A Personalized Letter From An Author: The Perfect Holiday Book Gift Is An Email Away

Books by Author Pete Earley

Here’s a chance to receive a personalized letter from an author that can be inserted inside a print edition of the book that you are giving over the holidays or added into a card announcing an ebook purchase.  “To (recipient,) autographed at the request of (Your Name) Best Wishes, Pete Earley” will make one of my books unique as a gift. Purchase a book from your favorite retailer and use the form below on this blog to notify me. Quicker than you can say Ho, Ho Ho, the letter is on its way. But you must fill out the form before December 15th to guarantee delivery and this offer is limited to the first 100 email requests.

Whether you enjoy fiction or non-fiction, there’s a Pete Earley book that will fit on your list. Thank you for your support!

An audio sample of Duplicity, my newest novel.

Sent to inspect a Pakistan prison for human rights violations, NGO Attorney Christopher King encounters a bribe-seeking warden and becomes entrapped in a Taliban attack in this short audio snippet from DUPLICITY, my new action/suspense novel co-authored with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Duplicity

Duplicity by Newt Gingrich and Pete Earley CoverMy newest, DUPLICITY is the first in a two-book series that Speaker Gingrich and I are writing that features two heroic Marines  — Capt. Brooke Grant, a African American military attache, and Sgt. Walks Many Miles, a Crow Indian embassy guard, in a battle against The Falcon, a charismatic terrorist forging an alliance between radical jihadist factions in Africa. It’s been described as a House of Cards and Jason Bourne thriller.

Resilience

Resilience Book CoverIf you prefer non-fiction, consider RESILIENCE: TWO SISTERS AND A STORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS, the autobiography that I helped Jessie Close write about her recovery from mental illness and addictions. Jessie speaks frankly about her bipolar disorder, suicide attempts, failed marriages and the resilience that eventually led to her healing and recovery in this lively, witty and poignant book that includes vignettes by her famous actress sister, Glenn Close.

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From My Files: Books That Influence Our Lives

Books by Pete Earley

Books make popular Christmas gifts, although I’m not sure how you wrap an e-book and put it under your tree.  In April 2010, I asked readers if they had a favorite book in their library that had influenced their thinking. Here’s what I posted. Please share with us the titles of books that you have found significant in your life or books that you have written and want to publicize. Happy reading!

First published April 19, 2010

When I was about fifteen, I read Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham and I was mesmerized. At the time, I was living in a town of a 1,000 residents in western Colorado where my father was a minister. My older sister, Alice, had died in an automobile accident and I was struggling to make sense of that age old question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I don’t remember now how I got my hands on Of Human Bondage or why I started reading it, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down.
For those of you who have never read it, it is perhaps Maugham’s best work. It is the life story of Philip Carey and his search for meaning in life. After Carey’s parents die, he is sent to live with his uncle, a vicar in a small village. The family is extremely religious.
I remember reading the book late into the night, thinking about Philip as if he were a close friend, and then hurrying home after school to discover what was happening to him.

SLY FOX Selling Briskly — A Great Beach Read!

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I mentioned that I’d collaborated with FOX Television’s Judge Jeanine Pirro on a new fiction book entitled SLY FOX: A Dani Fox Novel.

Inspired by criminal cases that Jeanine prosecuted early in her legal career, the book introduces readers to Dani Fox, a young, feisty, female prosecutor in New York during the late 1970s who goes after abusive  husbands and murderers.

Jeanine has been busy promoting SLY FOX this month and reviewers have described it as a great beach read. It is much different from the serious nonfiction topics that interest me and was fun to work on.  I’m about to leave on a much needed beach vacation with my family.

Hopefully, I will see some sun bathers turning the book’s pages during my morning and evening walks in the sand!

