Article 15

Article 15

by M.T. Bass

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GENRE:   Mystery

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BLURB:

“She was one in a million…and the day I met her I should have bought a lottery ticket instead.”

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Griffith Crowe, the "fixer" for a Chicago law firm, falls for his current assignment, Helena Nicholson, the beautiful heir of a Tech Sector venture capitalist who perished in a helicopter crash leaving her half a billion dollars, a Learjet 31, and unsavory suspicions about her father's death. As he investigates, the ex-Navy SEAL crosses swords with Helena’s step-brother, the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, and an All-Star bad guy somebody has hired to stop him. When Griff finds himself on the wrong side of an arrest warrant he wonders: Is he a player or being played?


Lawyers and Lovers and Guns…Oh, my!

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EXCERPT:

She was one in a million…and the day I met her I should have bought a lottery ticket instead.

Blonde, slim and well-built, of course, her eyes were darkly blue which, when unsheathed from behind her Jackie Ohhs, glinted like gun metal at twilight.

I noticed when we first met.

I ignored it after the first time we made love.

I caught it again as she testified against me.

I suppose, I’ll just never learn.

A Word With the Author:

Did you always want to be an author?

Not really. I mean not for a long while anyway.  You know, when I was a kid I was too busy being a kid, riding my bike, playing sandlot baseball and exploring the woods at the very fringes of suburbia—all unsupervised I’ll have you know—to see myself on a dust jacket. I’d fantasize about being a football hero or race car driver or a rockstar, maybe. Even when I got to college and moved into the English Department, I was really angling to be a better songwriter, working mainly in verse. Finally, when I was parked out in Colorado I had an idea for a book that I put to paper. Then another. And another. I suppose at that point I started seeing myself as an “author.” Maybe.  But it wasn’t until I had started scribbling things down and actually having a book to sell. Like William Faulkner says, “Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.”

Tell us about the publication of your first book.

When I moved back to Ohio from Colorado I had three and a half completed novels. By that time I had collected enough rejection slips to wallpaper a decent size family room—and not just from any old publishing houses. I was turned down by all the best and some of the not so best. Then eBooks were invented and I got one of the very first Sony Readers. Soon after, I found out about Smashwords and thought, “Hmmm, this could work out for me.” I did some serious study of the book covers of my favorite authors, like Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen and Joseph Heller; figured out what I wanted, then pulled the trigger and sent My Brother’s Keeper out into the world. Shortly after that I published Crossroads—which, by the way, is the very first novel with a soundtrack. I had labored for a while at the phone company supervising the Text Editing Center for prepping their manuals for print, so I was familiar with typesetting. Making the move to print wasn’t such a big deal for me and I got My Brother’s Keeper into paperback with IngramSpark. Then I just kept piling up more and more words into more and more books.

Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

One of the huge benefits of eBooks is that I was able to get back into my old habit of reading two or three books at the same time without putting a serious strain my my back muscles from carrying around bricks of paper. So, I went from a trickle of books to a steady stream and I’ve read so many great novels by some amazing authors like William Conescu, Jay Spencer Green, Caihm McDonnell, and Christopher Moore. But the guy I keep coming back to is Carl Hiaasen. To me, Tourist Season is just the best. And whenever a new one comes out from him, I’m there.

What's the best part of being an author? The worst?

First of all, there just is no worst part about being a writer.  You get to make it all up. And if it’s not right, well then, come on, you just make up more stuff.  The best part is always ripping open the box from IngramSpark and holding the finished product in print. I don’t care that hundreds or thousands of eBooks get bought for every print book I sell. There’s something about having your book in print that is simply magic.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel called Jungleland. Remember that first book of mine, My Brother’s Keeper?  It’s the long, long, long planned sequel. I always intended Hawk to be kind of an airport gigolo, who wanders aimlessly around from airport to airport having different flying adventures along the way. Needless to say, I got distracted by shiny things all literary and such, but I’ve finally gotten back to it. At the end of the first book he goes to Alaska to start a bush pilot operation. But I wrote Somethin’ for Nothin’ which has a similar kind of theme, so I skipped ahead to the 1960s where he finds himself in Congo, fighting in their civil war with the CIA, their Bay of Pigs leftover pilots and Mad Mike’s South African mercenaries.  Did I mention there’s a woman involved, too? There always is, isn’t there. 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

M.T. Bass is a scribbler of fiction who holds fast to the notion that while victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. He lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, USA.

Born in Athens, Ohio, M.T. Bass grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, majoring in English and Philosophy, then worked in the private sector (where they expect “results”) mainly in the Aerospace & Defense manufacturing market. During those years, Bass continued to write fiction. He is the author of eight novels: My Brother’s Keeper, Crossroads, In the Black, Somethin’ for Nothin’, Murder by Munchausen, The Darknet (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #2), The Invisible Mind (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #3) and Article 15. His writing spans various genres, including Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Black Comedy and TechnoThrillers. A Commercial Pilot and Certified Flight Instructor, airplanes and pilots are featured in many of his stories. Bass currently lives on the shores of Lake Erie near Lorain, Ohio.

M.T. Bass Author Links

Website:  https://www.mtbass.net

Blog:  https://www.owl-works.com

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/owlworks/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Owlworks

Amazon Author Page:  http://www.amazon.com/author/mtbass

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5270962.M_T_Bass

Article 15 Purchase Links

Author Web Site Info Page: https://mtbassauthor.wordpress.com/scribblings/article-15-griffith-crowe-1/

Amazon:  TBA July 24, 2019

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/article-15-a-griffith-crowe-adventure/id1444570485?mt=11

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/article-15-mt-bass/1129939582?ean=2940155886839

Kobo:  TBA

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/908763

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:

M.T. Bass will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway