Offthebookshelf.com
Chuck Fair
Chuck Fair is a playwright, “Outside Intervention”—prisons in a paranormal world and animation for kids, “Steven Sockeye Salmon”—greatest quest in the sea world. He currently creates novels in all genres: among his favorites are historical fiction, “Hellpath 1859”—great Sioux Wars and “White, Red, Black & Blue”—Vietnam vet in Nicaragua and thrillers, “Deviants”—L.A. suspense and “Right Into Wrong”—Middle East mayhem. “Bonjour Men of France,” “Messieurs et Mesdames Permit Me the Honor to Introduce Myself” and “Adieu Men Of France” are recent historical novels featuring a paranormal protagonist creating chaos in New France prior to the American Revolution. He resides in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains with a foot in Los Angeles.
All Books By This Author:
- Red, White, Black & Blue
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Against a background of revolution and counter-revolution, a love that should never be burns in war torn Nicaragua. The new revolutionary government wants to pick up the pieces and build a better future for its people, but the newly elected president in Washington D.C. is not about to let a ragtag bunch of communists supported by Fidel Castro exist, let alone flourish. He orders the CIA to get in there and get it right this time, no more screw-ups like in Vietnam, send in American veterans to retrain the fragmented Guardia Nacional driven from the country.
Battered by economic woes and loss of his family to another man, decorated veteran Danny Blaine can find no other way to reclaim his dignity than to accept the CIA offer to train the Guardia Nacional, now euphemistically called Freedom Fighters.
The first woman to join the Sandinista rebels in mountains to overthrow the tyrannical president of Nicaragua, Violet Chavera becomes the highest ranking woman in the post-revolutionary army, locked in never-ending battles against an enemy crossing her country’s borders. Now mentally harden by the death of her infant and the execution of her lover, the female combatant routinely defeats undisciplined Freedom Fighters north of Managua. That is, until the ex-marine, Danny Blaine, arrives at the border, and then events turn against her.
Facing a treason charge after the total destruction of her troops by the American mercenary, the disgraced heroine becomes the perfect scapegoat for political enemies. Sickened by the endless carnage in the border war and disillusioned by contra deceit, the American veteran defects to the Sandinistas.
When the communist commander and the capitalist mercenary find themselves pushed together by an explosion of events, they resist the passion they feel for each other, but are unable to contain it.
- Genres: Historical Fiction
- Hellpath 1859
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In 1859 violence ruled the nation, recruiting innocence, requiring it to bend its knee. An unforeseen recruit appeared in the shape of a 19 year old antebellum boy reporting for his first day of work in an unsettled part of western Virginia. His only gifts were a quick tongue, a likable wit and obstinacy to bending his knee.
In the span of two hours, violence--in the shape of a strikebreaker’s mule club—strikes at an iron foundry--iron workers strike, the powers to be retaliate-- ejecting the boy into a thirty year odyssey, running from the hanging rope.
Violence threw Crazy Ol’ Brown and Harpers Ferry at him; threw the Civil War at him; threw the Kansas Redlegs and the Missouri Bushwackers at him; threw the great Sioux wars onto his path--still this boy refused to bend his knee to her.
His innocence earns him Touch the Cloud--the much desired cousin of the Sioux War Chief Gall, and he finds love as only the Sioux know it, only to lose her to violence. His exploits on the plains bring him a second love, Speaks to Sky--the most gifted of all Sioux women, only to lose her. To further taunt him, violence gives him Little Howling Dog--the infant with cyclone lungs--a son he must protect from the devastation raging across the plains after the Civil War.
Even after violence takes his loved ones, the boy will not kneel to her. Instead, his violent past gives him a savage’s hurt, and he takes on a savage’s revenge, and for a time violence owns him, until he exceeds her limits.
Violence sends its foremost lieutenant, a demented ex-rebel officer, earlier disfigured by the boy, who stalks him across Virginia and the plains territory until the fateful day at Wounded Knee when his pursuer catches him, and innocence makes violence bend its knee.
