The following article appears in The Big Thrill.

By David Healey

Author Lee Gimenez is one of those rare writers who still uses a pen and paper to craft his stories, often in a coffeeshop or sometimes in the backyard during these pandemic times.

Day by day, word by word, those pages have added up to an impressive collection of books in his acclaimed J. T. Ryan series, as well as standalone novels, including his newest thriller, BLACKSNOW ZERO.

BLACKSNOW ZERO—the title referring to post-nuclear snow—features a high-tech and twisty plot that seems worlds away from the author’s handwritten notebooks.

“It’s probably my most plotted book,” Gimenez says, adding that the details of the story were in part sparked by a trip he and his wife, Judy, took to China. “It’s mostly told through the eyes of a young FBI agent.”

According to Gimenez, BLACKSNOW ZERO unfolds as FBI agent Erica Blake investigates the death of a United States senator and uncovers a drastic, top-secret operation led by rogue American generals. Unless she can stop it, the doomsday event will take place in 30 days. Ominously named Blacksnow, the operation plans to free the United States from the crushing debt owed to the Chinese government.

Agent Blake also learns that China has secretly bought massive amounts of American debt, giving the Chinese control over America’s domestic and foreign policy, and making the US president a puppet of the Chinese government. Agent Blake’s life is threatened when she learns top-level people at the FBI are involved in Blacksnow. Not knowing who to trust, she enlists the help of her lover, CIA agent Steve McCord. As Blake’s investigation deepens, she also realizes Blacksnow could plunge America into conflict. With the deadline looming, the two agents rush to expose the conspiracy before the United States becomes embroiled in a worldwide war.

Even a casual reader of today’s headlines will realize the plot comes uncomfortably close to plausibility, given current events.

To add to the countdown construct, each chapter covers a day leading toward the potential doomsday, starting with Chapter 1 on Day 30. Gimenez says this made the plotting quite intricate because changing one plot point as he wrote could reverberate back through the whole structure of the book.

“I had to do quite a bit of research for this book,” Gimenez says. “One of the elements of the novel has to do with the ever-growing national debt of the United States. Because of this massive debt, the USA has borrowed large amounts of money from other nations, such as China, Japan, and other countries. This has made our country very vulnerable; in effect, our domestic and foreign policy can be influenced and even dictated by foreign countries, which is a dangerous situation.”

Along with the tense plotting and current-events elements, something else that makes the book stand out is that a male author wrote a female main character.

“She’s a tough, take-no-prisoners type of woman who also has a sarcastic side to her,” Gimenez says of Agent Blake. “I use that humor to relieve the tension of the deadly situation she deals with. Blake has an on-and-off relationship with her ex-husband, and in this novel, she seeks his help with the investigation. Their personal relationship creates its own drama and conflict.”

Gimenez really enjoys the dynamic between Blake and her ex-husband. “I like the approach of a woman and a man in the key roles,” he says. “They bounce ideas off each other. One gets in trouble and the other one comes to help.”

On a more personal note, Gimenez credits his wife with being a good sounding board for the credibility of his characters’ actions and dialogue, and she also helps with cover design.

In addition to his own world travels in the military and then as a business executive, Gimenez says several authors have influenced his writing. His list of favorites includes David Baldacci, Brad Thor, Robert B. Parker, Lee Child, and Janet Evanovich. Many of their books fill his home office.

“I love to read fast-paced, page-turning novels, and that’s the type of novel I like to write as well,” he notes. “I enjoy putting my hero and heroines in danger. My goal is to create cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. And most of all, I try to include suspense, tension, and conflict on every page.”

That approach has garnered him more than a little success with 15 published novels to his credit. In 2019, Gimenez was a finalist for the 2019 Author Academy Award, and he is a multi-year nominee for the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He was also a finalist for the prestigious Terry Kay Prize for Fiction.

