Make sure to get THE KING OF MACAU (Jack Shepherd #4) coming in January.
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
(A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)
Author: Jake Needham
AVAILABLE
Amazon
Jack Shepherd was sick of Washington politics, sick of corporate law, and even a little sick of himself. So he hit the road looking for a new start, made a couple of wrong turns, and somehow wound up in Hong Kong. Now he needs a job, and being General Chalerm Kitnarock's lawyer is a job, so he takes it.
Shepherd could certainly have done a lot worse for himself. Charlie Kitnarok is the world's ninety-eighth richest man. But he's also a former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. When he's not making money, he's plotting his return to political power.
For Shepherd, that could be a real problem. Thailand already has a prime minister, and she's a woman with whom Shepherd once had a brief relationship. It will get particularly messy if, as Shepherd suspects, Charlie is smuggling arms to his supporters and intends to use the Thai army to seize control of the country. Can Shepherd keep his two friends from destroying each other and prevent Thailand from sliding into chaos?
Thailand is hurtling closer and closer to a bloody civil war. And as unlikely as it may sound, Jack Shepherd is probably the only person on earth who can stop it.
Excerpt
One
THE BLACK MERCEDES S500 pulled to the curb and stopped. Shepherd opened his eyes. He didn’t much like what he saw when he did.
“I thought we were going to your office,” he said.
“We are,” the man in the backseat with him replied.
“This isn’t your office.”
“I need to stop here first.”
“What for?”
General Chalerm ‘Charlie’ Kitnarok didn’t answer. He just opened the rear door and got out, and his driver and security man jumped out right behind him. Charlie bent back down and beckoned. Shepherd was the only person left in the car, so he sighed and got out, too.
Shepherd stretched and yawned and he damn well took his time doing it. It was only mid-morning in Dubai but he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours on the overnight flight from Hong Kong and he was dog-tired and grumpy. He rolled his shoulders and looked around. They weren’t anywhere near Charlie’s office. They were parked on Baniyas Road a little west of the St. George Hotel, just outside the souk.
“CNN wants some local color for their piece,” Charlie said as if he could see exactly what Shepherd was thinking. “You and I are going to take a walk through the souk and let them shoot a little film for background.”
Shepherd glanced at the white Jeep Cherokee that had stopped right behind them. A cameraman and a soundman were unloading their gear while they ignored a young female producer who was barking instructions. The two men looked like world-weary old hands who had earned their chops covering the Vietnam War. The producer looked like she had graduated from Bryn Mawr the day before and didn’t have any idea what the Vietnam War was.
“You think this is a bad idea, don’t you?” Charlie asked.
“What?”
Charlie jerked his thumb at the CNN crew.
“It’s none of my business,” Shepherd said. “I’m a lawyer, not a media consultant. I don’t give public relations advice, I give legal advice.”
“Then give me legal advice.”
“Sure. My legal advice is that there’s nothing illegal about letting CNN hang around with you to do a story about an unimaginably wealthy former prime minister of Thailand now living in splendid exile in Dubai and devoting his life to helping the poor and wretched of this earth.”
“That’s what I thought,” Charlie said. “So let’s take a little walk and get this over with.”
Charlie pressed his hand lightly against Shepherd’s back, ushering him toward a murky passageway that led into the souk.
DUBAI SHOWS THE world a face that is gaudy and futuristic, but the souk is what Dubai is really about. Dark and primeval, its twisting maze of alleyways is clogged with so many burlap bags, cardboard boxes, and wooden crates that there is seldom room enough for more than two people to walk abreast. The pervasive gloom drains everything of color and renders the world in murky shades of gray. Only the souk’s smells give it the illusion of depth and dimension. The cloying sweetness of the air, the spicy scents of cayenne and red pepper, the heady musk of wet burlap bags, the sour odor of garbage baking on hot concrete, the rich waft of bitter coffee, and the acrid aroma of strong tobacco smoked by men you cannot see.
Shepherd hated the souk. Every time he entered its cramped tangle of tiny passageways, some so narrow they were more like cracks between buildings than places to walk, he felt like a guy in a horror movie, the one who never figures out the axe murderer is standing right behind him until it’s too late. Shepherd was certain that a malevolent beast lived somewhere deep inside the souk. The place made his skin crawl.
Charlie didn’t seem to feel any of that. He strolled the souk as if he owned it, and maybe he did. He certainly could afford it. According to Forbes, Charlie Kitnarok was the world’s ninety-eighth richest man. And that was just counting the stuff they knew about.
Shepherd was Charlie’s lawyer. He knew about the other stuff.
At least he knew about a lot of the other stuff. Maybe even he didn’t know about everything. Charlie was a man who took pleasure in secrets and he had a great many of them. Shepherd doubted there was anybody alive who knew all of the things Charlie was involved in.
Possibly not even Charlie.
