BooksChatter: ☀ White Death: Alexander Hawke [8.5]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for White Death, a Thriller novella by Ted Bell (28 July 2015, Witness Impulse, 128 pages).

This is the eleventh book in the Alexander Hawke series, which comprises eight novels, one short stories and two novellas - full details of this series are below! Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below.

PREVIEW: Read the first two chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Do follow the tour where you will find other excerpts (☀) and reviews (✍).

Synopsis | Teaser | The Series | About the Author | Tour Stops

Synopsis

Alex Hawke is tracking one of the world’s most powerful villains high in the Swiss Alps.

A powerful Swiss banker is found dead, frozen at the base of a soaring Alp. When a second man, the head of a rival banking empire, is found dead deep inside a mountain cave, MI6 suspects a bizarre conspiracy. Vast sums may have been plundered from the Queen of England’s accounts. The British royal family’s centuries-old Swiss bank holdings are at risk, shaking the foundations of Her Majesty’s government and the monarchy itself.

Sir David Trulove, Chief of British Intelligence (MI6) tasks his most formidable weapon, Alex Hawke, with investigating the horrific murders. In Switzerland, Hawke and Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard are pulled into a tangled web of international intrigue, deceit, and murder. China and Russia are the prime suspects, and these powerful forces will stop at nothing to protect their secrets.

A mysterious figure known as “The Sorcerer” has long been rumored to reside within an impenetrable fortress inside a mountain complex in the Swiss Alps known as “White Death.” Hawke must scale perilous heights and breach the fortifications at the top of the world…and find the Sorcerer-or die trying.

Includes a sneak preview from Patriot, the exhilarating new Alex Hawke adventure.

Teaser: Excerpt

Some climber he’d never know had left him a lifeline. Trying desperately to subdue his mounting panic on the deadliest mountain in the Swiss Alps, Christian was shamelessly grabbing the old rope whenever it was visible, nearly paralyzed with fear. Any slip now would send him plummeting to the bottom of the wall, eight thousand feet of free fall with no chute and no god to save him.

He went higher, foolishly holding his breath to calm an anxiety he’d never known before. He started thinking that his much vaunted confidence had put him up here. And now that the same cocksure attitude he’d always had about life was going to send him to his death. He could almost feel his confidence, long his mainstay, seeping out through his pores.

He went higher, looking for each new shred of frayed rope, literally grasping at straws.

The whole spectrum of the face was in atrocious condition, far worse than he’d expected. It was plastered with rime and loaded with unstable snow. He was shit out of luck. There was nowhere left to go—he saw the rope! He lunged for it and that’s when he made the worst mistake of his short life. He made a single misstep. Both of his two ice axes and the crampons on his boots sheared out of the rotten ice at the same moment.

He found himself airborne, the wind tearing at his clothes as he hurtled downward.

They say time slows down just before you die. That you revisit all the important scenes from your life, like a movie. It’s all bullshit. You fall off a mountain top and three seconds later you’re a bug on the windshield of life…

White Death - available NOW!

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The Series: Alexander Hawke

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

Hawke [1]

While sailing in the Caribbean, young Alex Hawke witnesses an act of unspeakable horror as modern-day pirates brutally murder his parents. It is a tragedy that will haunt him forever and shape his destiny.

As a direct descendant of a legendary English pirate, Lord Alexander Hawke is skilled in the ways of sea combat - and one of Britain's most decorated naval heroes. Now, Hawke returns to the Caribbean on a secret mission for the American government. A highly experimental stealth submarine is missing. She carries forty nuclear warheads, and is believed to be in the hands of an unstable government just ninety miles from the US mainland. In a race against time, Hawke must locate the sub before a strike can be launched against the US - and, after a lifetime of nightmares, finally avenge himself on the mean who slaughtered his family . . . [Published 3 June 2003, 612 pages]

Assassin [2]

A shadowy terrorist kingpin has orchestrated the systematic slaying of American diplomats abroad and, as the death toll mounts, British intelligence agent Alexander Hawke is called upon to avert a cataclysmic attack.

From London to Indonesia, Washington to the Florida Keys, Hawke battles it out against a cunning and ruthless enemy bent on destroying the West - while on a personal level avenging a senseless crime that has left him devastated. [Published 20 July 2004, 596 pages]

Pirate [3]

In this heart-pounding nautical action adventure, intrepid British intelligence operative Alex Hawke must thwart a secret, deadly alliance between China and France before they annihilate everyone and everything in their headlong rush towards world domination.

