The Amsterdam Connection

When Bernie Villario, son of a Mafia family based in Connecticut and New York, decides to re-enter the U.S. narcotics market despite the fact that all Mafia families except two have been out of drugs for years, he needs an adequate supply of heroin. This requires convincing a Union Corse family with heroin processing labs in southern France to work with him. Villario selects a highly respected U.C. family and uses a dangerous ploy which threatens to explode into a war between the families. At the same time Villario starts pressuring feisty Tom Matthews and his Tampa-based travel agency. The agency's success is the second piece to Villario's elaborate plan. However, although Matthews refuses to bend even in the face of vicious attacks on his agency and its European tours, he finally realizes that fighting a foe who appears only through a polished intermediary is futile. Frustrated and desperate, Matthews turns to the FBI and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Throughout Villario's attacks, Tom leans more and more on his knowledgeable Hispanic secretary, Maria Escobar, and as the battle moves from Tampa through Europe to the Middle East and back, Maria and he are drawn into an intense, intimate love affair which drives him into decisions he never anticipated.The fast-paced conclusion which involves Matthews, the feds, the Villarios, and the Union Corse is headed toward a disaster of magnificent proportions, especially when Matthews and the feds unknowingly work at cross-purposes.

Dale Soderberg had an artistic mother and a determined father. The result was a creative personality which has led him from organizing and leading his own band while in high school and working as a radio announcer to majoring in English at Gettysburg College and in Systematic Theology at Gettysburg Seminary. While in college he was inspired to begin creative writing by professors who saw the glimmer of talent which was developed by writing sermons, short stories, and novels over a ten year stint in the Lutheran ministry. However, it all came to fruition when he became a high school English teacher who specialized in teaching Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James A. Michener, Nevil Shute and other modern authors. His first novel, published in 1980, was an adventure/thriller built around the 1967 Israeli/Arab war. Since then writing has been a daily discipline.Among other creative pursuits, he originated, organized, and directed tours to Europe, the Middle East, and Lutheran mission fields in Guyana, Liberia, Tanzania, and India, many lands that have provided settings for his writing. An avid photographer, he succeeded in taking a picture of the Taj Mahal which was chosen by Holiday magazine in 1960 as the 'Picture of the Month'. Early in his teaching career he decided that if one was to teach Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, it was imperative that he know something about the Feria of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. Although he has never run with the bulls, he has watched the running during seven fiestas and become an American aficionado of the bullfight aided by his friendship with many English aficionados who know exactly what a proper bullfight should be.Once retired he and his wife, Marjorie, were able to expand their activities to include working in Yellowstone National Park in 1993 and serving as volunteer missionaries in Papua New Guinea where he taught at the University's Teachers College at Goroka in the Eastern Highlands Province. Before and after they