- Genres: Adventure, Historical Fiction, Military/War
- Right Into Wrong
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The descendents of Abraham clash for the glory of God.
In a land where retaliation is as assured as the rising sun, an ancient nail is discovered where a Roman crucifixion hill is thought to be.
A Palestinian gives up his life during the discovery.
In retaliation to his death, terrorists blow up a Passover observance in Jerusalem, killing numerous Israelis.Could the recently discovered crucifixion nail be the one that pierced the flesh of Jesus Christ? Dating tests indicate it could very well be the one. Israelis dangle the possibility before American Christians.
No matter what the archeologists decide, American Christians want the nail they believe touched their Lord, but money will not buy it from the Israelis.A deal is made. American Christians send their do-anything man, an assassin of the unholy ones, with the equation for the world’s most deadly bomb, powerful enough to level a tiny Middle East nation, a heretofore impossible to create, pure fusion one that a bible-quoting general stole from the Pentagon.
What should have been a simple exchange between an Israeli and the American turns disastrous when a Palestinian woman, some refer to as an assassin of the Shaviah practitioners, happens upon the nail after executing an archeologist, doubling as an Israeli military officer.
The chase is on for the female thief: the Israelis and the Palestinians want the bomb more than the nail to destroy each other; the Americans want the nail to lay the groundwork for a Second Coming of their Lord. The woman ends up with both the nail and the bomb with the intent to destroy everyone, if the American and Israelis cannot derail her.
The stakes are high—a nuclear holocaust in the troubled Middle East. For the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Americans, catching the woman is akin to capturing light, as she pops up everywhere: in Jordon where a Mossad agent is found dead; in Syria where a feared Mukhabarut, Secret Police, agent is found dead; in Lebanon where Hezbollah plots against Israel; in Pakistan where the foremost Muslim nuclear physicist can be found; in Egypt where a contact to al Qaeda can be found; and in Sudan where primitive conditions lend the right atmosphere to building a super thermonuclear bomb.
No one can place the Palestinian woman’s whereabouts, until a very fateful day when she appears in Mecca during the Hajj.
- Genres: Adventure, Contemporary Fiction, Suspense
- The Percolators
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Set in the glitter and grime of Reno, in the saintliness and severity of Salt Lake City and in the defiant and dissipated streets of Philadelphia, the Percolators are up to their necks in big rig trucking, Latter Day Saints proselytizing and racial strife.
Truck drivers, Ace and Him, graduates from the school of hard knocks, discover prosperity never trickles down, so according to their logic it can only percolate up. The odd couple soon find out that knowing how the trickle works and making it work are not the same, for at the bottom lies a humanity with the strength of used coffee grounds.
Hacking their way through one dead-end job after another, they try their hand at organizing big rig drivers the conventional way only to get soundly thumped and quickly fired by the trucking company and deserted by the Teamsters.When employer demands on drivers give the unlikely pair a second opportunity to organize the same company, they are ready. Ready--thanks to an ex-streetwalker and refugee from the explosive streets of Philadelphia. Mal, haunted by the brutality of past, moves in the shadow of the nation’s premier political prisoner--known as the voice of the voiceless. She gives Ace and Him the unorthodox formula for organizing labor and the big solution--a six hour work day--to capture the surly drivers’ backing and garner an indifferent public’s support, which they need if they are to put together a national fraternity of labor.
Sheer determination is the only ally assisting Ace and Him as they wade through many obstacles on the path to get a piece of the American pie for their drivers. For Him, the jaded and aging narrator, distractions loom like sumac plants on the path. The hardest distraction is dealing with the loss of his sexual prowess. The motivation to fight the many obstacles comes from his grandson, Little Him--who can turn an organized Sunday morning service into a chaotic free-for-all. And there is Ruth, the capable social worker, who is spiritually indentured to the Latter Day Saints, a woman Him meets at his daughter’s wedding. Their subsequent relationship is a bite of the forbidden fruit. And there is his emancipated daughter, Sarah, who complicates his life as she pries open the formidable doors to the all-male inner circle of the Latter Day Saints Church. Him has no choice but to follow Sarah into the structured hierarchy of the Church, known as the General Authority--the Prophet, the Presidency and the Twelve Apostles.
