Fifth-generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong finds herself investigating the mass murder of an offshore oilrig crew that had found the long-lost wreckage of the Mother Mary.  But the same crew also uncovered something else beneath the surface of the sea, something connected to a devastating terrorist attack about to be launched on the United States by a mad American-born cleric who has recruited an army of homegrown terrorists to murder hundreds of thousands.

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1818:  In the Gulf waters off the Texas coast, the pirate Jean Lafitte and his partner Jim Bowie launch an attack on the Mother Mary, a slave ship carrying an invaluable treasure on board.

The Present:  Fifth-generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong finds herself investigating the mass murder of an offshore oilrig crew that had found the long-lost wreckage of the Mother Mary.  But the same crew also uncovered something else beneath the surface of the sea, something connected to a devastating terrorist attack about to be launched on the United States by a mad American-born cleric who has recruited an army of homegrown terrorists to murder hundreds of thousands.

With the stakes higher than any she has encountered before, Caitlin races to find the connection between the secret treasure pilfered centuries before by Jean Lafitte and the deadly secret hidden on the bottom of the ocean.  This as she struggles to raise the teenage sons of her imprisoned lover Cort Wesley Masters who secures his release just in time to join the fight by her side.

But shadows and subterfuge abound, starting with Teofilo Braga, a waste management baron hiding secrets born of his own past that are somehow linked to the threats America is facing today.  Caitlin’s desperate path plunges her deep into that past and a similar mass murder committed near the island refuge of Lafitte himself, a case pairing her legendary father and grandfather that remains unsolved to this day.

Caitlin’s only chance to defeat the terrorists lies in solving that 30-year-old mystery now, a trek that takes her into the darkest reaches of the Louisiana bayou even as she confronts the darkest evil she has ever faced.  In the end, only the strongest of vengeance can win the day, Caitlin and Cort Wesley standing with guns ready to save the country from the greatest threat it has ever faced.

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In the three thrillers to feature her heroic, crime fighting efforts, Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong has taken on everything from greedy industrialists to Mexican revolutionaries, to right-wing extremists.  But Strong Vengeance pits her against her most dangerous, and real, adversary yet:  homegrown Islamic terrorists.

“The biggest threat is no longer coming from the dusty landscape of Afghanistan or the mountains of Pakistan border regions. Instead, experts say, the threat now comes from within our own borders, in the form of homegrown terrorists.”

In September of 2010, the same Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group responsible for that quote wrote that, “a key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. Citizens and residents have played in the leadership of al-Qaida and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups.”

       FACT:  Since 9/11 there have been 43 homegrown violent jihadist plots or attacks in the United States.

       FACT: Between May, 2009 and November 2010 alone, 22 arrests were made of homegrown terrorists involved in jihadist-inspired plots by American citizens or legal permanent residents.

       FACT: In 2010 the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University noted, “a spike in domestic terrorism and attacks by American citizens directed from overseas are top concerns for police departments across the country.”

       FACT:  9/11 Commission Member Bruce Hoffman recently said,  “The United States has failed to fundamentally understand and prepare for these threats. Terrorists may have found our Achilles’ heel. We have no strategy to deal with this growing problem and emerging threat.”

In Strong Vengeance, Caitlin finds herself racing to stop a homegrown terrorist cell from unleashing an attack based on another headline-ripped subject: the explosion of a massive “dirty bomb” composed of nuclear waste material.  One study of potential terrorist tactics has identified such waste as a prime source for a potential radiological weapon.  And a watchdog organization, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), charged that “security at U.S. nuclear weapons complexes was inadequate and that hundreds of tons of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium could be stolen, sabotaged, or even detonated.”

We need look no further than the devastating effects wrought by the damaged Japanese reactor in the wake of last year’s tsunami to see what such a radiological attack would look like, only on a much more massive scale.  That’s what Caitlin Strong is up against in Strong Vengeance in fiction and what the United States may soon be up against in fact.