Before his writing career took off, he worked in business management for several Fortune 500 companies. Prior to that, he served as an officer in the US Army. He is a graduate of Georgia Tech University and also earned an MBA degree.

These days, Gimenez is happy to keep filling up those notebooks in longhand and typing up what he’s written, giving him an opportunity to revise his words.

“I wish I could write and publish three novels a year, but that’s not realistic for me,” he says. “I research my topics and try to make my novels as realistic as possible, and that takes time. To write a good book, the writing process also takes time. Normally, I can write and publish two novels a year.”

His secret to success? It’s as simple as what keeps him coming back to those notebooks and his keyboard.

“You’ve got to love writing.”

Earlier this week, I was out for my evening walk and I had a good bit of luck because I saw a red fox sitting in the path ahead. We started out some distance apart, keeping a wary eye on one another, but as I got to within about 50 yards away he still hadn’t moved.

I thought, isn’t that interesting? I had just reached a point where I was going to clap my hands or maybe head in the opposite direction when the fox jumped up from his haunches and ran off down the trail. Fleet of foot, he rapidly disappeared into the evening shadows. For me, spotting fox and getting that close to him was really special because foxes are one of my favorite kinds of wildlife.

We are so lucky living here at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to be able to see foxes. I understand that in a lot of places the growing coyote population has driven out red foxes because they basically competing for the same resources. One place where I’m almost always sure to see a fox is at Mount Harmon Plantation, where I like to walk from time to time. It’s way off the road and it’s not unusual to see a fox standing in the middle of the dirt lane like a sentry. Again, I always consider this to be a token of good luck.

Sometimes on winter nights if I’m out driving late and the headlights sweep over a big empty field, I will pick out a fox prowling the countryside. Again, the sight of that resilient fox is reassuring.

When I was a kid on the farm, foxes were usually seen as the enemy. Sometimes they would threaten the chickens. For a long time, there was even a fox who would set up shop on the hill overlooking the farmhouse and tease our large dog, who was tied up in the yard. The fox was thumbing his nose at the dog, which just goes to show that the fox was clever enough to know when the dog was tied up. There are still plenty of foxes around on the farm. The last time I stayed there before this pandemic mess, I woke up early and saw one trotting down the lane on some morning mission. That was better than a cup of coffee to start the day.

I don’t much have to worry about the fox raiding the laptop the way that he raided the henhouse all those years ago. To me, the sight of a fox is a symbol of wildness that always gives me a thrill.

The following article appears in The Big Thrill:

By David Healey

Former Weather Channel senior meteorologist H. W. “Buzz” Bernard is best known for his thrillers related to weather disasters and other natural phenomena. This time around, he has turned his attention to the skies in a new way, writing about a World War II bombing raid in his new historical thriller, WHEN HEROES FLEW.

The novel tells the story of Operation Tidal Wave on August 1, 1943, when more than 100 Allied bombers lifted off from a desert airfield to attack oil refineries in southern Romania, which was then an important oil-producing center for Germany. The raid required a flight of around 1,000 miles while passing over the width of the entire Mediterranean—in itself quite a feat given the technology available almost 80 years ago.

Although the raid was deemed a military success, the cost was great, with nearly half of the planes lost along with their crews, and more than 300 killed on the ground.

In the pages of the novel, Bernard has humanized the story of this remarkable raid.

“I want readers to be in awe of the extraordinary valor and courage exhibited by the Greatest Generation—when they were mere young men and women—in the face of prohibitive odds as they mounted an air attack on Nazi oil facilities in Romania during WWII,” he tells The Big Thrill. “In the particular bombing raid featured in this book, there were five Medals of Honor awarded, the most ever for a single action on a single day. Of the 178 B-24 bombers that launched out of Libya to strike the target, only half made it back in the immediate aftermath of the raid.”

Bernard notes the “absolute bravery and courage” of these young aviators, who knew they probably wouldn’t be coming back. “They knew the odds of survival were virtually nil,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine being a young man and being willing to sacrifice your life. It just boggles my mind.”

