Reading

“Mandate of Heaven” is now an audiobook, and it’s FREE!

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

Whether you’ve already read the adventures of treasure hunter Ethan Chase or if you’re new to this series, the good people over at Chirp books have a fantastic audiobook deal for you!

Mandate of Heaven, the first Ethan Chase adventure, can now be downloaded from Chirp books for precisely zero dollars and zero cents. Just click here to see this freebie for yourself!

What’s more, if you download this first audiobook, you can get the rest of the series, Solomon’s Fortune and Gold of the Jaguar, for only 99¢ apiece now through Monday!

That’s three audiobooks for just $1.98, less than the cost of the delicious Double Stacked Taco from Taco Bell that I am enjoying at this very moment (no, this post is not sponsored by Taco Bell but if a corporate representative from Taco Bell is reading this and wants to hook up a partnership, my email inbox is always open).

So if you, your sister, your best friend, college history professor, favorite nephew, congressman, or even your mailman are hankering for a good ol’ fashioned, Indiana Jones-esque adventure story, go to Chirp books now or share the link and join Ethan Chase on a globetrotting journey for a legendary treasure!

Book Review: “For the Sins of my Father” by Albert DeMeo

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

In the course of my deep dive into the history of the American Mafia, one particularly infamous member of the Mafia drew my attention: Roy DeMeo. A notorious hitman loyal to Paul Castellano, he and his crew are suspected of as many as 200 murders. They became so proficient at murdering victims and disposing of bodies that their modus operandi became known as ‘the Gemini Method’, named after the lounge that served as their headquarters.

As it turns out, DeMeo had a son and he has written a book about life with his father. He never tries to excuse his father’s actions or deny who he was. His goal with his book is to simply give the second side of the story. Yes, Roy DeMeo was a monster but, in the author’s words, for 23 hours out of every day, he was a loving father who took care of his family.

The early scenes of the book were the most interesting to me. Albert recounts how, as a young boy, he knew that everyone seemed to admire and respect his father, yet he had no idea what his dad did for a living. He carried a gun but wasn’t a cop. He carried lots of cash around but wasn’t a banker. He did know that his father owned a car dealership but was never there. So that was the story he told whenever some kid or teacher asked what his father did.

As he got to about 8 years old, Albert’s father made no effort to hide his vocation from his only son. Roy was grooming his son to follow his same path one day. This also struck me as interesting as in other books I’ve read about the Mafia, it seems there’s a bit of a split over whether children should be brought up into the ‘Family’. Some mafiosi don’t want their children living the same dangerous lifestyle as them while others believe that to not bring your children into the life of crime is a tacit admission that what they are doing is wrong and unacceptable.

Albert recounts two particular stories that clearly scarred him more than others. In one, as a ten year old he was relaxing with his father and his friends at one of their safehouses. His father left a revolver on the table next to Albert and walked into the next room. Suddenly a masked man burst into the apartment with a gun and pointed it at one of Roy’s friends. Terrified and confused, Albert snatched up the revolver, aimed at the intruder, and pulled the trigger.

Click.

The gun was empty. The intruder pulled off a mask to reveal himself as one of Roy’s friends. His father had set the whole thing up, staging a break in and leaving an unloaded gun with his ten year old son to see if he’d do the ‘right’ thing, that is to pull the trigger on somebody. Roy and the crew cheered for Albert, but Albert recounts how violently sick he felt.

The second formative event came later as an older teenager. His father would occasionally send him to collect money he was owed from some of his illicit business partners. One was a brothel, one that catered to particularly sick, sordid customers. Without getting into details, Albert recounts how the smells and sights of that building have stuck with him his entire life. When he finally got out with the money, he ran home, threw his clothes into the trash, and sat in the shower just crying.

For the Sins of my Father is a tough read at times. As both a son and father myself it’s horrifying to put myself into Albert’s shoes. I can’t even imagine growing up in such a lifestyle, nor could I imagine sending my son into such despicable places, putting him through diabolical tests of loyalty.

Eventually, Roy DeMeo is gunned down. After he and his crew caught too much heat from law enforcement, it was decided by the Commission that Roy needed to be ‘whacked’. According to Albert, his father knew it was coming and went willingly to a meeting that he knew would end with his murder. It’s impossible to know how true that is, but it’s what Albert believes.

The last 30% of the book or so is how Albert’s life spiraled out of control after his father’s death. Despite everything he knew about Roy’s criminal business, he loved the man and the man loved him. If only half of what Albert says is true, then Roy DeMeo was certainly a good father in terms of providing for and showing love to his children. Things got worse and worse for Albert until he eventually attempted suicide, more than once.