“With Strong Vengeance, Jon Land is a thriller author who is writing at the highest level; as always a great plot, interesting characters and a thrill ride that will keep your fingers glued to the pages for hours.”
—Strand Magazine

“Gripping! Caitlin Strong is my favorite new series character.”
—Harlan Coben
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Live Wire

“Jon Land’s STRONG VENGEANCE blends high-octane adventure with a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy. Tautly crafted, brilliantly plotted, here is a thriller that’s as gripping as it is important. A cautionary tale everyone must read.”
—James Rollins
New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Colony

“How the strong grow stronger! Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong proves once again she’s the woman for the job, taking on lost treasures, cold cases, mass murder and homegrown terrorists in a do-or-die race against the clock that will leave you gasping till the end.”
—Lisa Gardner
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Love You More

“With a magnificent heroine and an adrenaline-packed plot, STRONG VENGEANCE packs a Texas-sized wallop. If Jane Rizzoli ever gets into trouble, you bet she’ll be calling Caitlin Strong for help.”
—Tess Gerritsen
New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Girl

And BETRAYAL: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent who Fought to Bring Him Down is a hit with the critics! Since this was my first ever work of nonfiction, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. It was a learning experience for me from the beginning, not an easy process at all but very well worth it as you can see below.

The Associated Press says,

“Retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick does a fantastic job of juggling the names and facts while telling his compelling story of trying to bring Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to justice.”

From the Boston Globe:

“Betryal is a mind-blowing, punch-in-the-face insider account of everything that can go wrong when police get too cozy with criminals. . . . A contender for one of the most disturbing books you’ll ever read about law enforcement.”

The Providence Journal adds,

“a masterful job of recounting all of the behind-the-scene mechanizations.”

The Huffington Post says,

“Fitzpatrick’s story is a page-turner that reads like a novel that’s nearly impossible to put down.”

Fellow bestselling author Doug Preston proclaims,

“Betrayal is a staggering story of murder and corruption in Boston surrounding the bizarre case of the infamous gangster Whitey Bulger. This is a stupendous read, as electrifying as Mystic River but even more horrifying for being absolutely true. Betrayal is a page-turner of the highest order, one of the best tales of crime and (non) punishment I’ve ever read. You will not be able to put this book down — guaranteed.”

Finally, this from Lorenzo Carcatera, #1 bestselling author of Sleepers:

“A gripping saga of one honest and determined agent going up against a wall of corruption. Fitzpatrick and Land lay out their case in brilliant fashion—the writing is crisp and solid; the plot is warp-speed paced; and the story is chilling in the details, both large and small. This is Serpico on a federal level, the corruption running up the ladder to the very top, lies and deceit at every turn for all to see if only they chose to give it a glance instead of turning away to line their pockets or further their careers. Betrayal is a page-turner, a rapid-fire tale told with a passion that is a testament to the agent with the courage to wage the decades-long battle to get to the truth.”

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Bob Fitzpatrick was appointed ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) of the Boston office of the FBI in late 1980 with a clear mandate:  “Kick ass and take names,” according to his superior Roy McKinnon in Washington.  And the ass he really needed to kick was that of an Irish gangster named Whitey Bulger.  But what Fitzpatrick, one of the most celebrated agents of his time, didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that the adversary he was about to confront was fast becoming the most notorious gangster in all the annuls of American crime history.  Bigger than Al Capone, bigger than any of the infamous heads of the Five Families in New York, bigger than John Gotti and every other name of criminal legend.  Why?

Because only Bulger had the FBI and the Justice Department acting as willing accomplices in his murderous rise to the pinnacle of the criminal underworld.

Sound crazy?  Maybe so, but it happened, the how and the why detailed in BETRAYAL (Forge, January 3), the book I co-authored with Bob Fitzpatrick chronicling his time in Boston and the frustration he faced in trying to end the madness once and for all.  The Irish Whitey Bulger, you see, was then on the books as a Top Echelon (TE) informant, vital in the Bureau’s mind to supplying crucial evidence against the Italian mafia until Fitzpatrick ascertained that Bulger was providing no evidence of the kind whatsoever, never mind anything of note. Yet instead of taking Fitzpatrick’s advice and targeting Bulger, the FBI did nothing.  The Justice Department through Jeremiah O’Sullivan, head of the Organized Crime Strike Force for New England, did nothing.  No less than William Weld, then the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts and future governor of the State, did nothing.  Fitzpatrick warned officials at the very highest levels of the FBI in Washington about what was happening.  They, too, did nothing. Even when no less than three informants capable of proving everything he said was true were murdered thanks directly to sources inside the Boston FBI office who leaked the names of those informants to Bulger, assuring their deaths thanks to a vicious culture of corruption.