The novel focuses on a single crew aboard a bomber nicknamed “Oregon Grinder.” The genesis for the novel was a short story that received accolades in an international competition.

“That was the story that the novel grew from,” Bernard notes. “I wanted to try to tell the story from the viewpoint of a single (American) crew and one (German) fighter pilot.”

The focus on the German Luftwaffe pilot helps to give a very human portrait of the opposition. “I can tell you that while the Luftwaffe was dedicated to defeating the enemy, the Allies, many Luftwaffe officers were not Nazis and lived by their own code of honor, not that of the Nazis,” he says.

Part of Bernard’s insight into the Luftwaffe character came from his own time spent in Germany—and from his late wife, Christina, who was born there: “The stories that my wife told me about growing up in Germany during the war gave me something else that I could craft a story around.”

For readers, something else that makes WHEN HEROES FLEW stand out is the attention to detail regarding the planes themselves, and what it was like to fly one.

Bernard gleaned some air combat experiences from friends who flew fighters in Vietnam, where he did two tours of duty as part of his 30-year military career. He eventually retired as an Air Force colonel. Although he describes his role as “support,” he says that being around aviators for so many years has helped to inform his fiction. In fact, some readers mistakenly believe he is a pilot because of the aviation details.

Although Bernard has not been at the controls of a plane, he has flown as a meteorologist on a “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft. For his research into WHEN HEROES FLEW, he did take a trip on a WWII-era B-24 in the skies over South Carolina. He says the experience was not only amazing, but helped him as a writer to get the smells, sounds, and sights just right.

“I do try to get it technically correct,” he says, explaining that he has pilot friends vet those details. “I want it to be real.”

Anyone who has toured a WWII-era plane is immediately struck by the sometimes-rudimentary construction and controls. Today, many passenger jets are essentially flown by a computer, but that wasn’t the case in 1943.

“In those days, everything was very manual,” Bernard notes. There was a compass, for example, but no GPS to give instant positioning. In the raid, the planes skimmed the ground rather than conduct the high-altitude bombing that they were designed for. “A lot of this stuff turned out to be seat of the pants.”

The visit to the past in his fiction is definitely a change of pace for Bernard, and he has decided he might stay there for a while as a writer.

“Once I got into the history, I found it really did interest me a lot,” he says. He has already started writing another WWII novel, this one set in the Pacific.

Like many of us with relatives, friends, or neighbors who lived through WWII, Bernard allows that he sometimes regrets the lost opportunity that their stories could have brought to our writing—if only he had taken the time to hear them. Like hundreds of thousands of young men and women of the Greatest Generation who were in uniform, his own father served in the Navy during WWII.

“I wish I knew I was going to become a writer years ago,” he says. For example, a friend’s father from Germany once surprised Bernard with his flawless English… until he explained that he had been a POW in Texas. Wouldn’t that have been a great perspective to include?

After an accomplished career—actually several different careers as military officer, professional meteorologist, and author—the 79-year-old Georgia resident said he had been considering retiring from writing, but has found that the historical subject matter gives him renewed interest in telling the stories of those who have come before.

“It was something I just felt a calling to do,” he says.

Support our local bookstores through this time

Our local bookstores and shops have been so supportive of me in my 20 years of selling books. My heart goes out to the many small businesses and shops that are doing their part by closing their doors. You can imagine how difficult it is to suddenly stop your income. Shops may be trying to support longtime employees in some way. The rent/mortgage/utility bills are still due. While their physical doors are shut for now, many shops are still selling online. If you need a book or something unique, please knock on their virtual door!

Washington Street Books & Music • Havre de Grace

http://washingtonstreetbooksandmusic.com

Old Gray Mare • Chesapeake City

Lighthouse Gifts • Chesapeake City

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The Bookplate • Chestertown

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Kathy’s Corner Shop • North East

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Browseabout Books • Rehoboth Beach

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