Ed. Note: This is the third of three excerpts. Chapters one and two can be found here. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

Chapter Five

The White Room

I looked around.  There wasn’t much to see.  It was a small, cramped, white room.  There were no windows, no two-way mirrors, just the rough painted surface of the blank white cinderblock walls.  There was a white table bolted to the floor, and two plastic white chairs, one on either side.

For a minute or two, I just stood there, staring stupidly at all that whiteness.  I was still a little messed up in my head.  The memories from my attack still clung to me.  The scene had been so real, it was so much as if I were there, right there.  It hurt to be back here again, back in this prison.  Anyplace would have been better.

I heard the lock on the white door snap again.  The door opened.

I turned and saw Detective Rose step into the room.

Man, I can’t tell you what that was like.  At the sight of him, I felt my sore, battered body go weak with relief.  I couldn’t remember the last time I was so happy to see anyone.

“Rose!” I blurted out.  “Dude!  Oh, man, it’s about time you showed up!”

Rose didn’t answer.  His face was blank, expressionless. But then he never was much in the expressing-himself department.  He was a black guy with a round face and flat features, a thin moustache and smart, steady eyes.  He rarely smiled.  He rarely even grimaced.  Even his suits seemed to have no particular color.  He was always all business.

I saw his eyes go over me, pausing on the cuts and bruises.  But all he said was, “Sit down, Charlie.”

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Ed. Note: This is the second of three excerpts. Part one is here. Part three posts tomorrow. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

Chapter Two

The Yard King 

What just happened?

In the terror of the moment, I couldn’t make sense of it.  Then I could.

One of the Nazi musclemen—one of the thugs who’d been with me by the free weights—was standing before me where the wolf-faced man had been.  His fist was raised, a stone was gripped in it.  He had stepped up behind the Islamist assassin and clubbed him in the back of the neck.

The next instant, the two men holding me were ripped away, as if they’d been caught up in a tornado or something.  Some Swastika-tatooed musclemen had grabbed them too, dragged them off me.  As the men fought back, more of the Islamists were running to the scene to join the fight and more of the Nazis too.  Another second and hate-filled men were battling other hate-filled men back and forth across the grass. There was the crack of fists on bone.  Blood flying through the air.  Grunted curses and ugly names.  Men down on the ground rolling over and over one another, trying to gouge one another’s eyes or clutch one another’s throats.

It all happened in a second.  I stood dazed at the center of the chaos.

I thought:  This is hell.  It must look just like this in hell.

Now the guards in their blue shirts seemed suddenly to reappear out of nowhere.  They rushed into the melee of gray uniforms, wrapping arms around prisoners’ throats to pull them apart, hammering at their heads with the edges of their walkie-talkies, kicking at them as they rolled around in the dirt and on the asphalt.

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Ed. Note: This is the first of three excerpts that will post over next three days. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

The Homelanders series is about a kid named Charlie West – a good kid, who goes to sleep in his own bed one night and wakes up strapped to a chair being tortured by Islamo-fascist terrorists.  He manages to make a run for it – only to find that he’s also wanted by the police for murder.  For the first three novels in the series, he’s been on the run from both the jihadis and the cops, trying to find out what happened to his life before someone kills him or puts him behind bars.

The Final Hour  is the fourth and last installment in the series.  As it begins, Charlie has got most of the answers he needs, but the police have got him.  He’s been thrown into a very tough prison called Abingdon, where it’s a toss-up whether Islamist thugs or Nazis are going to have the pleasure of killing him first…

 Chapter One

Abingdon 

Most people have to die to get to hell.  I took a shortcut.

I was in Abingdon State Prison.  Locked away for a murder I didn’t commit.  Waiting for the men who were coming to kill me.  With nowhere to run.

It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I’d been there for two weeks.  Two weeks of smothering boredom and strangling fear.  When I was locked in my cell, the minutes seemed to lie like dead men, to decay like dead men—so slowly you could barely tell it was happening.  When I was out in the exercise yard or in the cafeteria or in the showers, there was just the fear, the waiting.  Waiting for the killers to make good their threat, the words one of them had whispered in my ear as I stood in the dinner line one night:

You’re already dead, West.  You just don’t know it yet.

Alone in my cell, I stared at the tan wall.  I felt a black despair surrounding me, closing in on me.  I did everything I could to fight it.  I did push-ups.  I read my Bible.  I prayed.  The prayer gave me some comfort, some relief.