Meanwhile, Bulger consolidated the power the FBI had enabled him to seize in the first place.  His equally notorious contemporaries and predecessors never had the government’s help, never had the FBI and Justice Department riding shotgun over their murderous exploits.  Elliot Ness put Al Capone away on tax invasion.  Melvin Purvis gunned down John Dillinger.  John Gotti, the so-called “Teflon Don,” died in prison.  Whitey Bulger, on the other hand, went on to allegedly murder more than a dozen people under the watchful eye of the FBI after Bob Fitzpatrick recommended he be arrested once and for all after their single fateful interview in March of 1981.  No other gangster, no other underworld figure, can make that claim.  No other gangster or underworld figure had their brutal efforts aided and abetted by the very officials charged with protecting the rest of us from their actions.

Whitey Bulger

Sound crazy?  As a fiction writer, of thrillers specifically, no one would believe this were possible or credible had I made it up.  Bob Fitzpatrick wasn’t just any agent either.  Before coming to Boston, his major case experience included playing a key role in the takedown of Sam Bowers in the famed Mississippi Burning case, leading the investigation into the Martin Luther King assassination, and running ABSCAM in Miami.  The Bureau had the right man for the job all right; they just wouldn’t let him finish it.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book!

 “So you wanna a bullet in the head?”

So begins BETRAYAL (Forge, January 3, 2012), my first nonfiction book after thirty novels.  The speaker is the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, addressing his soon-to-be victim John McIntyre, an informant capable of bringing him down once and for all, in 1984.

The hero of BETRAYAL is Robert Fitzpatrick, one of the most celebrated FBI agents of his time who was sent to Boston in late 1980 to “kick ass and take names.”  Simply stated, the office had spiraled out of control in large part because of the degree to which agents and officials stretching all the way to Washington were beholden to Whitey Bulger.  Bulger, you see, was an informant the Bureau was relying on to give them what they wanted most :  the Italian mob.  Of course, since he was the titular head of the rival Irish Winter Hill gang and promised to prosper from the takedown of the mafia, he was all too happy to cooperate.  

Only he didn’t.  In all his years as an informant, Whitey Bulger gave the FBI nothing that helped them take down the mafia.  Nothing.  That’s what Bob Fitzpatrick uncovered when he got to Boston and what was pretty much confirmed during his first and only meeting with Bulger himself.  Check out the following excerpt, one of my favorite scenes in the book:

      “I never got your name.”

“That’s ‘cause you didn’t shake my hand.  It’s Fitzpatrick.”

“You don’t understand,” he boasted.  “I was in Alcatraz; I was in the toughest penitentiaries.  I’m a bad guy, not somebody you wanna come out here and mess with.”

“Is that what I’m doing, Whitey, messing with you?”

“You tell me.”

“I just asked you.”

“You got any idea of the stuff I’ve done?”

“That’s why I’m here, to find out what you’ve done and what you’re doing for us.  See, you wanna tell me about all the stuff you’ve done when I want to hear what you’re doing for me.  Because you’re the informant.”  My last remark, a caustic taunt. “Whitey, what are you doing for the FBI?” I finally asked when he lapsed into silence, even though the answer was already written on the parts of his face I could see through the dim lighting.  “What are you doing for me?”

The answer, of course, was nothing, and Fitzpatrick embarked on a twenty-year quest, both in and out of the FBI, to prove that to the world in general and Bureau in particular.  Three times he developed informants prepared to give up Bulger and force the FBI to give the gangster up as an alleged informant.  All three times information leaked out from within the Bureau, and all three times the informants were murdered, the last one being John McIntyre whose body was not recovered until 2000.

What attracted me to Fitzpatrick’s story, which became BETRAYAL, was that it was one of those rare nonfiction “thrillers” that had a third act.  Even before Whitey Bulger was finally captured in Santa Monica in California last June, a series of trials over the past few years had already validated all of Fitzpatrick’s claims and fully vindicated his efforts.  Bulger’s apprehension was just the icing on the cake.

