I would like to welcome Larry Crane to The Avid Reader today. Thanks for stopping by Larry Crane. Please be sure and check out Larry Crane's novel A Bridge to Treachery. Please be sure to check out my guest post with Larry Crane on "THE GEOGRAPHY OF A NOVEL and WHERE IT COMES FROM" . Oh and be sure to enter the giveaway before you leave.
Book Title: A Bridge to Treachery
Author: Larry Crane
Published: May 17th 2011
Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
ebook:
Pages: 325
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BLURB
A Bridge to Treachery
Former Colonel Lou Christopher is an ex-Army Ranger retired from the military and contentedly working as a New York investment broker. After being assigned a number of lucrative accounts and becoming accustomed to living the good life, he discovers there is a pay back. His former military skills are requested under a threat of losing everything he has.
Handed a group of misfits to assemble into a military strike team, he is coerced into leading the team on a mission of domestic terrorism. At the center of a bridge outside of Manhattan, his strike team is caught in the act and unexpectedly becomes engaged in a deadly firefight. It's then that he learns the mission was a political maneuver from the highest levels of the U.S. Government-and ultimately realizes he has been betrayed by his superiors. Learning his team was considered nothing more than collateral damage and intended to be killed and left as scapegoats, he uses his unique military expertise and engages in a fight for his life.
As the strike team is decimated, he and a female teammate elude the opposition forces to survive and escape, turning the tables on his superiors. Using his distinctive set of military skills, he now becomes the hunter and vows to extract his revenge and bring them all down.
EXCERPT
A Bridge to Treachery
Lou got to his knees and scrambled under the trailer toward Frawley’s body. He reached across
him, for his carbine. Immediately, the police threw another fusillade of fire. Lou was caught in
the middle of the searchlight beam. He scrambled back to safety behind the tire as bullets
screeched around him, careening off the concrete in a shower of sparks, miraculously failing to
ignite the gasoline. By the weight of it, he judged the magazine of the carbine to be almost full.
Back toward the center of the bridge, the police cars were creeping forward. Lou crouched
behind the front tire of Mack West, gathering his strength for a sprint. He got to his feet and
plunged out into the darkness adjacent to the bridge railing. He pumped his legs with all of his
strength. He saw the dark form of his drenched jacket in the roadway ahead.
The headlights of the approaching squad cars created angular shafts of light through the wheels,
undercarriage, and stanchions of Mack East and the three-quarter ton full of napalm drums. He
dove for his jacket, grasping the machine beneath it in both hands. He whirled the handle once;
nothing. Then again, harder. Again. On the third twist, the center of the bridge seemed to heave
up in a ball of yellow and crimson flame. A thunderous roar enveloped the bridge and sent
shocks through the girders and the concrete surface, throwing Lou to his back.
Globs of thickened aviation gasoline arched through the night--clearing the overhead
cables—and then plunged to the inky river below. The massive ball of flame slowly rose off the
surface of the roadway and engulfed the cables and lights above.
Lou got to his feet and turned back toward the western end of the bridge, racing back toward
Mack West. For nearly a full minute, the center of the bridge was aglow with intense seething
light; yet no one fired at him. He went right to the truck, hugging the side of the roadway and the
railing. The air in his lungs seemed to swell in his chest until he couldn’t catch his breath. And
still no one fired.
Back in the shelter of Mack West, Lou sank to his knees behind the front tire. The entire bridge
and the mountains on either side of the Hudson were lit by flaming napalm that now stuck to the
overhead cables and slowly dripped in globs of orange flame to the roadway. He’d stopped them.
He became aware of the pulsing, rug-beating throb of helicopter blades. He looked out to the
north of the bridge and saw a military HU-1B hovering at the level of the roadway, its landing
lights gleaming. Red lights flashed on the tail boom. He was receiving no fire. The cops must
have been holding off to keep from accidently hitting the chopper or firing into their comrades
closing in from the east side.
Slowly the craft moved forward, dipping its nose and gaining altitude. It ascended above the
bridge, swinging back to the eastern side. Thirty seconds later, Lou heard throbbing directly
overhead. The chopper hovered out in front of him, by the traffic circle, and descended to the
ground. There was no firing. It was the perfect time to go.
He reached the end of the railing. Instinctively, he veered to the right, across the narrow strip of
grass. He dove headlong into the underbrush, still holding the carbine. He crawled on all fours
over roots and rocks and under bushes and low hanging branches that grabbed at his weapon and
held him back. He reached the cut.
It was steeper than he thought. He started down the embankment on his rump, warding off
boulders and stumps on his way down with his feet, but soon he began tumbling and sliding in a
cascade of rocks and water. The pool at the bottom was not deep and it was no colder than the
rain.
