Category: Excerpt

#BlogTour #Extract Robert Ludlum’s™ The Treadstone Resurrection by Joshua Hood @HoZ_Books

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The Treadstone Resurrection Blog Tour

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Treadstone Resurrection by Joshua Hood, the first book in an explosive new series inspired by Robert Ludlum’s Bourne universe. To give you a flavour of the book, I have a fabulous excerpt from one of the early chapters below. Thanks to Anna at Midas PR for inviting me to take part in the tour.

Hood_Treadstone ResurrectionAbout the Book

Treadstone made Jason Bourne an unstoppable force, but he’s not the only one.

Working as a cabinet-maker in rural Oregon, Adam thinks he has left Treadstone – the CIA Black Ops programme – in the past, until he receives a mysterious email from a former colleague, and soon after is attacked by an unknown hit team at his job site.

Operation Treadstone has nearly ruined Adam Hayes. The top-secret CIA Black Ops programme trained him to be a nearly invincible assassin, but it also cost him his family and any chance at a normal life, which is why he was determined to get out. Everything changes when he receives a mysterious email from a former colleague, and soon after is attacked by an unknown hit team at his job site rural Oregon.

Adam must regain the skills that Treadstone taught him – lightning reflexes and a cold conscience – in order to discover who the would-be killers are, and why they have come after him now. Are his pursuers enemies from a long-ago mission? Rival intelligence agents? Or, perhaps, someone inside Treadstone? His search will unearth secrets in the highest levels of government and pull him back into the shadowy world he worked so hard to forget.

Format: Hardcover, ebook, audiobook Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 25th February 2020  Genre: Action, Thriller

Find The Treadstone Resurrection (Treadstone #1) on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of any affiliate programme

Extract from The Treadstone Resurrection (Treadstone #1) by Joshua Hood

Chapter 1

LA CONNER, WASHINGTON

Adam Hayes was lying in the center of the bed when the nightmare came. The tremor started at the edge of his lips, a ripple that twisted into a feral snarl. He started to sweat, hands tearing at the sheets, eyes pinballing behind closed lids, mind trapped in the horrors of the past.

He waited in the shadows, eyes closed, ears straining for the sound of his approaching prey. Kill them all – that was the order. He was just the instrument – a man conditioned to kill without hesitation. His hand closed around the hilt of the knife at the small of his back. The metal hilt felt cold through the latex gloves. The blade came free with the hiss of steel on leather and Hayes opened his eyes; the sentry’s face was green in the night
vision.

Now, the voice told him, and he struck.

Hayes’s hand snaked under the pillow and his fingers closed around the reassuring steel of the Springfield 9-millimeter EMP. He rolled off the bed and dropped into a crouch, the hardwood cold as a corpse on his bare knees. Muscle memory had taken over, and his hands worked independently of thought. The snap of the pistol onto the target and the flick of the thumb disengaging the safety came unbidden.

It was only when his index finger curled around the trigger, compressing the spring until all it would take was a whisper of pressure for the gun to fire, that Hayes became conscious of the moment.

Then the nightmare evaporated.

Hayes blinked the world back into focus, his eyes falling to the outstretched pistol, sights centered on the shirt hanging on the back of the door. Jesus Christ.

He let go of the trigger and snicked the safety into place. The realization that he’d come within a hairsbreadth of sending a 9-millimeter hollow-point through the door made him sick to his stomach.

It was 5:05 in the morning and the nightmares were getting worse.

When he trusted his legs to hold him, Hayes grunted to his feet, placed the pistol on the bedside table, and padded across the hardwood to the bathroom. He palmed the wall switch and the overhead lights flashed to life, revealing the mass of scars that crisscrossed his bare torso like lines on a topographic map.

He stopped at the sink, plucked the orange pill bottle from the open medicine cabinet, and twisted the cap free. He shook a dose into his hand. The oblong pill in his callused palm reminded him of the last appointment with the shrink in Tacoma.

“What about the nightmares?” she asked, over the scratch of her pen across the paper.
“Haven’t had one in months.”
“Adam, you are making wonderful progress,” she said, tearing the sheet from the prescription pad, “but.”
There’s always a but.
“But there will be setbacks.”
Setbacks.

He felt the anger stir in his gut, like a wolf waking in its den. Three nightmares in one week wasn’t a setback; it was a fucking meltdown. He was pissed. Mad that he’d listened to her – let himself believe that he’d made progress.

That he could be normal.

“No,” he said aloud. “That’s not who I am anymore.”

He took a breath, placed the pill in his mouth, and gently closed the door. He took a drink of water from the sink, and when Hayes looked up, his eyes alighted on the sheet of construction paper taped to the glass. The stick-figure family holding hands beneath a lemon-yellow sun.

Hayes brushed his finger over the “I love my Daddy” scrawled in crayon, a sad smile stretching across his face.

In the shower, he twisted the cold-water knob all the way to the left and ducked under the showerhead. The water came out of the pipe ice-cold and hit his flesh with the sting of a bullwhip. His mind recoiled, muscles tensed like hawsers beneath his skin, forcing the air from his lungs, but Hayes stood fast and waited for the question that had greeted him every morning for the past eighteen months.

How did I get here?

About the Authors

Robert Ludlum (1927 – 2001) was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 225 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into 32 languages in 50 countries. Among his best-sellers were The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), The Osterman Weekend (1972), The Matarese Circle (1979). He is most famous for the Jason Bourne series – The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990). The series was adapted for TV in 1988, for a film featuring Matt Damon in the lead role in 2002, and for a brand-new TV production from the writer behind Heroes and Chicago Hope in January 2020.

Joshua HoodJoshua Hood is the author of Warning Order and Clear by Fire. He graduated from the University of Memphis before joining the military and spending five years in the 82nd Airborne Division. He was a team leader in the 3-504 Parachute Infantry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, conducting combat operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. From 2007 to 2008, Hood served as a squad leader with the 1-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Afghanistan for which he was decorated for valour in Operation Furious Pursuit. On his return to civilian life he became a sniper team leader on a full time SWAT team in Memphis, where he was awarded the lifesaving medal. Currently he works as the Director of Veteran Outreach for the American Warrior Initiative.

Connect with Joshua
Website | Twitter | Goodreads

#Extract The Caroline Paintings by Arthur D. Hittner

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Arthur D. Hittner’s novel Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse, set in the art world of pre–war New York City, is unfortunately still languishing in my review pile (although it is gradually getting closer to the top!) A while back, Arthur was kind enough to write a fascinating guest post about the challenge of capturing in words the inspiration that drives the creative process of an artist.  Arthur has recently published a new book, The Caroline Paintings, also set in the art world, and I’m pleased to be able to bring you an extract from the book.  If you like the sound of it, you can find purchase links further down this post. 

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Extract from The Caroline Paintings by Arthur D. Hittner

Chapter Two

Longmire, Virginia
September, 1968.

No one ever accused Caroline McKellan of reticence. She marched right up to the studio door and rapped loudly, like the wolf in the nursery rhyme. Irritated at the interruption, the artist sighed. He deposited his brush in the paint-spattered coffee can he’d used for decades, rose as quickly as his arthritic knees would allow, and opened the creaky wooden door.

“Caroline?” he stammered. The visit from his young next-door neighbour was unexpected; she’d been in grade school the last time she’d appeared at his door. Wearing cowboy boots, a tight pair of blue jeans, and a low-cut sweater, her lips painted a lush ruby red, she looked every bit of her sixteen years – and then some.

“Hi, Mr. Elliott,” she said breezily, whisking into his studio as if entering her own living room.

Caroline McKellan had known Grant Elliott all of her life. Growing up on the small Virginia farm that had been in her family for generations, her parents had often hosted intimate dinners with their famous neighbours, Becky and Grant Elliott, whose eighteenth-century fieldstone farmhouse stood a mere two hundred yards from their own, nestled in the ancient ridges of the Shenandoah Valley in the rural climes of northern Virginia.

The McKellans traced their ancestry back to a hardy couple of Scottish descent who’d emigrated on the eve of the Revolutionary War, settling in Longmire, on the very plot of land on which their early nineteenth-century farmhouse now stood. They’d been there ever since, passing the farm down, as was custom, to the eldest son. But the enduring chain of patrilineal descent had come to a crushing halt.

