweden, he pays the ultimate price when a British bomber catches him on the surface.  He and his U-boat are destroyed, leaving Randall an emotional cripple overcome by exhaustion and guilt. For the next six years, Randall remains inSweden, working as an anonymous deck hand on fishing boats, trying to forget and to heal; but it is no use.  He knows he must return to US and confess his role in Hodge’s death to his father and sister.  While there, he learns the impossible . . .  Eric Bruckner is alive!   Somehow, he survived the air attack and is now a West German Admiral in charge of NATO plans and operations, visiting east coast ports on a good will mission.  Randall hurries toNew Yorkto see him and to thank him; but when they come face to face in a Manhattan hotel lobby, he immediately sees that the Admiral is not Eric Bruckner.  He is a phony, but whose phony is he? Randall knows the truth, and he knows what he saw inside the wooden crates in that U-boat . . . a fortune in gold, stolen art and jewels, Nazi records, and a dead hero.  No one wants to believe Randall, so he returns to Sweden, to the Baltic coast, with a ragtag group consisting of Hodge’s little sister, a retired NY cop, and an old Swedish fishing captain, and two Israeli salvage experts to find that U-Boat and prove them all wrong.   Equally determined to stop him are the Soviet KGB, the Russian Navy, and the underground Nazi network of Martin Bormann and his ‘strong right arm’, Heinz Kruger. The truth lies three-hundred feet down on the bottom of the Baltic.  Some want the gold.  Some want to know the truth.  Some want to destroy it and kill everyone involved.