Aboard the Star of Shanghai in the south of France, an American spy is held captive. He possesses vital, explosive intelligence linking two nations and one horrifying plot. If he is not rescued, he faces certain torture and inevitable death. In Paris, a ruthless descendant of Napoleon has risen to power, hell-bent on restoring France's former glory. His fiery ambitions are cynically stoked by a coterie of cold-blooded Mandarins, plotting behind the gates of Beijing's Forbidden City. Cloaked in secrecy, this unholy alliance devises a twisted global plan, backed by China's growing nuclear arsenal, that will send America and the world to the brink of a gut-wrenching showdown.

British secret agent Alex Hawke must prepare to hurl himself deep into the nightmare visions of madmen. He will need all his strength and courage to defeat this enemy or else forfeit the lives of thousands, including his own, to an axis of evil no historian could ever have predicted. [Published 16 August 2005, 641 pages]

Spy [4]

Sailing up the furthest reaches of the Amazon on assignment for the British Secret Service, Alex Hawke is captured by a brutal tribe of indigenous cannibals. Forced into slave labour, he witnesses the unimaginable: vast armies are being recruited and trained deep within the Amazonian jungle. Possessing weapons only dreamed of by the Western allies, their aim is to launch a vicious jihad that will unite one continent - and destroy another. Somehow Hawke must escape his captors and live to tell the tale.

From black magic, poison-tipped arrows and blowguns to an awesome arsenal of the most advanced military hardware, Hawke faces insurmountable odds as he searches for a river with no name in a quest to seek out and destroy a lawless mastermind who threatens the West's very existence. [Published 15 August 2006, 722 pages]

Tsar [5]

Somewhere in Russia is a man so powerful that no one even knows his name. Yet though he is all but invisible, he is pulling strings - and pulling them hard. For suddenly Russia is a far bigger threat than even the most devoted Cold War warriors ever thought possible. With her finger on the switch to the European economy and her sights on the American jugular, Russia gains a new leader. Not just a president, he has been appointed Tsar, a signal to the world that the old imperial power is back - and plans to have her day.

At the same time, a mysterious killer brutally murders an innocent American family, literally blowing up the small midwestern town in which they lived. Just a taste, according to the new Tsar, of what will happen if America does not step aside in preventing Russia's plans to 'reintegrate' her rogue states.

Onto this nightmarish stage steps special agent extraordinaire Alex Hawke, the only man - both the British and Americans agree - who can stop the madness. [Published 1 January 2008, 721 pages]

Warlord [6]

Counterspy Alexander Hawke races to stop a madman hell-bent on murdering the British royal family in this latest spellbinding action thriller in Ted Bell’s New York Times bestselling series.

Alex Hawke has all but given up on life. The British-American MI6 counterterrorism operative lost the woman he loved almost a year ago and has sought refuge at the bottom of a rum bottle ever since. But late one night at his home on Bermuda, he receives a wake-up call . . . literally.

His Royal Highness Prince Charles, an old friend, desperately needs his help. The prince has discovered a not-so-subtle threat directed toward the British royal family. What’s more, the evidence reveals an ominous connection to Charles’s god-father, Lord Mountbatten—the beloved family patriarch assassinated by an ingeniously designed bomb thirty years before. A shadowy figure from the past has the British crown in his sights, and has proven once before that his warnings are not to be taken lightly. Several clues point to IRA involvement, but the authorities have little to go on and answers are scarce. This is just the call to duty Hawke needs to get back into action—if the madman doesn’t strike first.

Alex Hawke, one of the most dashing and compelling action heroes in all of thriller fiction, faces his most formidable challenge yet in Warlord, a gripping, white-knuckled adventure told with verve and swashbuckling panache by a master of the art. [Published 14 September 2010, 704 pages]

Phantom [7]

Counterspy Alex Hawke must catch a villainous megalomaniac—a man obsessed with horrifying experiments in cyberwarfare—in this mesmerizing new espionage thriller in Ted Bell's New York Times bestselling series

The first and most bizarre event nearly becomes a monumental catastrophe when something goes awry at an American theme park, wreaking havoc on visitors looking for nothing more than a sun-splashed holiday. In a different part of the country, a USAF F-15 pilot, escorting another jet in the skies over the Midwest, inexplicably loses control of his plane, endangering the lives of several people and deeply puzzling those following his mission on the ground. Then, in the misty calm of a coastal California evening, the world's premier scientist on the subject of artificial intelligence gets a strange phone call. When he hangs up, he quietly grabs his coat and leaves for an after-dinner stroll from which he never returns.