And here’s the thing.  My fictional thrillers also feature heroes defined by their ability to overcome incredible odds and survive, if not thrive, on their own.  They are men and women unafraid to buck the system, to do the right thing regardless of what they must sacrifice along the way.  Well, that describes Bob Fitzpatrick perfectly.

“I took on plenty of guys like you,” Bulger taunted during that now famous meeting with Fitzpatrick.  “Turned out they weren’t so tough either.”

Turned out he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Caitlin saw D. W. Tepper standing in the shade cast by the Intrepid building through the lobby’s glass entry doors.  She joined him outside in the early spring heat and watched him stamp a cigarette out under his boot.

“Captain?” she said, stopping just short of him, something all wrong about his being here.

Tepper handed her a sheet of paper that was already dog-eared and smelled of tobacco.  “This came in a few minutes after you left.  No one else has seen it yet.”  And then, as if feeling the need to say more, “It’s about your friend Masters.”

Caitlin read the single-spaced type running nearly the whole page beneath Texas Department of Public Safety letterhead.  The piece of paper shook in her hand, as if ruffled by the wind.

“This can’t be right.”

She looked up to see Tepper’s weary eyes boring into her.  “Maybe so.  But it’s gotta be handled all the same, Ranger.  And that means by the book.”  Tepper stopped and looked down at his crushed cigarette, shaking his head.  “I figured you deserved a heads-up.”

“Masters just called me.  His oldest son’s missing.”

She could see Tepper’s expression tighten, the deep furrows seeming to fill in a bit.  “We talking foul play?”

“Could be,” Caitlin told him, elaborating no further as thoughts churned in her head.  “I just don’t know for sure yet.”

Tepper smacked his lips, watched the piece of paper in her hand flapping about until she folded it back up.  “Not a good idea you handling this, Ranger.”

Caitlin stuffed the paper in her pocket, holding Tepper’s gaze the whole time.  “It is if you want to avoid bloodshed, sir.”

Strong at the Break by Jon Land

Writing Caitlin Strong, as you may have noticed from the excerpt above from Strong at the Break, is truly a labor of love.  But the truth is I don’t really write Caitlin; she writes herself.  Her own dialogue, her own responses, her own emotions.  I have no idea really where it all came from, only that she took over the page almost from the first time I typed her name.  That said, once in a while I have to make Caitlin’s life easier by putting her situations and predicaments that allow her character to shine through.  How do I do it?  Glad you asked!

Conflict:

As you saw in the excerpt, things aren’t easy for Caitlin and they never are.  Her entire existence is about having stuff thrown at her she has to deal with; obstacles to overcome and challenges to confront.  Every scene I write is tense in its own way and based on its own definition.  Whether that scene is a gunfight, and there are plenty of those in Strong at the Break, or a simple conversation, there needs to be something that Caitlin is trying to resolve.  Otherwise the story, and the writing, fall flat.  It’s easy to create conflict when the scene is action-based.  The trick lies in maintaining equal levels of tension, suspense and pacing in scenes containing nothing more than two people talking.

Scene Setting:

But where are they talking?  The best advice about writing I’ve gotten in the past decade was “When writing a scene, always know where the light is coming from.”  Caitlin is such a rich character that I try to place her in equally rich settings, again even if that setting is as simple as an office, a car, or a restaurant.  The scene in Strong at the Break where she confronts the villainous right-wing militia leader plotting a second Civil War is a perfect example.  There’s no violence, not even the suggestion of violence, but it’s a seat-squirmer all the same because of the way I’ve framed the scene.  I never use the omniscient narrator; every scene is told from a character’s viewpoint, so you see and feel what they’re seeing and feeling.

Emotion:

Great stories make us feel something because we’re vested in the characters; we truly care about what happens to them.  The fun of writing Caitlin Strong lies not only in coming up with a plot structure worthy of her, but also an emotional arc to what’s confronting her.  How she deals with the people who are most important to her.  The great John D. McDonald (author of the Travis Magee books) once defined story as “Stuff happens to people you care about.”  Thrillers always have stuff happening but nearly as often contain people we really care about.  The outcome of a gunfight should be no more suspenseful than the outcome of where the relationship between Caitlin and Cort Wesley Masters and his two sons to whom she’s become a surrogate mother.  It’s those relationships that define her much more than bullets and in Strong at the Break they are fully on display.