At first, it was absolutely black in the cut. Gradually his eyes adjusted, but there was no moon
and no reflective surfaces to magnify what little light existed. He was shielded from the open
ground a hundred and forty feet above him at the level of the bridge. He heard no sound except
the splashing of water at his feet and his own deep breathing. The rain still came down steadily,
unrelenting. For that he was thankful. It would mask all of his movements.
There wasn’t much time. He didn’t know if they’d seen him dart off under the cover and
confusion of the helicopter landing. The only thing to do was to strike out west, shielded from
view until he was far from this place.
“Hello...” he heard from the other side of the stream. It was a half
whisper. “Is it you?”
“Come over here,” he said softly. “Over here. I’m holding out my hand.”
He heard her stumble into the water and stifle a screech. Then his hand was holding hers; pulling
her across. She rushed to him, clutched at his shirt, and wrapped her arms around him.
“You don’t look dead,” she said.
GUEST POST
THE GEOGRAPHY OF A NOVEL and WHERE IT COMES FROM
The setting of my thriller A Bridge to Treachery is deeply rooted in the geography of the Hudson River Valley stretching from Newburg, New York, a town on the Hudson River north of West Point all the way south to Manhattan. I chose to use actual locations within this area for most of the scenes rather than to invent them because this adds to the feeling I'm trying to induce in the reader that this story could actually have happened where the fictional scenes unfold.
Geography drives most of the action in the novel. Once the characters are placed in a scene and need to move to another location, the actual terrain, roads, etc. determine exactly how this is accomplished. You could look it all up on a topographic map.
I didn't need to research the geography of the region. I lived in it for nearly thirty years, starting when at age nineteen I departed my home in the suburbs of Chicago in the midwest and traveled by train east to attend the US Military Academy at West Point, 40 miles north of New York City. It was the first exposure I had to terrain that was not absolutely flat.
West Point is situated at a bend in the beautiful Hudson River that flows through the heavily forested and rugged foothills that rise on either side. Within a day of arriving at West Point a pretty scruffy teen-ager, I was formed up in immaculate dress gray trousers and pressed white shirt for the swearing in ceremony in front of Trophy Point, from which you can look out to the north at the river stretching out between towering hills, a perfect vista for the artists of the Hudson River School. It is here where my protagonist Lou Christopher reflects on his days as a cadet, and makes a decision that dictates the climax of the novel..
As a cadet at West Point, I became very familiar with the rocky local terrain during a summer of intense military training at the beginning of my sophomore year. As a junior in Engineering Class, I would travel to the Bear Mountain Bridge to check out how the massive cables were anchored in the surrounding rock. Later, I would stand on a smaller bridge and peer down into the chasm in which Popolopen Creek flows. Here in the novel, Maggie Christopher galvanized herself for action.
When my military service was over, I settled with my family in Bergen County, NJ from which I commuted to Wall Street. Daily, I walked the streets from the World Trade Towers and through Trinity Churchyard, and in the summer, ate brown bag lunches on the benches of Bowling Green. I rode the subway to Grand Central Station in midtown. These are the places where, in the novel, Lou finds temporary refuge.
An activity that absorbed a lot of my family's time in my thirties is the sport of Orienteering. I was fascinated with navigation by map and compass, and the joy of traipsing the hills that surrounded us. I organized a club, put on tons of "meets", and eventually administered much larger meets. Putting on meets requires producing orienteering maps from scratch. I spent hundreds of hours in the field, plotting every boulder, stream, cliff and trail on detailed maps. This is how I know what it's like to traverse the terrain around Bear Mountain, an important part of A Bridge to Treachery.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Transplanted to Maine mid-westerner Larry Crane brings an Illinois sensibility to his writing. Larry graduated from West Point and served in the Army before starting
a business career on Wall Street. His writing includes articles for outdoor magazines, plays, short fiction, and his most recent thriller novel, A Bridge to Treachery. In his spare time, Crane is a hobbyist videographer for his local Public Access Television Station and is a volunteer at his local historical society. Larry and wife Jan live in splendid isolation on the coast of Maine.
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10/29 Yvonne Mikell Interview & Giveaway
10/31 Queen of the Night Reviews Review & Guest Post
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11/16 Hooks and Book Review Guest Post, & Giveaway
11/19 The Cover by Brittany Interview & Giveaway
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11/23 Kindle Fever Review
11/26 TBR Review
11/26 Reflections of a Bookworm Review
11/27 Beauty in Ruins Review
11/28 Reviews By Molly Guest Post & Giveaway
11/29 Harlie's Books Review
11/29 Have Kindle, Will Travel Promo
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