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Narrator

Chris Abell

Chris Abell

  • Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, “How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?” For over five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post.

    Collected here are interviews with forty-seven accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow. These are their personal stories in their own words, much of the material never before published. How do these writers’ life experiences color their art? Find out their thoughts, their inspirations, their candid opinions. Learn more about your favorite authors, how they work and who they truly are.

  • The first time the Donovan twins, Lucas and Jamie, saw a Canadian Northwest Mounted Police officer, they knew that’s what they wanted to be when they grew up. Years later, Lucas Donovan, now a member of the force, is on a mission to bring a ruthless serial killer to justice. For years Jack Emerson has eluded capture in the vast Canadian wilderness, but now Donovan has vowed that nothing on earth will stop him from seeing this man caught and punished. The oath is both personal and professional, since one of the men Emerson killed ruthlessly was Constable Jamie Donovan, Lucas’ twin brother.

    Believing that he understands more about Emerson than any other man, but restricted by the policies of the force, Donovan is forced to take administrative leave to carry out his quest for revenge. Accompanied by Red, his enormous Malamute sled dog, Donovan begins his quest and crosses the border into the US. Aside from chasing a dangerous murderer, the long pursuit presents special dangers of its own as the two fight for survival in an unfamiliar and unfriendly country where nature takes a toll on all.

    When the time finally comes for the two men to meet, Lucas Donovan must decide between personal and professional honor. When he became a Canadian Mounted Police Constable, Donovan took an oath to enforce and obey the law. However, the standards he has lived by are now in conflict with his burning desire for revenge. His decision on which course of action he will pursue could result in disgrace or death. But Donovan is led by the creed of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police that a Mountie always gets his man.

  • Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer’s Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876.

    More than forty first-person narratives are used—Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women—to paint a panorama of the battle itself.

    Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to life in a series of first-hand accounts.

  • Two thrilling Western stories set in Arizona, in which strong and silent cowboys use their wits to overcome bullies while avoiding gunplay as much as possible

    The first story, “Scalisi Claws Leather,” is set in Arizona during the Prohibition era. The notorious Chicago gangster Pete Scalisi has come to the Bar BQ dude ranch to hide out for a while. He has only contempt for the hicks he encounters at the Bar BQ, but waitress Rose Dunn and top cowhand Jim Falconer show him a thing or two. Scalisi has some lessons to learn about Westerners, and he will have to learn them the hard way.

    In the title story, “Long Texan,” Boone Sibley arrives in Tough Nut, Arizona, just in time to save a small child that wanders into the line of fire in a shootout. But instead of getting a hero’s welcome, saving the kid puts Sibley on the wrong side of Whip Quinn and his gang, who are used to doing as they please with no one standing against them. Quinn suggests that Tucson would be a better place for Sibley. But Sibley embodies the code of the West, and says he likes the climate and the people in Tough Nut, and that’s where he plans to stay. But if that’s what he wants, he has to first deal with Quinn framing him for stage robbery and murder.

  • Retired US Army sergeant Thaddeus McCallum joins the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he makes enough money to purchase the ranch he’s always wanted.

    But just as McCallum begins to settle in to his new life, he receives an urgent letter from a former comrade in arms, whose son Jeff has gone missing. Despite his age and the aches and pains that go with it, Thad decides that he owes it to the man to help. Pedro Peralta, who ordinarily would be left behind to manage the ranch, insists on accompanying Thad on his journey.

    The men soon learn that Columbus, New Mexico, was the site of an attack by Pancho Villa and his army of revolutionaries, and young Jeff has been taken prisoner. As they pursue Jeff into the wastelands of northern Mexico, Thad and Pedro must overcome an entire army to save him.

  • “That was the year we had no food.”

    It’s the spring of 1864, and times are hard in Washington County, Arkansas, especially for thirteen-year-old Travis Ford. He hasn’t heard from his father, a sergeant in the Second Arkansas Cavalry, in months. His mother is struggling to make ends meet on the family farm and abandoned sawmill near Poison Spring. All Travis really wants to do is to follow his passion—make up adventure stories in the style of Alexandre Dumas. But the Civil War keeps getting in his way. Since his mother hails from Illinois and has Abolitionist leanings, the Ford family—including Travis’ twin sister, Edith, and their seven-year-old brother, Baby Hugh—has few friends to turn to for help, only eccentric Miss Mary Frederick, who owns a cotton plantation down the road, and Uncle Willard Ford, a slave trader in nearby Camden. For the most part, Anna Louella Ford and her children find themselves alone, and they are about to become even more isolated.

  • William Clarke Quantrill was a hated name during the War between the States by the Federals of the Union Army as well as by many non-combatants. Even the high command of the Confederacy distrusted him. But there were others who were passionate sympathizers. He was both friend and mentor‚ but also manipulator and opportunist.

    Alistair Durant was someone who came to know him in all these guises. Durant was a young Confederate soldier‚ captured by the Yankees‚ and released when he took an oath never again to bear arms against the Union. He had a long walk back to his home in Clay County, Missouri. It is on this trek that Alistair meets another youngster‚ Beans Kimbrough.

    The two become companions and then friends on the way to Clay County, and it is there that Beans will introduce Alistair to a man calling himself Charley Hart. Hart has a fantastic plan—to organize a militia to fight against the Federals.

  • Tormented by Southern partisans, Missouri farm boy Caleb Cole joins the Union’s Eighteenth Missouri. About the same time, down on the Texas coast, violin-playing Ryan McCalla, from a well-to-do family, enlists in the Confederacy’s Second Texas—mainly in the spirit of adventure—with some friends.

    The two teenagers are about to grow up quickly.

    Fate will bring the two together—along with a teenage girl from Corinth, Mississippi, when the Confederate and Union armies clash at Shiloh, Tennessee, and then again in the town of Corinth.

    They will learn that war is far from glorious.