Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for The Good Traitor, a Espionage Thriller by Ryan Quinn (5 April 2016, Thomas & Mercer, 336 pages). This is the second book in the Kera Mersal Thrillers series.
The first instalment, End of Secrets, is currently on sale for only $1.99 on Amazon.com!
Don't miss our interview with author Ryan Quinn.PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first three chapters with Amazon Look Inside.
The Good Traitor is FREE on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.
Author Ryan Quinn will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour, as well as one ebook or print copy of The Good Traitor to one of our readers.
Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍).
Synopsis | Watch: My Book in 15 Seconds | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaways & Tour Stops
Synopsis
The US ambassador to China is killed in a suspicious plane crash just days after a news article links Chinese spies to US business interests. The American intelligence community is left scrambling to investigate possible connections between the crash and a series of other high-profile deaths.On the other side of the world, ex-CIA operative Kera Mersal returns to the United States determined to clear her name after being branded a traitor for exposing illegal government surveillance. There, former colleague and fellow fugitive J. D. Jones contacts her with a new assignment: find out who is staging accidents to murder news sources. As the news site continues to publish stories about top-secret CIA programs and Chinese government corruption, Mersal reunites with old allies to uncover the truth and prove her loyalty to her country once and for all. But Mersal’s investigations put her on the trail of a sinister hacker whose own motives may influence a vaster—and more deadly—geopolitical conspiracy than either of the world’s two largest superpowers is prepared to handle.
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Teaser: Excerpt
from Chapter 1
Amid the rigged chess game that shuffled fuselages around the tarmac of Pudong International Airport, a sleek Gulfstream G450 taxied from a private terminal and slipped into position behind a line of wide-body commercial jets. Overhead, the last daylight drained from the waiting sky. Inside the glowing porthole window over the G450’ s wing sat Greg Rodgers, United States ambassador to China. Graying but still handsome and healthy, Rodgers had eyes that were steady with the patience of a family man, which he was, and lit by the incurable curiosity of an academic, which he’d been before the presidential appointment that had moved him and his wife, Wendy, from New Haven to Beijing. Their two grown sons remained in the States, though they visited often with the diplomat’s daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.
During his ambassadorship, now on the eve of its sixth year, travel for Rodgers rarely involved more than a traffic-choked ride in one of the drab diplomatic vehicles that shuttled the ambassador and his security detail around the capital city. But a recent spate of multination trade talks had forced him to the sky, where he’d been wearing out the airways between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
This particular trip was exceptional for its incorporation of the private jet, which belonged to a wealthy Chinese investor named Hu Lan. Rodgers’s first instinct had been to decline Hu’s offer to lend him the Gulfstream for the weekend. Posted to a country where hundreds of millions of citizens lived in abject poverty, Rodgers was not the sort of man who felt comfortable indulging in luxury. But Hu was on the list of Chinese politicians and businessmen with whom Rodgers was encouraged to form ties. This was an actual list— classified and delivered to him weekly in encrypted cables from the State Department in DC. Some of the names on this list had obvious diplomatic value; others didn’t. Rodgers suspected the latter were placed there by the Central Intelligence Agency. Hu Lan was almost certainly one of the CIA additions.
Aside from reluctantly agreeing to borrow the Chinese businessman’s private jet, Rodgers had not given Hu a second thought— until the previous day, when a story had rippled through the international news media that made the trip on Hu’s jet more awkward than it had been already. The story originated on the news website Gnos.is and was quickly confirmed by other reputable news organizations. This Gnos.is-led wave of disruptive news stories was starting to feel like the new norm. Gnos.is’s reportage was thorough and apolitical, and Rodgers had to admit that on many occasions he’d found the site a valuable resource. But Gnos.is— which, instead of relying on the labor of individual journalists, vacuumed up massive amounts of online data and applied algorithms to sort fact from rumor and even to generate the actual text of articles— had a habit of publishing details that caused headaches for diplomats like Rodgers, whose job relied on state secrets remaining secret. While this particular story didn’t cause embarrassment for the US government, it nonetheless promised to complicate Rodgers’s life. The Gnos.is scoop was that Hu Lan’s majority stake in an American telecom company called InspiraCom had been funded by the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent to the CIA.
The news story proved Rodgers’s instinct right: Hu’s hospitality would amount to more trouble than it was worth. But that changed nothing. He confirmed that Hu was still on the State Department/ CIA list, and then he and his staff climbed aboard the plush little jet and pretended to be grateful for the ride, sipping glasses of wine and avoiding discussing anything they wouldn’t have said aloud in the presence of a Chinese MSS officer.
Owning a business jet was a hot trend among the Chinese elite, who imported them from the United States and Europe by the hundreds annually. With an operating cost of $ 10,000 per flight, the small luxury aircraft were by all appearances impractical. But the motives behind keeping up appearances are often exactly that. If Hu Lan wanted to spend $ 10,000 per flight to whisk Rodgers to Shanghai and back as a symbol of China’s ascension in the global economy, who was Rodgers to decline? Diplomacy, he’d discovered, required not only a clear knowledge of one’s principles but also a willingness to go along with almost anything that didn’t violate them outright. Despite his personal discomfort, he had no political principle against riding in a private jet. At least the G450 was American made.
SHANGHAI
Amid the rigged chess game that shuffled fuselages around the tarmac of Pudong International Airport, a sleek Gulfstream G450 taxied from a private terminal and slipped into position behind a line of wide-body commercial jets. Overhead, the last daylight drained from the waiting sky. Inside the glowing porthole window over the G450’ s wing sat Greg Rodgers, United States ambassador to China. Graying but still handsome and healthy, Rodgers had eyes that were steady with the patience of a family man, which he was, and lit by the incurable curiosity of an academic, which he’d been before the presidential appointment that had moved him and his wife, Wendy, from New Haven to Beijing. Their two grown sons remained in the States, though they visited often with the diplomat’s daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.
