Clear Skies
Imprisoned in a storeroom with a Beretta 9 mm pistol pressed against his temple by a garrulous moron eager to kill, a grim calculation of life and death played out in Slade’s mind. Plan A was to keep the man talking and his mind off taking the shot. He hadn’t come up with plan B yet, but if plan A failed, he wouldn’t need it anyway.
THE CHALLENGE: Seven murders and two collateral deaths, a rogue US government official who takes Machiavellian schemes to the stratosphere, and his stunning but soulless co-conspirator
THE CHALLENGERS: Dan Slade, in a dead-end job as an FBI investigator attached to the Tokyo Criminal Investigation Bureau; his love interest who may not be quite what she seems; and a French colleague with serious cyber-skills
THE ROADBLOCKS: A multi-layered conspiracy of staggering brilliance and an unimaginable identity conundrum—the first victim, now lying in a Tokyo morgue, appears to be alive; she’s sailing the Mediterranean in her luxury yacht, and placing mega-bets at the Monte Carlo casino
THE STAKES: Averting diplomatic fallout of catastrophic proportions.
CAN SLADE FIGURE OUT THE TRUTH OR WILL FORCES WAITING AND SCHEMING IN THE WINGS GRAB THE REINS OF GLOBAL POWER FROM THE US AND ITS ALLIES?
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Alison Murray is an Australian working in Tokyo, Japan. She became addicted to reading thrillers and mysteries at a young age and has devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and all the books in the ongoing series authorized by Ian Fleming Publications. Her list of favorite paperbacks and Kindle downloads has exploded to include most of the thriller and mystery genre authors to the present time. Lack of time subdued the desire to write her own thriller, but she decided to take charge of her aspirations and make it happen, a major life transition.
With undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in science, education, and the Japanese language, she’s a former university lecturer and former freelance journalist in Japan for The Economist, New Scientist, other journals and
magazines, and an online news service. Currently, her day job is working as the Executive Director of a large European advocacy organization in Japan for which she has written professionally for 18 years, producing everything from press releases to newspaper articles, reports, web copy and collateral. She spends her nights and weekends writing fiction.
Alison Murray speaks, reads and writes Japanese, and her work, based in Tokyo, takes her frequently to Europe, giving her intimate familiarity with Japan and other locations in Clear Skies.