Synopsis:
Famous for his suspenseful fiction that delivers sheer emotional power, David Morrell, the bestselling author of First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fifth Profession, and Assumed Identity, here presents a mesmerizing novel of intrigue and high-action thrills...Fallen star journalist Matt Pittman holds a gun in his hand, ready to commit suicide...until he's abruptly interrupted by a phone call and a bizarre assignment: to write the obituary of a man who is not yet dead. Suddenly, clinging desperately to a life he'd so recently been eager to discard, Matt is thrust into the heart of a global conspiracy whose sinister machinations promise a terrifying endgame. He will find himself both a murder suspect by the police and a target for murder by invisible assassins determined to destroy him. Now Matt Pittman is on a desperate, great final story -- and his last byline may be written on a tombstone.
About the Author:
My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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