Will iconic images recorded in the grooves of an ancient vase unite the Holy Land or rip it further apart?

THE VASE

A novel by Mark M. DeRobertis

Muhsin Muhabi is a Palestinian potter, descended from a long line of potters. His business is run from the same shop owned by his ancestors since the day his forebears moved to Nazareth. The region's conflict saw the death of his oldest son, and rogue terrorists are in the process of recruiting his youngest in their plot to assassinate the Pope and Israeli prime minister.

Professor Hiram Weiss is an art historian at Nazareth’s Bethel University. He is also a Shin Bet operative on special assignment. With the help of fellow agent, Captain Benny Mathias, he plans to destroy the gang responsible for the death of his wife and only child. He puts a bomb in the ancient vase he takes on loan from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.

Mary Levin, the charming assistant to the director of Shin Bet, has lost a husband and most of her extended family to recurring wars and never-ending terrorism. She dedicates her life to the preservation of Israel, but to whom will she dedicate her heart? The brilliant professor from Bethel University? Or the gallant captain who now leads Kidon?

Harvey Holmes, the Sherlock of Haunted Houses, is a Hollywood TV host whose reality show just flopped. When a Lebanese restaurant owner requests his ghost-hunting services, he believes the opportunity will resurrect his career. All he has to do is exorcise the ghosts that are haunting the restaurant. It happens to be located right across the street from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.




Friday, May 31, 2013

Killer Eyes--Antagonist

In the sequel to Killer of Killers, which has the working title Killer Eyes, the antagonist is a Chinese woman named Ming Sang, and she comes the closest of all the villains in my four books to being a sociopath. But she's really not. She knows the difference between right and wrong, and she does care about other people, but she's cold-hearted. Not cruel, but unrelenting in the pursuit of her own brand of justice. It has to do with the Chinese holocaust, which is something that most Americans know nothing, or very little about. It took place during WWII, like the Jewish holocaust, but in China and it was orchestrated by the Japanese military against Chinese civilians, mostly in the city of Nanking. By extension, it occurred throughout the Chinese countryside during the conquest and occupation of southeast China. The Japanese soldiers were particularly cruel to the Chinese, and the estimates of Chinese civilian casualties are in the millions. Ming Sang is the granddaughter of a Chinese resistance fighter who organized a death squad which hunts down and executes all Japanese ex-military men who were involved in that holocaust. Not unlike Jewish Nazi hunters. And my main character, Trent Smith was trained by a martial arts expert named Shoji Wada who is a veteran of the Japanese military, and he was there. At Nanking. But that's all I need to say at this point. Except for the obvious, that Ming Sang targets Shoji Wada for execution. But she does it her own way, and as a means for another end that has nothing to do with Nanking. Okay, that's all for now. I'm not even finished revising it yet.

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