The origin of Caitlin Strong, arguably my greatest and most complex hero ever, owes itself to a conversation my editor Natalia Aponte had with one of the heads of sales at Tor/Forge, my publisher.  They were discussing the state of the genre and bemoaning the fact that with all the thrillers out there, bought predominantly by women, there wasn’t a single female thriller series hero.  Not one.  Sure, there were lots of women heroes driving less action-oriented mysteries, but nothing akin to what I like to call a female Jack Reacher after Lee Child’s seminal creation.

Well, after Natalia relayed this conversation to me, a light bulb went off in my head.  I was looking for a new theme and potential series hero, something dramatically different than the Michael Tiranno “Tyrant” character I was coming off of in The Seven Sins.  That was truly an over-the-top-book, as many great thrillers are, and the last thing I wanted to do was another just like it.  I wanted instead to work with a character who was more conflicted, flawed, down-to-earth.  I’d always wanted to write about the Texas Rangers, having long been fascinated by their well-earned reputation for being badass lawmen and gunfighters.  So the light bulb that went off shined squarely down on the notion of featuring a female Texas Ranger in the first of what I already envisioned as a series.

Making Caitlin a Texas Ranger, and a fifth generation one to boot, provided instant credibility for her character as an action hero.  She’s got a past she’s not too proud of and the first book in the series, Strong Enough to Die, opens with her sorely searching for some form of redemption she finds by going up against an evil Haliburton-like company called MacArthur-Rain for reasons more personal than professional.  As always, I knew very little of this when I got started.  Things just started falling together and if you asked me where it all came from, I honestly couldn’t say. But I knew I had something here that I’d never experienced before and Strong Enough to Die left plenty of room for Caitlin and Cort Wesley Masters, a man she wrongly put in prison and ultimately falls in love with, to grow and develop.

The second book in the series, Strong Justice, as a result, was even easier to write. And this one similarly allowed me to introduce another staple in the series:  a historical flashback subplot woven into the fabric of the story and intricately tied to what’s happening in the present.  In Strong Justice that subplot featured Caitlin’s legendary Ranger grandfather Earl Strong ridding a lawless Texas oil boomtown of criminals and, finally, gangsters dispatched by Al Capone himself.  Strong Justice also featured a renegade Mexican colonel plotting a guerrilla war against the United States and, just as importantly, Caitlin’s ever-deepening relationship with Cort Wesley and his two teenage sons.

Which brings me Strong at the Break, the latest and best of the three so far, featuring a radical right-wing militia out to start a second Civil War.  The politics of that aside, this is an intensely personal tale for Caitlin since as a teenage girl she witnessed her father kill the leader of a similar separatist movement.  Years later, it’s that man’s very son she has to stop from spilling blood in streets all across the country and the nature of their conflict takes the book to a whole new level.  Strong at the Break also features a parallel investigation Caitlin’s conducting into drugs being smuggled through Indian Reservations over the Canadian border (Did you know that more drugs come into the country that way every year than over the Mexican border?  Not many people do!).  There’s also this young Iraq war veteran at a rehabilitation facility in San Antonio claiming the army’s trying to kill him, and a white slavery ring operating out of Mexico.

Yup, a lot going on for sure and everything, ultimately, ties neatly together.  That’s my tried and true formula but it’s never worked better than in Strong at the Break.  In fact, let me go out on a limb and promise this will be the best book you read all summer.  It’s taut, exciting, and altogether impossible to put down.

So happy reading and let me know if you agree at www.jonlandbooks.com.

What’s it like writing Caitlin Strong?

The official book trailer for STRONG AT THE BREAK is out today!

Female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong races to a stop a second Civil War being orchestrated by a right wing militia group led by Malcolm Arno. Twenty years ago Caitlin’s father gunned down his to prevent a similar debacle and now history is about to repeat itself with thousands of lives at stake.

Head to the Book page for more information!