Twelve inches of snow blanketed the Washington D.C. area last week on the same day Netflix released the second season of its original television series, House of Cards. The freeze gave everyone a welcomed invitation to stay home and watch multiple episodes of the award winning series.
For those of us who have worked on the Hill ( I covered Congress from 1978 to 1980 as a reporter,) the original TV series is a must watch. While the murders in the series are far-fetched, the Congressional wheeling-and-dealing and back- stabbing often rings true. Many of the scenes are only slightly exaggerated. I write “slightly” because in real life, most of the players are not nearly as clever as their TV counterparts.
The icy snowfall also gave me a chance to catch up on projects that have been on a back-burner. Thanks to my son, Evan, who runs his own website, The Black and Blue, about being a professional camera assistant in the movies, and my youngest daughter, Traci, I’ve finally been able to get four of my earliest books converted into e-books.
Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring; Prophet of Death: The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings; Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life and Justice in a Small Southern Town; and Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames were printed before e-books.
I asked Evan to use his considerable computer skills to convert these four into e-books and Traci to copyedit them. I’m thrilled to be re-introducing them now because each of them tells a story well- worth reading.
Family of Spies, for example, describes one of our nation’s worst spy scandals, but it really tells a bigger story about greed, manipulation, and a dysfunctional American family. It is as interesting today as it was when it hit the New York Times bestseller list in 1990.
The same can be said about Prophet of Death, which recounts how a religious cult leader was able to use his twisted knowledge of scriptures to have sex with his followers and get them to murder a family of five, including three children.
I’m proud of Confessions of a Spy because it contains exclusive interviews with CIA traitor Aldrich Ames who explains in his own words why he betrayed his country. Ames is articulate and chillingly frank. The CIA still refers to this book in many of its training programs.
My newest e-book, Circumstantial Evidence, describes the murder of a white teenager in the same Alabama town that inspired To Kill A Mockingbird. An innocent black man is framed but is rescued — not by a white Atticus Finch — but a brilliant black lawyer who exposes how racism and greed still corrupt our legal process.
Each of these books is about a specific case, but the real and lasting value in them is the portrait that each paints of deeply flawed characters. Like House of Cards, these books describe people who are willing to do anything to get what they want. The difference is that my books are non-fiction, which makes the calculating characters in them even more frightening.
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