Strong As Steel
by Jon Land
on Tour April 22 – May 25, 2019
Synopsis:
Tough-as-nails Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong returns in this electrifying ninth installment of the series, by USA Today bestselling author Jon Land
1994: Texas Ranger Jim Strong investigates a mass murder on a dusty freight train linked to a mysterious, missing cargo for which no record exists.
The Present: His daughter, fifth generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, finds herself on the trail of that same cargo when skeletal remains are found near an excavation site in the Texas desert. She’s also dealing with the aftermath of a massacre that claimed the lives of all the workers at a private intelligence company on her watch.
These two cases are connected by a long buried secret, one that men have killed and died to protect. Caitlin and her outlaw lover Cort Wesley Masters must prove themselves to be as strong as steel to overcome a bloody tide that has been rising for centuries.
**Read my review HERE and enter the giveaway**
Book Details:
Genre: Thriller
Published by: Forge Books
Publication Date: April 23rd 2019
Number of Pages: 336
ISBN: 0765384671 (ISBN13: 9780765384676)
Series: Caitlin Strong #10
Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
Author Bio:
Jon Land is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of 50 books, including ten titles in the critically acclaimed Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong series, the last of which, STRONG TO THE BONE, won both the 2017 American Book Fest and 2018 International Book Award for Best Mystery. The next title in the series, STRONG AS STEEL, will be published in April. MANUSCRIPT FOR marked his second effort writing as Jessica Fletcher for the MURDER, SHE WROTE series, and he has also teamed with Heather Graham for a new sci-fi series starting with THE RISING. He is a 1979 graduate of Brown University, lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
12 THINGS THE READER
DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT CAITLIN
She was inspired to follow the Strong family tradition by becoming a Texas Ranger, only after she was sexually assaulted as a college student and the man who did it was never caught.
Her legendary father and grandfather, Jim and Earl Strong, worked on only a single case together as Texas Rangers, tracking killers who were after the legendary lost treasure of the pirate Jean Lafitte who really did base his operations off Texas’ Galveston Island, as told in STRONG VENGEANCE.
In the next book in the series, STRONG FROM THE HEART, she develops an addiction to opioids she’s being treated with for something that happens at the end of STRONG AS STEEL.
She actually left the Rangers for a time after tracking down and executing the cartel soldiers who killed her Texas Ranger partner Charlie Banks.
She was married for a brief stretch and her husband was thought to have died while serving as a contractor in Iraq. But the first book in the series, STRONG ENOUGH TO DIE, brings him back into her life as an amnesiac with no memory of her or what happened to him. This proved to tbe the impetus for her return to the Rangers.
Her grandfather taught her how to shoot at the age of six or seven and she could handle the likes of a 1911 Springfield model .45 by the time she was nine when she won her first shooting competition.
At the age of four, she witnessed the murder of her mother by drug mules but has no memory of that to this day, though she believes a lot of her more violent tendencies, and gunfighter mentality, stem from that day.
Caitlin also believes that incident is to blame for the fact that she never married or had children of her own. But it also explains her attachment to the sons of her outlaw lover Cort Wesley Masters for whom she becomes a surrogate mother.
When she was thirteen she witnessed her father gunning down a villain who’d escaped the law. Years later, as told in STRONG AT THE BREAK, she comes up against the man’s son, who also bore witness to Caitlin’s father Jim Strong killing his father.
Caitlin’s giant, deadly protector and guardian angel Guillermo Paz, the former head of the Venezuelan Secret Police, was actually hired to kill her in STRONG ENOUGH TO DIE. But she turned the tables in classic Caitlin form.
Caitlin is a quarter Mexican, thanks to an affair her grandfather, and fellow Texas Ranger, Earl Strong had with a woman he rescued from an early form of human trafficking in 1934 Texas.