During his ambassadorship, now on the eve of its sixth year, travel for Rodgers rarely involved more than a traffic-choked ride in one of the drab diplomatic vehicles that shuttled the ambassador and his security detail around the capital city. But a recent spate of multination trade talks had forced him to the sky, where he’d been wearing out the airways between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
This particular trip was exceptional for its incorporation of the private jet, which belonged to a wealthy Chinese investor named Hu Lan. Rodgers’s first instinct had been to decline Hu’s offer to lend him the Gulfstream for the weekend. Posted to a country where hundreds of millions of citizens lived in abject poverty, Rodgers was not the sort of man who felt comfortable indulging in luxury. But Hu was on the list of Chinese politicians and businessmen with whom Rodgers was encouraged to form ties. This was an actual list— classified and delivered to him weekly in encrypted cables from the State Department in DC. Some of the names on this list had obvious diplomatic value; others didn’t. Rodgers suspected the latter were placed there by the Central Intelligence Agency. Hu Lan was almost certainly one of the CIA additions.
Aside from reluctantly agreeing to borrow the Chinese businessman’s private jet, Rodgers had not given Hu a second thought— until the previous day, when a story had rippled through the international news media that made the trip on Hu’s jet more awkward than it had been already. The story originated on the news website Gnos.is and was quickly confirmed by other reputable news organizations. This Gnos.is-led wave of disruptive news stories was starting to feel like the new norm. Gnos.is’s reportage was thorough and apolitical, and Rodgers had to admit that on many occasions he’d found the site a valuable resource. But Gnos.is— which, instead of relying on the labor of individual journalists, vacuumed up massive amounts of online data and applied algorithms to sort fact from rumor and even to generate the actual text of articles— had a habit of publishing details that caused headaches for diplomats like Rodgers, whose job relied on state secrets remaining secret. While this particular story didn’t cause embarrassment for the US government, it nonetheless promised to complicate Rodgers’s life. The Gnos.is scoop was that Hu Lan’s majority stake in an American telecom company called InspiraCom had been funded by the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent to the CIA.
The news story proved Rodgers’s instinct right: Hu’s hospitality would amount to more trouble than it was worth. But that changed nothing. He confirmed that Hu was still on the State Department/ CIA list, and then he and his staff climbed aboard the plush little jet and pretended to be grateful for the ride, sipping glasses of wine and avoiding discussing anything they wouldn’t have said aloud in the presence of a Chinese MSS officer.
Owning a business jet was a hot trend among the Chinese elite, who imported them from the United States and Europe by the hundreds annually. With an operating cost of $ 10,000 per flight, the small luxury aircraft were by all appearances impractical. But the motives behind keeping up appearances are often exactly that. If Hu Lan wanted to spend $ 10,000 per flight to whisk Rodgers to Shanghai and back as a symbol of China’s ascension in the global economy, who was Rodgers to decline? Diplomacy, he’d discovered, required not only a clear knowledge of one’s principles but also a willingness to go along with almost anything that didn’t violate them outright. Despite his personal discomfort, he had no political principle against riding in a private jet. At least the G450 was American made.
The Good Traitor
Available NOW!
The Series: Kera Mersal Thrillers
Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.
End of Secrets [1]
Currently on Sale for only $1.99!
Though her specialty is foreign cyberterrorism, CIA agent Kera Mersal finds herself plunged into a bizarre domestic case. Singers, writers, and artists are disappearing, leaving no trace in a world where everyone leaves a digital footprint. Posing as a journalist, Kera attempts to track the artists’ last-known movements.
On a hunt that takes her from the underground art scene to a rogue domestic spying program, Kera finds her investigation on a deadly collision course with ONE Corp., the world’s largest multimedia conglomerate. As she’s drawn deeper into the investigation, she discovers that an enigmatic young ad exec, a wealthy playboy, and a mysterious website may connect the missing artists and ONE’s growing power. And with each discovery comes confirmation of a terrifying truth—no one’s secrets are safe.
A smartly suspenseful and timely thriller, End of Secrets dives into the depths of our culture’s two most relentless obsessions: entertainment and profit.
[Published 1 December 2014, 401 pages]
About the Author
A native of Alaska, Ryan Quinn was an NCAA champion and an all-American athlete in skiing while at the University of Utah. He worked for five years in New York’s book-publishing industry before moving to Los Angeles, where he writes and trains for marathons.
Quinn’s first novel, The Fall, was an award-winning finalist for the 2013 International Book Awards.
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Giveaways and Tour Stops
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Apr 05 The Book Divas ReadsApr 06 Socrates Book Review Blog
Apr 07 Book Reviews from an Avid Reader ✍
Apr 08 Wall-to-wall books
Apr 09 BooksChatter ℚ (own giveaway)
Apr 11 Deco My Heart
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Apr 14 From the TBR Pile
Apr 15 A Bookaholic Swede
Apr 16 Vics Media Room ✍
Apr 18 Fiction Zeal
Apr 19 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, & Sissy, Too! ✍
Apr 22 Cozy Up With Kathy
Apr 23 Lauras Interests ✍
Apr 25 Building Bookshelves ℚ ✍
Apr 26 Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers
Apr 27 Booked on a Feeling ✍
Apr 29 Jaquo Lifestyle Magazine ℚ
May 03 Romance Under Fire ✍
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