Behind the scenes

For those of you who have read Mercenary Blues or Mercenary Rules, you can download PDFs of the "behind-the-scenes" documents I created before I wrote the books. You can see the original plot thoughts, some character background, and other interesting things. If you haven't read the books, I warn you, it is chock full of spoilers, but if you want to see the genesis of them, please check them out.

• Mercenary Blues (Acute Operations 1)
• Mercenary Rules (Acute Operations 2)

Book five in the Acute Operations series.

The rescue of a kidnapped heiress brings the three women of Acute Operations to a deserted island in the Pacific. A standard enough mission for the battle-hardended mercenaries, but when they arrive, things turn strange.

Emma and Lisa fight for their lives as they are hunted on the island by a cadre of psychopathic sadists. Back in Australia, Chloe struggles to find her friends from hundreds of miles away.

Can the women escape their tormentors, or better yet, turn the tables on them and still complete their contract? They'd be fools not to.

Book four in the Acute Operations series.

Normally diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but in this case, the women of Acute Operations find themselves thrust into the underbelly of conflict diamonds, with heavy emphasis on conflict.

As a simple job becomes more complicated these three highly-trained mercenaries need to work their way up the supply chain and stop the death and destruction these diamonds cause. What they discover sends them halfway across the world into a culture they can’t blend into with a language they don’t speak. They are in over their heads, leaving them little choice but to go in guns blazing.

Convincing the world to stop using these diamonds is an impossible task, but that is why the women of Acute Operations were called in: to do the impossible.

I get asked a lot for recommendations for board and card games to play with kids, so I wrote this short book with suggestions.

In it are reviews of games for preschoolers, elementary-aged kids, and middle-school-aged kids, along with links to the games if you are having trouble finding them.

How exactly did Lisa Renard come to join Acute Operations? Read this free short story and see.

You can download the file directly from the link below. Click on the version you would like (if you aren't sure what version, go ahead and choose PDF):

• The Interview - PDF
• The Interview - EPUB
• The Interview - MOBI

Eastern Europe. That's where the job has taken Acute Operations this time, into mountains still shadowed by the old Iron Curtain and towns where the only constant seems to be chaos.

Obtaining a thumb drive from a scientist would seem to be a simple task for accomplished mercenaries like Emma, Chloe, and new-hire Lisa, even if there does happen to be a slowly simmering civil war going on...but that's why Emma's team was hired in the first place.

No plan survives contact with the enemy though, even if that plan was devised by Emma Chapel; AO's hired guns learn of another team of shooters employed to achieve the same thing.

Can Emma and company prevail over their rivals while trying to stay alive in a country torn apart by civil war?

There are air strikes, armored vehicles, and urban warfare with highly trained operatives standing between the women of AO and their prize, but that is not the worst of their problems. It is the possibility of treachery within the tight-knit group that might bring down everything that Emma and Chloe have worked for.

Mercenary companies have rules. Rules they follow to protect themselves. The primary one is don't get involved in a personal vendetta. The pay is rarely worth the stakes and people go to great extremes for revenge.

When freed kidnap victim Tyler Westbury approaches Emma and Chloe about a revenge job, though, the pay sounds too good and the risks too low to say no.

So they don't.

Little did the mercenaries know they'd soon be crossing continents, fighting terrorists and a madman intent on wholesale destruction. Fighting against desperate odds is nothing new for Emma and Chloe, but it could be this time they're finally spread too thin.

As one of the world's best mercenary's, hiring Emma Chapel to prevent a coup in Santa Castillo made perfect sense. President Vega’s choice in stiffing her on her payment however, could prove to be a mistake.

Now Emma, along with her business partner Chloe, need to make the leader of the small Central American country pay, literally. They are two women alone in a hostile country, with no support, few supplies, spotty Wi-Fi, and an entire army hunting them down.

The odds are against them, but there’s no way Emma’s leaving without a suitcase full of cash.

Collected to support Independence Fund (www.IndependenceFund.org), 'Attack of the Zombie Hippies' is an anthology of zombie fiction and non-fiction 'instructional' pieces about life during (and how to deal with) a zombiepocalypse...but not just any zombiepocalypse - a HIPPIE zombiepocalypse. Featuring fiction from many up and coming writers as well as training articles and op-ed pieces from some of the biggest names in the tactical training industry, it is the publishers' hope that this book entertains as much as it educates.

I helped edit this and did a lot of work on the fiction pieces.