It's up to Hawke and the brilliant former inspector Ambrose Congreve to find out what could possibly be happening. But how does one identify—and fight—an enemy one can't see, a real phantom? Even these seasoned operatives are mystified. Is there really such a thing as an ultra-intelligent machine, a cyberweapon that can shift the geopolitical balance of power?

In a hunt that takes him from Palo Alto, California, to the Russian frontier, to Cambridge University and the glistening Mediterranean aboard his newly christened and armed super-yacht Blackhawke, Alex Hawke is joined by the unstoppable Stokely Jones and his ex-CIA buddy Harry Brock as he moves closer to unmasking the scientist behind these extraordinary events, going nose-to-nose with an enemy unlike any he's fought before—and may never again. [Published 20 March 2012, 672 pages]

Crash Dive (Short Story)[7.1]

Ted Bell's first ever e-Book exclusive short story finds Counterspy Alex Hawke in hostile foreign waters, flying at nearly the speed of sound, at an altitude no sane man would dare, piloting an F-16 Viper on a highly covert mission.

His task is simple: enter another nation's airspace undetected, meet a secret contact, and find a way to avert a global war. It will take every skill at his command—but there are few as shrewd and savvy as Alex Hawke. When his plane is discovered by enemy radar, he is forced to improvise—or die trying.

Alex Hawke. Saving the world one bullet at a time.

Includes a 98-page sneak preview from Phantom, the exhilarating, new novel in the Alex Hawke series. [Published 6 March 2012, 116 pages]

What Comes Around (Novella) [7.2]

An esteemed former CIA director dies off the coast of Maine.

Another senior CIA officer is found dead of a "heart attack" in a posh Paris hotel. Counterspy Alex Hawke and his friend Ambrose Congreve think this could be more than coincidence. Hawke discovers that the victims are connected through one man: Spider Hyde, a rogue intelligence officer whose dangerous exploits got him barred from the CIA. Now Spider believes he's been wronged and is out for vengeance-and Alex Hawke is his number-one target.

Hawke's only hope is to lure his deadly enemy into a trap he can't escape-and it's a place Hawke knows better than anyone: his seaside home in Bermuda. [Published 26 November 2013, 208 pages]

Warriors [8]

Five years ago a brilliant American scientist, well known in high-tech military circles, suddenly disappeared without a trace off the streets of Washington, DC.

Now a professor at Cambridge University is murdered, a victim of bizarre, ancient Chinese torture methods. Counterspy Alex Hawke teams with former Scotland Yard chief inspector Ambrose Congreve to find the killer, but they soon discover that this death is merely the opening gambit in a tense and lethal game of geopolitical brinkmanship.

In the United States, the president is behaving erratically and some begin to question his fitness for leadership as hostile exchanges and new technologies ramp up tensions between China, North Korea, and the United States—threatening western military superiority.

With the situation edging closer and closer to the abyss, Hawke must face down a superb Chinese assassin and pull off his most daring mission yet: infiltrate enemy territory and neutralize their advantage . . . or risk the outbreak of World War III. [Published 1 January 2014, 592 pages]

Patriot [9]

Available 15 September 2015

Intelligence officer Alex Hawke takes on power-hungry Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is wielding a terrifying new weapon, in the latest adrenaline-fueled thriller in Ted Bell’s New York Times bestselling series.

In corrupt Russia, an erratic Vladimir Putin is determined to forge his country into a formidable superpower once again. He intends to redraw the map of Europe, and will go to impossible extremes to realize his fantasies—including shooting down a civilian airliner packed with tourists bound for China. Kremlin scientists have developed a radical new weapon that could forever alter modern warfare. NATO, locked in a tense standoff over Ukraine, Poland, and Estonia, knows Putin will not hesitate to use it. But there is one man who can bring the world back from the brink: Britain’s foremost intelligence asset, Lord Alexander Hawke.

The intrepid MI6 officer’s latest challenge begins in the Gulf of Aden and soon has him searching for the link to a series of bizarre assassinations. Spies are dying all over the world—from London, Washington, D.C., and Maine, to Moscow, and even the glittering Cote d’Azur. In the murky world of counterterrorism and high-stakes intrigue, the odds have never been higher. Once again, Alex Hawke must save the world . . . one bullet at a time. [Published 15 September 2015, 544 pages]

About the Author

Ted Bell, former Writer-in-Residence, Cambridge University, was Chairman of the board and World-Wide Creative Director of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Hawke, Assasin, Pirate, Spy, Tsar, Warlord and Phantom, along with a series of YA adventure novels.

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