Why I wrote The Green Berets: Chasing the Lost
by Bob Mayer
Thanks for having me guest post on your blog. I appreciate the opportunity as my 51st title, The Green Berets: Chasing the Lost is now out and #1 in Men’s Adventure, even though a woman is at the core of the story. Aren’t they always?
I wrote The Green Berets: Chasing the Lost backwards. What I mean by that is I came up with the idea about 8 years ago while living on Hilton Head Island. The low country is a fascinating place and Hilton Head is full of interesting characters. We knew the island bookie, some shady characters from Boston, and quite a few people who either lived there or passed through.
In the book I liken the area to Deadwood—a lawless place. Event though there are 30,000 full time residents and over a million visitors, it has no police force, instead relying on the Beaufort Sheriff’s department. Beaufort is almost 45 minutes away from the island. So that got me thinking—
So I wrote the ending. I could see it so clearly and it was so good and such a nice twist to the story, that I started there. But then I got caught up in writing other stuff and the idea languished for years. I moved to Whidbey Island, WA, about as far as you can go in the other direction after a family tragedy, then back east to North Carolina for the birth of our grandson, and now we are at Write on the River, overlooking the TN River. I resurrected the idea and decided to insert Dave Riley from my Green Beret series into it, as he is now retired and living on Dafuskie Island (where Pat Conroy taught school). Then brought in Horace Chase, from Chasing the Ghost, to a house that he inherited from his mother in that book. This is something I think readers will see more and more of: consolidating story lines and characters. I’ve written so many books and have so many interesting characters, I’m beginning to pull together some of my series about covert operations and have the organizations and people interact.
I thought I had a really cool ending—after all, I wrote the entire book to get to it. But then I was talking about it with my wife, the story-whisperer, and she suggested adding something to it that just stunned me. I thought what I had was pretty wicked, but what she came up with blew me away. Totally evil and wicked and perfect for the characters and the stories. While the book has been in the top three in Men’s Adventure on Kindle since publication, the key character in the book is a woman. She is the one driving the plot. I’ve been told I actually write women better than men, and am the only male author on the Romance Writers of America Honor Roll, which is weird for an ex-Green Beret. But that just gives you an idea of the types of books I write.
Hope you enjoy and feel free to visit us at CoolGus.com
NY Times Bestselling Author, former Green Beret and West Point Graduate, Bob Mayer.
“A pulsing technothriller. A nailbiter in the best tradition of adventure fiction.” Publishers Weekly ref Bob Mayer
Horace Chase arrives on Hilton Head Island to pay his last respects at the Intracoastal Waterway where his late mother’s ashes were spread and to inspect the home his mother left him in her will. He’s been recently forced into retirement, his divorce is officially final, and now he’s standing in the middle of the front yard of his ‘new’ house where a tree has crashed right through the center of it.
What could possibly go wrong?
Within six hours of arriving on Hilton Head, Chase is exchanging gunfire with men who’ve kidnapped a young boy and tried to grab the boy’s mother, Sarah Briggs. Soon he’s waist deep in an extortion plot to funnel a hundred million dollars of Superbowl on-line gambling money into an offshore bank account or else the boy dies.
Dave Riley has long retired from the military and living peacefully on sleepy Dafuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. Sort of. Actually he’s bored, feeling old, and just a bit cranky running his deceased uncle’s small-time bookie operation.
Horace Chase, meet Dave Riley. Riley-Chase.
Chase and Riley assemble a team of misfits and eccentrics as they take on the powerful Russian mob in the lawless tidal lands of the Low Country to get the boy back.
Meet Erin: Chase’s long-ago summer fling, now a veterinarian and not interested in men any more, at least that way. But her suturing skills and her knowledge of the island bring assets the team needs. Especially after Chase’s first visit with the Russian requires a bit of the former.
Meet Gator: an ex-Ranger, iron-pumping, fire-breathing hulk of a redneck, with a soft spot in his heart for Erin, and steroids burning in his muscles to hurt people. As long as Riley and Chase point him in the right direction, the rest of the populace should be all right.
Meet Kono: a Gullah, descendant of the free slaves who fled to the barrier islands in the 19th century and developed their own culture. He nurses his own pain and secrets, but heeds Chase’s call to renew their childhood friendship. Especially when he learns the target is the Russians.
It adds up to a fiery confrontation to rescue the young boy, and settle some old scores.
But Riley and Chase need to remember a basic tenet from their days in covert operations: Nothing is ever as it appears.
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Genre – Thriller
Rating – PG
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Website http://www.bobmayer.org/
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