For Him organizing truckers in the face of insurmountable opposition is almost child’s play compared to fifteen old men’s tough opposition, who beat back any hint of parity for women within the church. Latter Day Saints seem to walk hand in hand with their God as they have had the good fortune to have one visionary Prophet after another, from their originator--Joseph Smith Jr.--to the current Prophet Hartley, leading the Saints from disaster to glory in less than two centuries. The octogenarian Prophet Hartley senses the church can no longer hold back the raging sea of female equality, so to prevent the church from drowning beneath waves of adverse opinion he stills the waters by appointing the first female apostle.
Sarah, the nemesis of chauvinistic old men, represents an unprecedented change to Church rule--the first female in line to be the Prophet. She is a dropout of the conservative Brigham Young University and graduate of the progressive Cal Berkeley, collegiate soccer star, recent widow and heir of a family fortune in the heart of the Mormon empire.
Ace, half Him’s age and his carbon copy in mores, possesses the toughness and determination of Jimmy Hoffa and the ability to organize and hold together surly truck drivers scattered across the forty-eight states. He seems to be the messiah the drivers need to deliver them from long, underpaid, sleepless trips fraught with danger.The only soft spot in Ace’s makeup is Bangor Bates, an ex-waitress who knows from experience what it is like to be mishandled by employers, most recently by the biggest casino and the most powerful CEO in Reno. Conditioned to being discarded when she doesn’t meet expectations, Bangor tries to get on with raising her two boys, but empathy for the itinerant workers at the casinos draws her to them, motivating her to take their grievances to the casino head, a man used to turning a deaf ear to employees.
When the protagonists and the antagonists face off in The Percolators it is the might of the fifth largest trucking company in the nation verses the neophyte organizers, the repressive power of the state verses a cry for freedom from within its prison walls and the intransigence of the most successful church in the contemporary world verses the independence of one woman. Could the face offs be a matter of David verses Goliath or Don Quixote verses the Windmill?
- Genres: Crime Fiction, Suspense
- White, Red, Black & Blue
-
Against a background of revolution and counter-revolution, a love that should never be burns in war torn Nicaragua. The new revolutionary government wants to pick up the pieces and build a better future for its people, but the newly elected president in Washington D.C. is not about to let a ragtag bunch of communists supported by Fidel Castro exist, let alone flourish. He orders the CIA to get in there and get it right this time, no more screw-ups like in Vietnam, send in American veterans to retrain the fragmented Guardia Nacional driven from the country.
Battered by economic woes and loss of his family to another man, decorated veteran Danny Blaine can find no other way to reclaim his dignity than to accept the CIA offer to train the Guardia Nacional, now euphemistically called Freedom Fighters.
The first woman to join the Sandinista rebels in mountains attempting to overthrow the tyrannical president of Nicaragua, Violet Chavera becomes the highest ranking woman in the post-revolutionary army, locked in never-ending battles against an enemy crossing her country’s borders. Now mentally harden by the death of her infant and the execution of her lover, the female fighter routinely defeats undisciplined Freedom Fighters north of Managua. That is, until the ex-marine Danny Blaine arrives at the border, then events turn against her.
Facing a treason charge after the total destruction of her troops by the American mercenary, the disgraced heroine becomes the perfect scapegoat for political enemies. Sickened by the endless carnage in the border war and disillusioned by contra deceit, the American veteran defects to the Sandinistas.
When the communist commander and the capitalist mercenary find themselves pushed together by an explosion of events, they resist the passion they feel for each other, but are unable to contain it.
- Genres: Adventure, Historical Fiction, Military/War