Mercifully, he finally found the strength to get help for himself and by all accounts is now leading a normal, healthy life.

All in all, I’m glad I read this book. For all the outsider perspectives and opinions about the Mafia that I’ve consumed, getting an insider’s glimpse was both fascinating and heartbreaking. I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in the American Mafia or the life of crime in general.

Book Review: The Five Families by Selwyn Raab

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

Longtime readers of this blog may know that I’m something of a history buff. The thing about me, though, is that I don’t want to be an expert on just one thing or one field. I want to know everything. Literally every topic, area, or time period of human history, I want to know about it. I will say that the US Civil War is probably my area of expertise but even then there’s so much more that I could read about that conflict.

Instead, I tend to roam the historical wilds. I look to my left and right and whatever catches my eye, that’s the direction I go. Around last November, it was the American Mafia that consumed my attention. I watched that ‘Gotti’ special on Netflix, then ‘Fear City: New York vs the Mob’, and finally “The Irishman”, a historical fiction film about the Mafia produced and directed by Martin Scorsese.

After all this viewing, I decided I also wanted to read a book about all that. I can’t speak for everyone, but I feel like I can only gain so much knowledge from the TV medium. Reading about something, seeing physical words on the page, helps me retain knowledge much better. So, I went straight to one of the authorities on the American Mafia: Selwyn Raab. Raab is a reporter who has covered the mafia for decades for The New York Times and is considered a living legend among people who have taken on the mob.

It was a fascinating book, and the 800 pages seemed to fly by. Raab rights about a serious topic with the flare and panache of the best novelists. He puts you in the jury box as mob lawyers and public servants wage war in the courtroom. He places you at the scenes of the most heinous murders imaginable, like when mob boss Albert Anastasia was shot to death as he reclined in a barber’s chair with a towel over his face, or when Dutch Schultz murdered his closest lieutenant by encasing his feet in cement and dropping him into the East River. He shows you the backroom business deals and how easily labor unions become huge money-making rackets for the Mafia.

The history in this book spans well over a century, from the birth of the Sicilian mafia in the mid-19th century, its emigration into America following the crackdowns by Benito Mussolini, the mob’s golden age in the New World, and finally with its seeming downfall in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

I say ‘seeming’ because the mob unfortunately is on the rise again, according to Raab. Many politicians, law enforcement agencies, and investigators believed that the conviction of John Gotti, followed by a few other high-profile indictments, had permanently chopped the head off the snake, and for a while they were right. They had the mob on the ropes, but the mob gained a reprieve in 2001. After the September 11th terror attacks, everyone forgot about the mob. All the time, money, and assets that the FBI and other agencies had in place to catch gangsters was reassigned to tracking down Al-Qaeda operatives.

The Mafia saw their opportunity and took it, and Raab fears that they are as strong as ever, especially with the new revenue streams they’ve gained through the internet and sports gambling.

If you want to learn more about the American Mafia, I can point you to no finer source than The Five Families by Selwyn Raab. It’s a hefty tome, make no mistake about that, but it’s size should only make it more enticing.

Book Review: ‘Shadow Prowler’ by Alexey Pehov

/ Peter Martuneac / 1 Comment

When I was deployed to Afghanistan many years ago, we would routinely receive care packages from businesses, churches, and charity organizations, packages containing myriad items. New socks, snack, and sometimes even books. As a voracious reader since childhood, I always appreciated the assortment of books. I had my Barnes & Noble Nook loaded with some of my favorites, but sometimes I wanted to read something new.

One book I’d picked up was a fantasy story, the first of a planned trilogy, written by some Russian author. I remember enjoying it and planning to get the rest of the books in the series when I returned to America. However, the months passed, the book series faded from memory, and by the time I remembered there was a book I’d really enjoyed, I could no longer remember the name of it or even the name of the author. Even Google searches of Russian fantasy authors were mostly unhelpful. The only thing I remembered for sure was that the protagonist was some kind of rogue, and that in this world the dwarves were all beardless, a significant departure from standard fantasy fare.

Finally, 10 years later I found it! Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov. I got the book for Christmas and dived right in, hoping that it would be as good as I remembered. Much to my delight, it was.

The plot is pretty typical for the genre. A nefarious, ancient evil referred to only as ‘The Nameless One’ is brooding far away, biding its time until it can unleash its full power on the kingdoms of men and elves who defeated him once before. In his service are vast hordes of orcs, corrupted men, and wicked shamans. The only thing keeping him locked away behind mountains of ice and snow is the Rainbow Horn, the most powerful magical artifact in the all the world, created long ago by the greatest shamans of the ogres.