“To what do I owe the honour?” Grant inquired, a smile spreading across his well-chiseled face. Tall, broad-shouldered, and ruggedly handsome, he looked more like the Marlboro Man than a world-famous artist. But his advancing arthritis, the deepening lines on his face, and the random specks of grey intruding upon his unruly mantle of black hair bore testimony to his fifty-eight years.

“I’d like to be your muse, Mr. Elliott,” she said bluntly.

Her boldness amused him. “My muse?” He laughed heartily.  “It’s not that simple.” She stared at him, undaunted, her eyes blazing with determination.

Ever since she was a child, Caroline had reveled in her proximity to the artist celebrated for his poignant studies of the denizens of the Shenandoah Valley, ordinary people to whom the verdant valley was a cherished birthright.  When she was eight, Grant had produced sketches of each of her parents, presenting them as framed gifts to the family that Christmas.  Four years later, he’d contributed another portrait to the family collection, a sketch of her brother done from a photograph.  But he’d never drawn Caroline.

[…]

“I’m deadly serious,” she said defiantly, challenging the artist’s resistance. “I know you want to paint me, you said so at dinner!” She deposited herself on the timeworn seat of an old Windsor chair, her outline silhouetted by the dim northern light filtering through the bay window of the once dilapidated outbuilding that the Elliotts had refitted as a studio.

Caroline was right.  Grant Elliott would have liked nothing more than to paint the precocious sixteen-year-old. A tinderbox of beauty, grief, and anger and rebellion, she was captivating and provocative.  He’d struggled to wrest his eyes from her two nights earlier, when the McKellans hosted the Elliotts for dinner.  It was his first glimpse of Caroline in more than a year and the changes were startling.  She’d grown into a beautiful young woman: tall, lithe and brash, with piercing blue eyes, porcelain skin and a luxurious mane of strawberry blond hair.  In passing dinner conversation he’d mentioned his interest in painting her, but his hosts were decidedly cool to the notion.  He’d pursued it no further.

But to Caroline, Grant’s remark was a summons – an invitation to pursue her covert ambition.  After all, she figured, she had nothing left to lose.

The Caroline PaintingsAbout the Book

A Florida retiree, dabbling in the art market, acquires the contents of a storage locker in a foreclosure sale. Included is a cache of unsigned paintings of a beautiful young woman by a supremely talented hand. Who is she, who’s the artist, and what gave rise to these stunning works? By what tortuous path did they find their way into an abandoned storage unit and who’ll prevail in the ensuing struggle for their possession?

The answers are revealed in the art-sleuthing novel, The Caroline Paintings, a bittersweet, fifty-year tale of art, love, duplicity, perseverance, and discovery featuring a troubled teenage runaway, a tormented artist, an illegitimate son, an unscrupulous attorney, a beer-guzzling widower, and a quirky Harvard art professor.

Inspired by the saga of the Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth, and in the tradition of art-centred fiction such as The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and The Art Forger, The Caroline Paintings is a must-read for lovers of art and partisans of historical and contemporary fiction.

Format: Paperback, ebook (225 pages)  Publisher: Apple Ridge Fine Arts
Published: 1st January 2020                    Genre: Historical Fiction, Art

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Caroline Paintings on Goodreads

 

Arthur D HittnerAbout the Author

Arthur D. Hittner, author of the art-related historical novels, The Caroline Paintings and Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse, and the humorous baseball novel Four-Finger Singer and His Late Wife, Kate.

He is also the author of Honus Wagner: The Life of Baseball’s ‘Flying Dutchman’ (McFarland, 1996), winner of the Seymour Medal awarded by the Society of American Baseball Research for the best book of baseball history or biography published in 1996, At the Threshold of Brilliance: The Brief but Splendid Career of Harold J. Rabinovitz (The Rabinovitz Project, 2014), a biography and catalogue raisonne of a newly rediscovered master of American art of the Depression era, and the irreverent travelogue, Cross-Country Chronicles: Road Trips Through the Art and Soul of America.

Mr. Hittner has also written about fine art subjects for Maine Antique Digest, Fine Art Connoisseur and Antiques & Fine Art and has served as a Trustee of the Danforth Museum of Art and the Tucson Museum of Art.

Connect with Arthur

Website ǀ  Goodreads