The Story Behind This Book
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.
Praise and Reviews
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.