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In a celebrated 2008 essay for the Village Voice, David Mamet made the startling announcement that he was “no longer a brain-dead liberal.” I think it only fair to mention here that I rejoiced. Mr. Mamet is a terrific playwright, maybe even a great one (“American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”) and a screenwriter of the first rank (“The Verdict,” “The Untouchables”). That a writer of such talent and stature had become a conservative seemed to me to promise some relief from the soporific political conformity of the American arts.

So I rejoiced—and I also sympathized. Breaking free of leftism while working in show business is like escaping from “The Matrix” only to find oneself in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” You wake to a risky but bracing new reality of individual liberty, limited government and free markets and are instantly beset by zombified statist dreamers determined either to make you rejoin their ranks or to destroy you. Mr. Mamet reports that a certain prominent left-leaning newspaper actually panned his first openly conservative play not once but twice for good measure. (Libertarian humorist Greg Gutfeld has introduced a “Mamet Attack Clock” on his late-night cable show to measure just how fast critics will now downgrade their opinions of the playwright’s work.)

Under such circumstances, it is natural that Mr. Mamet would develop the urge to cry out, like Kevin McCarthy in the famous last scene of “Body Snatchers”: “Listen to me! Please listen!” From that urge, no doubt, arises Mr. Mamet’s new work of nonfiction, “The Secret Knowledge.” It is his attempt to explain and disseminate the thinking behind his conversion to the right.

“Liberalism is a religion,” he writes. “It affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed. Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.”

Full article here.

You can purchase “The Secret Knowledge” here.

Author’s note: Informant Peter Patterson is on the run from the homicidal police lieutenant Brick Ramsey.  As he tries to escape through a storm-drenched city, he encounters an almost apocalyptic disaster.

He drove north through the empty city.  He drove slowly, careful of the storm.  The pavement was slick where it was level and there were troughs and hollows where deep puddles gathered, where the water thundered against the undercarriage and gripped the tires of the old car as they passed through.

As he got away from downtown, the streets grew even darker around him.  It took him a while to notice it:  the electricity here was out.  He looked past the laboring wipers.  He saw rainswept boulevards empty as alleyways, storefronts boarded against the tempest.  He was glad to be inside and warm with the heater on.  The unreasoning urgency in him—the anxious conviction that he had just been in some kind of danger—was already beginning to recede.  Maybe he’d just spooked himself.  Maybe he’d just let his nerves get the better of him.

He turned on the radio.  Hoping for some news, some voices for company.  Nothing came out but static.  He pressed the scan button and listened as the tuner automatically ran the band.  Still nothing but that hiss, end to end, that hiss with broken fragments of words in it like men sending messages from the belly of a snake.

Look at this.  Look at this.

The hollowed brownstones.  The vacant businesses.  The broken windows like phantoms’ eyes.  He was in the north now, at the edge of the neighborhoods.  He was thinking:  The wages of sin. (more…)

Author’s Note: Two time loser John Shannon agrees to go in on a robbery with psychopath Benny Torrence.  Just as they get to the money, everything goes bad—and Shannon does something that will change his life forever. 

A floorboard creaked on the landing.  Shannon tensed, his hand frozen reaching for the cash.  He turned to see Benny’s dark shape likewise frozen by the door.  In their silence, they heard light footsteps running on the hall carpet.  All the pieces—all the half-acknowledged thoughts—fell into place in Shannon’s mind and he understood:  There was someone in the house.  There had been someone in the house all along.  That’s why he’d seen a glow at the door.  The someone must have heard them break in.  The someone must have turned the light off in order to hide his own presence.  Now the someone was trying to get to the stairway and escape.

For another second, Shannon hoped things might still turn out all right.  All they had to do was let the someone go.  Then they could grab the money and get out of here before the police showed up.  Even with Benny’s supercharged engine roaring for all the world to hear, they might still get away without being spotted.

But then Benny moved—and he moved so fast Shannon had no time to stop him or even call out.  His shadow flashed through the door like a streak of black lightning.  When he flashed back he had the someone in his hands.

It was a woman.  Benny was gripping her by the throat.  He shoved her up against the wall hard, hard enough to make the room shudder.  He shone his flashlight in her face and then down the whole length of her.  She was in her twenties, very pretty, with a curvy figure pressing through her blouse and skirt.  In the outglow of the flashlight beam, Shannon could see Benny’s bright eyes and the teeth in his fierce smile as he breathed over her.  His breath was a low, laughing growl of triumph and desire.

