OATH TO DEFEND

Mystery & Thrillers

By Scott Matthews

Publisher : Guardsman Publishing, LLC

ABOUT Scott Matthews

Scott Matthews
  The author is an attorney and was a JAG officer and chemical warfare specialist in the Army. He lives in Oregon with his wife and family, and enjoys a good book, good wine, University of Oregon football and following Formula One racing.

Description

When the trail of America’s most wanted terrorist goes cold in Tijuana, and radiation from a nuclear device is detected in San Diego, one man has a hunch the hunted terrorist and the nuke are connected, and will ultimately wind up in the same place.

Adam Drake thinks he knows where that place is. The only question is whether he can find them both in time to prevent an unimaginable catastrophe.

A couple of years ago, the local newspaper in my city ran a story after the Tsunami in Japan that a dam failure in the mountains above would be worse than the catastrophe in Japan. A wall of water would rush down and flood the valley below and reach to the fifth floor of our largest hospital. After two public hearings the story was forgotten because the odds of such a natural disaster occurring were small. The odds of a man-made disaster occurring in our age of terrorism, I thought, were a lot higher. It was a threat I knew I had to write about.

Oath to Defend is a compulsively readable thriller right up until the explosive ending. When the Governor called former special ops officer Adam Drake for a favor in Matthews' debut novel, Drake quickly and quietly took down an assassination threat aimed at the Secretary of Homeland Security. But when he found the assassin's list of targets, Drake was forced to confront an even more chilling adversary: David Barak, head of a hidden jihadist cell known as the Brotherhood.

When Drake gets a tip that Barak has business south of the Mexican border, he calls in a security team led by his best friend and heads to Tijuana on his second mission as a troubleshooter for the DHS. When the threat becomes nuclear, a race up the west coast is set in place.

In Oath to Defend, Drake must confront the global threat before it spirals out of control. Before the mission is over he will consider exactly what he is willing to die for-and how much he has to live for.