Tempest North (Gritt Series - 1820’s: Available July 16, 2024)
It’s 1820 and the American Revolution is breaking down the old European order and culture. Captain Chad Grittenburg, a wounded veteran of the War of 1812 is driven by duty and chivalry. He fears dishonor more than death. When a duel goes horribly wrong and his fiancé is killed, his world collapses.
Escape from his troubled mind comes in the form of a journey from Boston to Russian America. The peaceful trading voyage should be a remedy, but his emotional crisis tears at his leadership and frays his command. Betrayed on a stop in Cuba, attacked by pirates in the Caribbean, he barely saves his ship from storms rounding Cape Horn.
Arriving in the Spanish American port of San Francisco, Chad encounters a British brig captained by an old war foe with a beautiful young Russian noblewoman named Katarina Gerhardt. Smitten, yet troubled, he is happy to see her ship depart for Russian America.
Following their route, the American ship comes upon a handful of survivors from the British ship, wrecked on a remote forested island. Katarina is missing. Driven by his sense of chivalry, it will take all of Chad’s combat and leadership skills to save her from a terrifying fate.
But what will save Chad from himself…the love of a beautiful woman or this untamed, unforgiving and wickedly beautiful land?
Two Civil Wars(Gritt Series - 1850’s)
Chad Gritt, the lanky, blue eyed, former Civil War naval officer once thought of himself as a hero until a rescue mission turned into a bloodbath. Now he is content to captain a ship carrying heroes on their mission. That is until the enemy sinks his ship and throws the soft-spoken recluse into leading survivors across a thousand miles of Mexican Civil War that makes America’s Civil War look tame.
It’s 1865 and the War Between the States is almost over. In Mexico, a far more brutal war is reaching a turning point. President Lincoln’s advisors and most of Congress favor using Civil War military power to intervene in the Mexican War as a prelude to annexing the country. Lincoln himself has intervened in the Mexican conflict where his move is distrusted by those he seeks to help and hated by the other side. He is also plotting with Russia to purchase Alaska in hopes of heading off American troops invading their southern neighbor.
As part of his efforts to head off a foreign war that the American public doesn’t support, Lincoln and Secretary of State, William Seward send a clandestine exploration team to the Pacific. The explorers are shocked to find that one of Seward’s own lieutenants is plotting against their mission, a mission made more critical when the U.S. Treasury entrusts millions in California gold to them. Gold that the collapsing Confederacy plans on stealing to support Southern Officers who have lost everything. Sinking Gritt’s ship is critical to their effort.
The explorers begin burying their own one at a time. No one they meet can be trusted in a country where everyone is a pawn to be played, killed, or sold. Will help come from the colorful captain of the only ship of the Free State of Jones, or from one of two beautiful Mexican women; one passionately involved in Mexico’s conflict and the other fleeing it?
Enemy Patriots (Gritt Series - 1940’s)
His family, held by Japanese Army Intelligence on a visit to Japan, Mark Ishihara is ordered to the family fish processing plant across the bay from America’s only military base in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. With the planned bombing of Pearl Harbor only months away, his job is to spy for Japan, as they prepare to seize American territory.
Mark’s blood brother, U.S. Army pilot Chad Gritt is sent to the same island as part of a secret American intelligence group. The two men are forever tied by a terrible accident that killed each of their brothers. Their childhood trauma makes Chad a recluse and Mark the life of the party, each struggling to connect with the women they care about. The two reunite only miles from the accident site, each spying for the other side.
As the war breaks out, Mark’s Japanese face is as welcome in Dutch Harbor as a rattlesnake at a party; but if he leaves, his parents die. Simultaneously, the American government begins rounding up its Japanese American citizens, worried that some are spies. Some like Mark are. But after finally disclosing his dilemma to his blood brother, the question is, for which side?
The Opposite Of Trust (Gritt Series - 1960’s)
It's 1958 and the U.S. McCarthy witch hunts are destroying lives, while in Russia, Stalinist hardliners are fighting Khrushchev’s reforms. Both countries are paranoid over the other’s nuclear threat.
A Russian bomber trying to deliver a threatening message to an American Air Force Base crashes on a remote Alaskan lake. The lone survivor, Major Anton Bidkov, has flown the mission to free his wife from a political gulag, even though he knows in his heart that she is already dead. Ellen, a self-exiled widow of a career U.S. intelligence officer, whose life was destroyed when he was denounced as a Communist sympathizer, rescues Anton. Realizing that both share similar stories, their common betrayal sparks a fire inside that each thought was forever gone.
Ellen and Anton’s impossible affair faces one major threat; each is a trained professional and patriot who together may have the key to stopping the deadly North Pacific air war between America and Russia. Is it worth risking what they have, to do what each knows is right? Do they owe their respective governments anything?