Shannon jumped to his feet.  He shone his own flashlight on Benny, the blue beam crossing with the white beam in the dark.

“What the hell’re you doing?  Let her go,” he said in a harsh whisper. (more…)

A personal incident has given me a particular perspective on recent news about the media. Last Tuesday, I received word that the French release of my thriller novel Empire of Lies had been canceled by publisher Seuil Policiers. The editor who originally bought the book had left the French company, and the new editor, my agent says, feels that “she can not publish . . . because of the political and religious aspects of the story.” This, even though it’s in breach of a contract for which I’ve been paid in full. 

Empire of Lies features a politically conservative Christian protagonist, Jason Harrow, who believes he has uncovered an Islamist terrorist plot being obscured by the leftist mainstream media. “Lies, lies, lies,” the emotionally troubled Harrow murmurs at his television set. “It’s all about what they don’t say.” It will come as no surprise that my friend Andrew Breitbart praised the book as the only thriller he’d ever read in which the mainstream media were the villains.

The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the Daily Caller website that left-wing journalists conspired to suppress scandals that might harm Barack Obama and to the brouhaha over Breitbart’s online release of a video that resulted in a government worker’s momentarily losing her job. In both stories, one thing leaps out at me: everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on. (more…)

Over the last forty years, leftism has failed in every particular but one:  it has succeeded in demonizing the opposition.

Leftists will blacklist you—then if you complain, they’ll attack you for whining.  They will call you racist and compare your leaders to Hitler—then if you return the insult, they’ll scream about the decline of civility.  They will do everything in their power to cut you off from media and artistic outlets—then when you create outlets of your own they will savage them for their bias.  Like the mobster in a Raymond Chandler novel, they will beat your teeth out, then kick you in the stomach for mumbling.

As a result of their success in marginalizing dissenting opinions, nothing now creates a greater commotion in modern American discourse than speaking the obvious truth.

Last week during a stop in Washington DC, I gave a five minute interview to an extremely nice reporter named Peggy Star from CNSNews.  I pointed out that, while leftists speak their political minds openly and aggressively in Hollywood, conservatives are forced to meet in secret and speak in whispers to avoid insult and tacit blacklisting. (more…)

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Charlie West went to bed one night an ordinary high school student. He woke up a hunted man. Terrorists are trying to kill him. The police want to arrest him for the stabbing death of his best friend. He doesn’t know whose side he’s one or who he can trust. With his pursuers closing in on every side, Charlie makes his way back to his hometown to find some answers. There, holed up in an abandoned mansion, he’s joined by his friends in a desperate attempt to discover the truth about a murder he can’t remember-and the love he can never forget.

 Chapter One
The Killer In The Mirror – Part 2 

You have to understand:  a trained man with a knife is as deadly as anything, even more dangerous in some ways than a man with a gun.  You might grab a gun.  You might wrestle it away.  But you can’t get hold of a knife without getting cut.  And if the knife-man knows what he’s doing, he can carve you up with a blade just as fast as a bullet.

And this guy knew what he was doing all right.  All the karate training in the world wasn’t going to save me if I didn’t act fast and act smart.  If I fell and he came down on top of me, I’d be dead in seconds.

I knew it even as I was falling.  The panic raced through my belly.  The thoughts raced through my head:  I have to do something. (more…)

Charlie West went to bed one night an ordinary high school student. He woke up a hunted man. Terrorists are trying to kill him. The police want to arrest him for the stabbing death of his best friend. He doesn’t know whose side he’s one or who he can trust. With his pursuers closing in on every side, Charlie makes his way back to his hometown to find some answers. There, holed up in an abandoned mansion, he’s joined by his friends in a desperate attempt to discover the truth about a murder he can’t remember-and the love he can never forget.

Chapter One
The Killer In The Mirror – Part 1 

The man with the knife was a stranger.  I never saw him before he tried to kill me.

I was in the Whitney Library when it happened, about seven miles from my hometown of Spring Hill.  I’d been there for about forty-five minutes.  I had come with a plan—a plan to clear my name, to get free, to get home to my family and out of danger.  Now I had to leave.  It wasn’t safe for me to stay in any one place for very long.

I was in the main research room on the library’s second floor.  I went down the hall and pushed into the men’s room.  I took off my black fleece and hung it on the door of one of the stalls.  Then, wearing just my jeans and black t-shirt, I stood at the sink and splashed cold water on my face. (more…)

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Part 1:

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