The problem? It’s weakening, and that’s where the protagonist, master thief Shadow Harold comes in.

The pacing of the story is interesting. While the world of men is in mortal danger, the protagonists aren’t exactly rushing into action. They do have time to complete their mission of retrieving the Rainbow Horn, but they’ll only get one shot at it so they need to be prepared. And before Harold can even depart on this quest, he has a shadowy demon dogging him, and he has to deal with that. There’s also a mysterious magician known only as The Master, who is either working for The Nameless One or against the men and elves. Either way, he’s bad news.

As for the world itself, it’s a very unique world for a fantasy story. As aforementioned, the dwarves here are beardless and are proud of it. The reason being their ancient and hated rivals, the gnomes, grow beards. Goblins are present in the story too but are not bad guys. In fact, they are a formerly oppressed race, nearly driven to extinction by men and elves who believed them to be no different than orcs when in fact they tend to be good and fair.

Speaking of elves, they are fascinating in this world. Instead of the wise, restrained, angel-adjacent type of elves normally seen in fantasy, elves in Shadow Prowler are a bit terrifying. Their eyes shimmer with gold, they have razor-sharp fangs, and they are famous for bad tempers. A passing insult from a non-elf can expect to be returned in the form of an elven blade pressed against one’s throat.

So while the plot is pretty typical, the world itself feels different, which is good as far as I’m concerned.

One negative that I’ll bring up is sometimes the writing feels a little choppy. It’s told in first-person present, through the eyes of Shadow Harold, and sometimes the dialogue or his inner thoughts don’t seem to flow very well. However, I’m inclined to believe this is the result of a book being translated from Russian to English. I’m sure there are Russian phrases or sentence constructions that are perfectly good in their own language that just don’t hit the same when translated to English.

I highly recommend this one to any and all fans of fantasy. I’ll be ordering the rest of the books in this series soon and can’t wait to see where the story goes next.

Another Ethan Chase Adventure?

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

When I was first in contract talks with my publisher, Evolved Publishing, I was asked how many books would be in my Ethan Chase series. I told them three for sure, but I was uncertain after that. They ended up asking me to try for four, but not requiring the fourth book, which I appreciated.

So since the publication of Gold of the Jaguar, I’ve been planning and plotting a potential fourth adventure. Truth be told, I was 90% against the idea to begin with. If you’ve read Gold of the Jaguar, which you can find on Amazon at the link above, then you know that Ethan’s story seems to have been wrapped up and tied with a pretty bow.

However, when I published my first ever novel, His Name Was Zach, back in 2019, I thought that that too had been tied up with a pretty bow and would be a standalone work. I ended up writing two sequels, a short story prequel, and a serialized prequel on Kindle Vella. So I’ve given the idea of a fourth book considerable thought.

Now, over the last month, I’ve also given it some serious writing. I finally had a decent enough idea of how to draw Ethan back into an adventure that he had sworn off not once but twice already. One that I not only enjoyed but felt like it necessarily advanced the series. The last thing I wanted was a blatant ‘money-grab’ of a book, something that is forced and unnecessary for the world in which the books and characters exist. If I was going to write a fourth book, then it had to feel like a natural progression of the story.

Last week, I finally hit on the big idea that could plausibly draw all the main characters back into a treasure hunt, and I went from just a 2,000 word intro to now a working first draft that so far stands at 8,000 words. I’m starting to get really excited for this one, and I’m already seeing betrayals, conflicted loyalties, and maybe even an ‘enemies to lovers’ subplot. Nothing is certain right now, but the draft is full of potential, and that’s the beauty and the fun of writing something new!

However, the framework in my mind is still very loose. I’ve broken my one rule of writing: never start a book until you have the ending finalized. I currently have no idea how this work-in-progress will end, if I choose to take it to the end. I’m in uncharted waters with this one. I don’t even know what treasure will be at the center of it all.

There’s a lot of work still to do before I can call this a true manuscript, and I might just end up trashing it all and leaving the series at three books. I will not put out a story that I do not love, that I do not believe in, that much you can count on.

So that’s the exciting new news for me! I will keep you all updated if the story continues to progress. In the meantime, you can find my previous works in the hyperlinks above, either my self-published zombie-pocalypse novels or my Ethan Chase adventure series published through Evolved Publishing. And as always, thank you for reading!