CHARLIE LED THE way with Shepherd walking next to him. The CNN camera crew took up a position about thirty feet behind them and the driver and the security man brought up the rear. They entered the souk and the gloom closed in. Split and pitted concrete walls rose up on both sides of them. Iron pipes and black rubber electrical cables snaked haphazardly back and forth over their heads and air conditioners buzzed and dripped from somewhere above. Metal handcarts piled with bulging burlap sacks and heavily taped brown cartons rattled past them in both directions.
Fifty feet inside the souk the alleyway made a sharp turn to the left and they passed a narrow shop with mounds of car batteries piled head-high behind a stained and dusty window. In front of the shop two men dressed in dishdashas, the long white shirt-dress that is the preferred attire of locals in Dubai, sat on upturned wooded boxes smoking cigarettes. Their dark eyes tracked Charlie and Shepherd as the little procession passed.
“Where are we going, Charlie?”
“Nowhere. Just walking.”
It didn’t feel to Shepherd like they were just walking. It felt more like they were going somewhere, but he had no idea where. Still, Charlie was his client, his only client if he were being completely honest, and no matter how tired he was, that was a boat Shepherd had absolutely no intention of rocking. So he nodded and said nothing.
Charlie took a heavy-framed pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. The lenses were so dark they were almost black. Shepherd wondered why Charlie was putting on sunglasses when the light around them was already so dim he felt like he was walking under water.
A few minutes later they rounded a sharp bend, slipped past a tall stack of odd smelling burlap bags, and emerged into a rectangular courtyard. The courtyard didn’t have much to recommend it as a destination, but something about it made Shepherd wonder if it was the place they had been heading all along.
It was about eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide with narrow shophouses walling off all four sides. There was some kind of merchandise stacked in front of most of them. Brightly-colored spices sealed in clear plastic cylinders the size of barrels; concrete packed in heavy red-and-blue striped paper bags; hundreds of pairs of slippers arranged by color on aluminum racks; wooden cases the size of refrigerators lettered in red Korean characters; and tan cardboard cartoons tightly bound with white plastic straps. The only exit was another narrow passageway at the opposite end.
Two men brushed by them walking in the direction from which they had just come. The first man was Iranian-looking, clean-shaven and wearing a dark suit with a white shirt buttoned at the neck. The other man wore a dishdasha and a blue Yankees baseball cap. Both men were talking on mobile telephones and Shepherd wondered briefly if they were talking to each other.
Charlie was a half step ahead of Shepherd, walking just in front of his right shoulder. They were almost exactly in the center of the rectangular space when Charlie turned his head as if he was about to say something. Whatever he was going to say, he never got the chance.
The shots came from behind them.
In the confined space of the courtyard, they sounded like mortar fire.
Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers Author
Website: Jake Needham
Author's Blog: Jake Needham blog
Twitter: @jakeneedham
E-Mail: JakeNeedham@jakeneedham.com
Goodreads: Check Out Goodreads
Facebook: Check Out Facebook
Author Description: JAKE NEEDHAM is an American screen and television writer who began writing crime novels when he realized he didn't really like movies and television very much. He is a lawyer by education. Prior to becoming a screenwriter through a series of accidents too ridiculous to be believed, he held a number of significant positions in both the pubic and private sectors where he took part in a lengthy list of international operations he has no intention of telling you about. Mr. Needham has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand for over twenty years. He, his wife, and their two sons divide their time between homes in Bangkok and New York. You can read excerpts from Jake Needham's other books as well as his weekly column, 'Letters from Asia,' at his web site: www.JakeNeedham.com.
Author's Book List
THE UMBRELLA MAN
- An Inspector Samuel Tay NovelThe first bomb cracked the Hilton like an egg; the second gutted the lobby of the Marriott; and the third peeled the front off the Grand Hyatt. Three massive explosions, all at American hotels in the heart of the city, and all within a few horrifying seconds. Hundreds are dead and thousands are injured. Singapore is bleeding.
Inspector Samuel Tay is a senior inspector in the Special Investigation Section of Singapore CID, but he is frozen out of this investigation from the beginning. He's made serious enemies in Singapore's Internal Security Department, and he has even more enemies at the American embassy, so Tay is assigned routine cases while his colleagues join with the CIA and the FBI in a feverish search for the bombers.
Three days after the explosions, the smell of death still sticky in the city's air, Tay is sent to a run-down apartment near the Malaysian border where two children have found the body of a Caucasian male with a broken neck. Tay feels an immediate connection with the dead man, although he doesn't think he has ever seen him before.
As Tay searches the dead man's past for clues to who he was and who his killer might have been, Tay's own past begins to give up its secrets. A long-dead father he can barely remember reaches out of the grave to point to the truth about both the murdered man and the bombings. And the horror of Singapore's destruction becomes a personal horror for Samuel Tay.
Order the Book From: Amazon
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
- (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)Jack Shepherd was sick of Washington politics, sick of corporate law, and even a little sick of himself. So he hit the road looking for a new start, made a couple of wrong turns, and somehow wound up in Hong Kong. Now he needs a job, and being General Chalerm Kitnarock's lawyer is a job, so he takes it.
Shepherd could certainly have done a lot worse for himself. Charlie Kitnarok is the world's ninety-eighth richest man. But he's also a former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. When he's not making money, he's plotting his return to political power.
For Shepherd, that could be a real problem. Thailand already has a prime minister, and she's a woman with whom Shepherd once had a brief relationship. It will get particularly messy if, as Shepherd suspects, Charlie is smuggling arms to his supporters and intends to use the Thai army to seize control of the country. Can Shepherd keep his two friends from destroying each other and prevent Thailand from sliding into chaos?
Thailand is hurtling closer and closer to a bloody civil war. And as unlikely as it may sound, Jack Shepherd is probably the only person on earth who can stop it.
Order the Book From: Amazon
KILLING PLATO
- (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)Plato Karsarkis was an international celebrity straight out of Vanity Fair until a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Iraqi oil and charged him with racketeering and espionage. There was also the matter of a woman he may or may not have murdered to cover it all up. When Karsarkis flees the United States just ahead of the FBI and promptly vanishes, the world's media whips itself into a frenzy.
Jack Shepherd was a politically connected American lawyer until he traded the fierce intrigues of Washington for the quiet life in Bangkok. Then one day he walks into a bar on the jet-set island of Phuket and finds the world's most famous fugitive waiting for him.
Karsarkis wants to hire him. He wants a presidential pardon so he can return to American and he knows Shepherd's connections to the White House just might get it for him. But the U.S. Marshals are in Phuket as well and they want something from Shepherd, too. They're there to kidnap Karsarkis and take him back to the US for trial and the Marshals want Shepherd to help them set a trap.
What Shepherd wants is for everybody to go away and leave him alone. At least he does until he discovers a chilling secret, one that plunges him a violent spiral of friendship and betrayal and pulls him straight back into the life he thought he had left behind in Washington.
The Marshals aren't really in Phuket to arrest Plato Karsarkis. They're there to kill him.
Order the Book From: Amazon
- Barnes and Noble
- Smashwords
LAUNDRY MAN
- (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he?
A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances. A former law partner Shepherd thought dead reveals himself as the force behind the disgraced bank and coerces Shepherd into helping him track the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared during the collapse. A twisting trail of deceit leads Shepherd from Bangkok to Hong Kong and eventually to an isolated villa on the fabled island of Phuket where he confronts the evil at the heart of a monstrous game of international treachery.
A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd battles the global tide of corruption, extortion and murder that is fast engulfing the new life he has made for himself in Thailand.
Order the Book From: Amazon
THE BIG MANGO
From the Big Apple, to the Big Orange, to the Big Mango. It does have a kind of nutty logic to it. Bangkok is about as far as Eddie Dare can go without falling off the edge of the world, although at times Eddie wonders if that isn't exactly what he has done.
$400,000,000 is in the wind, the result of a bungled CIA operation to grab the Bank of Vietnam's currency reserves when the Americans fled Saigon in 1975. A few decades later, the word on the street is that all that money somehow ended up in Bangkok and a downwardly mobile lawyer from San Francisco named Eddie Dare is the only guy who can find it.
The problem is, Eddie knows nothing at all about the missing money. At least he doesn't think he does. But so many other people believe he's got an inside track that he and his old marine buddy Winnebago Jones figure it's worth a shot to head for Bangkok and try their luck.
But first Eddie and Winnebago have to battle the jagged netherworld of modern-day Thailand - a corkscrewed realm where big-time dealers tango with small-time hustlers, criminals on the lam mingle with politicians on the take, and the merely raffish jostle with the downright scary for center stage in the big leagues of weird.
If they can overcome all that - as well as outmaneuver a freelancing CIA man, a pack of angry Secret Service agents, and a ruthless Vietnamese intelligence woman - maybe they can find out what really happened back in Saigon all those years ago.
And where those ten tons of money are.
Order the Book From: Amazon
- Barnes and Noble
- Smashwords
The Ambassadors Wife
The first body is in Singapore, on a bed in an empty suite in the Marriott Hotel. The second in Bangkok, in a seedy apartment close to the American embassy. Both women. Both Americans. Both beaten viciously and shot in the head. Both stripped naked and lewdly displayed.
The FBI says it's terrorism, but the whispers on the street are that a serial killer is stalking American women across Asia.
Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID is something of a reluctant policeman. He's a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much. Thinking back, he can't even remember why he became a police detective in the first place. He talks about quitting all the time, but he hasn't. Because the thing is, he's very, very good at what he does.
When bodies of American women start turning up, Singapore CID calls in Inspector Tay. It's a high profile case, and he's the best they have.
Then why is it, Tay soon begins to wonder, that nobody seems to want him to find the women's killer? Not the FBI, not the American ambassador, not even his bosses at CID.
When international politics takes over a murder case, the truth is the next victim.
Order the Book From: Amazon
Author Recommended by: HBSystems Publications
Publisher of ebooks, writing industry blogger and the sponsor of the following blogs:
eBook Author’s Corner and HBS Mystery Reader’s Circle
Check out the index of other Spotlight authors. Spotlight Index.
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