Staying on the family theme, Caitlin also has a half-sister thanks to an affair her father Jim Strong had with a Mexican crime boss whose life he saved in STRONG AS STEEL, the most recent, and just released, book in the series
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Read an excerpt:
CHAPTER 1
Dallas, Texas
“You want to tell me what I’m doing here again?” Caitlin Strong said to Captain Bub McNelly of the Texas Criminal Investigations Division.
McNelly, who favored string ties and shiny cowboy boots, turned to the quartet of figures in equally shiny windbreakers milling behind him in the makeshift staging area, who looked more like businessmen. Caitlin had heard he was a descendant of the famed Texas Ranger captain Leander McNeely, a man who’d once told the whole of the U.S. government to go to hell, but wasn’t too keen on the freedom with which Rangers still operated today.
“Special Response Teams hang their hat on being multi-jurisdictional,” McNelly told her. “Consider yourself the representative Ranger.”
“Since when does an SRT look more comfortable holding briefcases than firearms?”
“I need to tell you that computers are the real weapons these days?” McNelly asked her. “And those boys accompanying us are forensic experts who know how to fire back.”
“Just two guns, yours and mine, backing them up,” Caitlin noted.
“I don’t need a computer to do the math, Ranger,” McNelly said, while the four techs wearing windbreakers hovered behind them in front of the elevator. “You and I serve the warrant on the geek squad upstairs and let the experts do their thing with brains instead of bullets. How hard can it be?”
They were about to serve a search warrant on an information technology firm on the 42nd floor of the Chase Tower, the city’s tallest building. Caitlin had served plenty of more “traditional” search warrants in her time on the likes of biker gangs, drug dealers, and various other suspects. The kind of service that found her backed up by guns and plenty of them, instead of briefcases and backpacks.
A chime sounded ahead of the elevator door sliding open.
“In my experience,” Caitlin said, stepping in first to position herself so the door didn’t close again before the SRT computer forensics techs were inside, “it pays to have brains and bullets.”
McNelly smiled thinly. “That’s why you’re here, Ranger. You were specifically requested for the job.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know. Orders came from the top down.
The cab began its ascent. If this were a Ranger operation, as opposed to CID, Caitlin would have insisted on securing the space in question prior to bringing up the civilians. Because that was clearly what these personnel in ill-fitting windbreakers pulled from a rack were. Civilians.
“Get your warrant ready, Captain,” she told McNelly, as the cab whisked past the floors between “L” and “42.”
He flapped the tri-folded document I the air between them. “Got it right here.”
“What’s CTP stand for again?” Caitlin asked, referring to the acronym of the company on which they were about to serve the warrant.
“Communications Technology Providers. I thought I told you that.”
“Maybe you did, but you never told me what the company did to get on the Criminal Investigation Division’s radar. I’m guessing that’s because somebody ordered you to take me along for the ride. All well and good in this political world we live in, until something goes bad.”
McNelly flashed Caitlin a smirk, as a chime sounded to indicate the elevator had reached its desired floor. “I can tell you this much, Ranger. The suspects we’re after here don’t know a gun from their own assholes. Worst thing they can do is infect us with a computer virus.”
He led the way through the open cab door, without waiting for Caitlin to respond. She exited next, followed in a tight bunch by those four computer techs in their windbreakers which made it look like they’d stuck their arms through Hefty bags.
The doors along the hall were uniformly glass, sleek and modern, some frosted. According to the building layout Caitlin had studied, Communications Technology Providers occupied a pair of adjoining office suites adding up to nearly five thousand square feet in total. One was a corner office, meaning at least a portion of those suites would enjoy wraparound windows and plenty of natural light.
Caitlin had just reflexively shoved her jacket back behind the holster housing her SIG Sauer P-226 nine-millimeter pistol, when the glass double-door entrance to Communications Technology Providers ruptured behind a fusillade of gunfire.
***
Excerpt from Strong As Steel by Jon Land. Copyright © 2019 by Jon Land. Reproduced with permission from Jon Land. All rights reserved.
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