Guest Author: William Peace

I have been writing novels for five years, and my fifth novel is now being edited before publication.  Until I started my first novel, I had no intention of becoming a novelist.  Until that point I had been a general manager and a management consultant.  My writing was strictly non-fiction!  But while I was on holiday in Sicily, I had a series of dreams about a beautiful Sicilian girl (whom I didn’t know).  Somehow, I managed to keep her in my dreams for almost a week, and then I thought, ‘I’ve got to write this down’.  When it got to page 70, I thought, ‘well, I might as well make a book of it.’   

My author’s page is: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00CXS12MW.
  
Fishing in Foreign Seas was followed by Sin & Contrition about six characters from the age of 13 to age 62 who have mixed success dealing with life’s temptations.  The next was Efraim’s Eye which involves a terrorist with a plot to destroy the London Eye, and a financial consultant who finds himself on a pro bono assignment to audit a Moroccan charity.  With the help of a beautiful Israeli, the Operations Director of the parent charity, he discovers some suspicious linkages between the Moroccan charity and the terrorist.  There is, of course, a love story (two, in fact), and a cliff-hanging finale involving Scotland Yard.

My most recently published novel is The Iranian Scorpion, which like my other novels, was published by Strategic Book Publishing.  The key figure is Robert Duval, a US Drug Enforcement Agent, who is sent to Afghanistan to find ways of stemming the flow of heroin, converted from opium, the principal crop in Afghanistan.  With the help of Kate, a freelance journalist (with whom he develops a relationship) and Vizier Ashraf, a shadowy Taliban figure, Robert disguises himself as an Afghan field hand, working on Azizullah’s opium farm.  Here, he learns opium cultivation, and, from Rustam, a fifteen-year-old ‘chemist’, he understands the method of converting opium to heroin.

Robert (known to the Afghans as Abdullah) and Rustam enter Iran illegally and are able to sell 25 kg of heroin to The Iranian Scorpion, a powerful provincial governor and drug king pin.  Robert and Rustam trace the onward shipment of the heroin to New York City, where a bust is made.  Furious, the Scorpion has Robert traced, jailed, and found guilty of capital crimes.  Meanwhile, Robert’s father, David, a retired US Army general is sent to Tehran as part of the UN’s team investigating Iran’s use of nuclear energy.  David suddenly learns (falsely) that his son has been executed.  He is able to pin responsibility for his son’s death on the Scorpion, and vows to assassinate him.  The rest of the novel deals with who lives and who dies, who wins and who loses: Robert? David? The Scorpion? Kate? Rustam? Azizullah?  The research for this book took almost as long as the writing.  I’ve had friends who have read it ask, “When were you in Afghanistan and Iran?”

I haven’t been there, but I have a blog at http://williampeace.bookblogworld.com.