 

A Sly Project with Judge Jeanine Pirro

I met  Judge Jeanine Pirro several months ago and she told me that she was looking for someone to help her write a novel about her early days as the first female prosecutor in Westchester County,  just outside of New York City. Shortly after Jeanine was hired in 1978, she created one of the first Domestic Violence Units in

the country. She specialized in prosecuting spousal abuse cases at a time when it was not illegal in some states for a husband to beat his wife. After calling attention to domestic violence, Jeanine targeted pedophiles, by creating the first sting operation in the nation to catch sexual predators. (This was decades before NBC’s Dateline Series: To Catch A Predator.)  Jeanine later was elected the first woman judge in Westchester County and eventually ran unsuccessfully for the New York Attorney General’s job. Since leaving the bench and politics, she has been a regular on television, hosting her own FOX prime time program, Justice With Judge Jeanine.

I was hooked the moment I met Jeanine. She is a smart, no-nonsense, tireless legal champion for underdogs. She also has a great sense of humor and smile. I  liked the idea of fictionalizing actual cases and I especially was interested in helping write a novel grounded in the 1970s about a feisty, female prosecutor.

Jeanine and I quickly came up with a main character — Dani Fox — who is (not surprisingly) a lot like Jeanine. The title of the first book is  SLY FOX , which will debut in July and is now available for order. A second novel, CLEVER FOX, will be published later.

This is not a ghostwritten book where a FOX TV News celebrity simply attaches his/her name to a professionally written novel.  Jeanine selected the cases  and we worked collaboratively on the manuscript with her pouring over every word.  Because Jeanine was so involved, SLY FOX gives readers an intimate and insider’s glimpse at what she experienced as a young prosecutor when women were not welcomed in courtrooms.  The reviews (printed below) have been good.

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Traveling Spy Show Offers Unique Gadgets & My E-Books About U.S. Traitors

Have you ever wondered if those amazing spy gadgets that you’ve seen in James Bond movies are real? Do operatives working for the Brit’s  MI-6, the CIA, and the Russian SVR (formerly known as the KGB) really have access to sleek sports cars with ejecting passenger seats and wristwatches with hidden laser beam torches? 

My friend, H. Keith Melton, owns the largest collection of spy artifacts in the world – more than ten thousand items. Many of the 007 inspired spy gizmos on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. are on loan from his personal collection. 

Melton recently decided to show off some of his most prized items in a traveling exhibit called “Spy: The Secret World of Espionage”  which opened in mid-May in Discovery Times Square in Manhattan.

Featured in his traveling show is the trick umbrella that Bulgarian intelligence operatives used to shoot a pellet that contained ricin into the leg of Georgi Ivanov Markov,  a dissident writer, while he was waiting for a bus in London. The so-called “deadliest poison” known to man was sealed by wax in a tiny pellet and was released when Markov’s body temperature melted the seal.

The traveling collection also contains a CIA manufactured robotic dragonfly, the smallest operational submarine used in World War II, a robot catfish and pigeon made for spying and a pick axe that Soviet Ramon Mercader drove into the skull of Leon Trotsky  in Coyoacan, a borough of Mexico City, in 1940.

When he was preparing the exhibit, which will tour 10 cities during the next several years, Keith asked me if I would share some of the artifacts that I collected while doing research for my books, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring; Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames; and Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War.

 

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What Mental Health Books Helped You?


Each week, I receive books about mental illness from publishers who ask if I would be willing to give their book a plug. I also get requests from individuals who either want to get their books published or have self published their own books and need help publicizing  them.

This week I want to turn the tables.

What books about mental health would you recommend?

Is there a specific book that has helped you personally?

Have you written a book about mental health that you want to plug on my webpage?

Here’s your chance. Don’t be shy. I’ll start.

My friend, Clare Dickens, first published her book, A Dangerous Gift, in Iceland. It’s a moving story about her son’s struggle with bipolar disorder. When the big publishers in New York turned her down, she refused to give up. She kept knocking on doors. Recently, Politics and Prose, the Washington D.C. bookstore, published a U.S. version.  I’m happy that she is telling her story here.

Now tell me about books that helped or matter to you.
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