John Corey, the ex-NYPD detective who now works on a government anti-terrorism task force, returns in this exciting and uncomfortably realistic thriller. Bain Madox, a brilliant and probably insane villain, has hatched a fiendishly clever plot to force the U.S. to launch an all-out nuclear attack against the entire Islamic world. It's up to Corey, with the help of his FBI agent wife, to stop Madox before he can detonate nuclear weapons on American soil. Set in 2002, barely a year after 9/11, the novel presents a what-if scenario that's so plausible we have to remind ourselves that DeMille is making the whole thing up. Or is he?

Asad Khalil (aka "The Lion"), the ruthless Libyan terrorist who menaced ex-NYPD cop John Corey in The Lion's Game (2000), returns to the U.S. 18 months after 9/11, bent on finishing old business in DeMille's fast-paced fifth John Corey thriller (after Wild Fire). In Los Angeles, Khalil dispatches the last of the eight American pilots who dropped the bombs that killed Khalil's family in the historic 1986 raid on Tripoli. In New York City, a daring encounter with Corey, a member of the federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, and Corey's FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, who's also a member of the ATTF, sets the stage for the mano-a-mano struggle both Corey and Khalil crave. DeMille splices gripping action scenes with accounts of Khalil's horrifically inventive attacks and the ATTF's futile countermeasures. While Corey isn't much more appealing than his foe, those who enjoy starkly black-and-white battles between good and evil will be satisfied.

John Sutter

*Welcome to the Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world.

When readers left lawyer and freelance gumshoe John Sutter at the end of The Gold Coast (1990), he was a most unhappy man: His wife had been, well, dallying with the Mafia don who had hired him to sort out his taxes, something had gone amiss in the relationship and said wife had filled said don with lead. In the intervening years, it seems, Sutter has sailed around the world with an eye to finding paradise and staying far away from the Long Island shore, winding up in London advising British barristers that "screwing the Internal Revenue Service was an American tradition." Post 9/11, some thought of Americanness has drawn him back, and this being a postmodern era, he has returned to living on the Gold Coast in the estate of his ex, the ever-luscious Susan Stanhope Sutter, who somehow has escaped the justice that would be meted out to us poor folk and instead is having her nails done at liberty. But then life gets complicated, as it does: The don's son and heir, a toughie named Anthony Bellarosa, insinuates himself into Sutter's life to get at Susan, who meanwhile has been visiting Sutter in the gate house at all hours and in all states of dress and undress. The characters are just shy of stock. It's not just that they have more money, but that they really do live like the characters in The Great Gatsby, save here with more guns and considerably more intricate plots involving one another.

Individual Novels

*On a dark road deep inside Russia, a young American tourist picks up a most unusual passenger - a U.S. POW on the run with an incredible secret to reveal to an unsuspecting world. The secret concerns "The Charm School", a vast and astounding KGB conspiracy that stands poised against the very heartland of America.

Arrayed against this renegade power of the Soviet state are three Americans: an Air Force officer, who will fly one last covert mission into the center of a mad experiment; an embassy liaison, who will have her hopes for a saner superpower balance brutally tested; and the chief of the CIA's Moscow station, who will find his intricate dance of destiny and death reaching its devastating conclusion.

Daniel Graham MacCormick—Mac for short—seems to have a pretty good life. At age thirty-five he’s living in Key West, owner of a forty-two-foot charter fishing boat, The Maine. Mac served five years in the Army as an infantry officer with two tours in Afghanistan. He returned with the Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, scars that don’t tan, and a boat with a big bank loan. Truth be told, Mac’s finances are more than a little shaky.

One day, Mac is sitting in the famous Green Parrot Bar in Key West, contemplating his life, and waiting for Carlos, a hotshot Miami lawyer heavily involved with anti-Castro groups. Carlos wants to hire Mac and The Maine for a ten-day fishing tournament to Cuba at the standard rate, but Mac suspects there is more to this and turns it down. The price then goes up to two million dollars, and Mac agrees to hear the deal, and meet Carlos’s clients—a beautiful Cuban-American woman named Sara Ortega, and a mysterious older Cuban exile, Eduardo Valazquez.

What Mac learns is that there is sixty million American dollars hidden in Cuba by Sara’s grandfather when he fled Castro’s revolution. With the “Cuban Thaw” underway between Havana and Washington, Carlos, Eduardo, and Sara know it’s only a matter of time before someone finds the stash—by accident or on purpose. And Mac knows if he accepts this job, he’ll walk away rich…or not at all.