Mike Bond
on Tour
August 15-September 11
with
Amazon Best-Seller Thriller
Goodbye Paris
(thriller)
Release date: June 11, 2019
at Big City Press
349 pages
ISBN: paperback: 978-1-949751-02-4
ISBN ebook: 978-1-949751-03-1
Website | Goodreads
SYNOPSIS
Special Forces veteran Pono Hawkins races from a Tahiti surfing competition to France when he learns that a terrorist he’d thought was dead, Mustafa al-Boudienne, has a backpack nuclear weapon and plans to destroy Paris. Pono was once Mustafa’s prisoner, and he is now the only one left alive to identify him. Joining allies from US and French intelligence, including a fearless and brilliant French agent, Anne Ronsard, with whom he soon falls in love, Pono faces impossible odds to stop Mustafa before he can destroy the most beautiful city on earth. Third in the Pono Hawkins series after best-selling Saving Paradise and Killing Maine, the newest Pono thriller takes the reader into never-before revealed depths of covert action on three continents, insider secrets in the war against terrorism, and intense memories of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Alive with covert action and unknown details of the war against terrorism, Goodbye Paris is a hallmark Mike Bond thriller: tense, exciting, and full of real places, and that will keep you up all night. Can be read as a standalone.
EXCERPT
IT HAD BEEN LESS than two months since the tragedy of Notre Dame, and the source of the fire as still unclear. True, part of the cathedral had been saved, but its mystical and magnificent core was gone, its spirit, gone after 850 years, gone forever.
Stepping into its vast magical aura, in the ancient odor of the stones, the hazy incensed air, the eight centuries of prayer, sorrow and joy, took us to another time, another way of life.
All destroyed now.
It was losing a loved one you thought would never die. And now they were dead you couldn’t think of them alive again. Never again would there be that smoky, mystical connection, so that the people who had prayed here eight hundred years ago felt close to you. Were family.
You could create a copy of what was lost, but it would be Disneyland. No way to replace the huge oaks cut in 1190 for ceiling beams. They don’t exist anymore. No way to reproduce the vast brilliant glass windows through which the light scintillated like the spirit itself.
No way to reproduce the skill, art and love of workers 850 years ago. Who would probably regard us, if they could, with astonishment and scorn.
The French government, having just lost the world’s greatest architectural treasure through stupidity, arrogance, negligence, laziness, and bad faith, raced to cover its ass. Fearing the fire might be due to Islamic terrorism, it had instantly announced, while the flames were still raging and the cathedral’s roof was collapsing, that the catastrophe wasn’t due to terrorism, although Muslim terrorists had recently tried to burn the cathedral down. The tragedy was due, the government insisted – long before anyone could possibly know – to workers renovating the roof. And when the director of the roof work stated that none of his crews had been near there before the fire, he was quickly silenced.
Though I told myself I wasn’t here to sorrow over the loss of the world’s greatest architectural treasure, but to help protect Paris from a new danger, the ISIS bombmaker Mustafa.
But sorrows live inside us, and over time they can grow. And as you get older, if you’re lucky enough to get there, they can take over your life. Ask my Pa. Who’s dead now, so you can’t. Ask any veteran with a scarred face, a limp, or who can’t sleep at night.
−−−−−
“PARIS IS ALWAYS a good idea,” Audrey Hepburn once said. Even from her movies you can tell she was a lovely person, and correct about many things, including Paris. So despite my sorrow at the loss of Notre Dame, and despite my previous miseries with the Agency, I stuffed myself at 23:00 into a tiny cavity on Air Tahiti Nui, code-share Air France, to Los Angeles, an 8 hour and 15-minute Airbus ride. I soon fell asleep, as I’d medicated all my recent surfing injuries with my old friend Tanqueray, plus a large joint smoked before takeoff and whose benefits lasted most of the flight.
And I dreamed of Paris. Its memory had kept me alive during those lonely Leavenworth months. Because jail is the absolute deprivation of freedom and Paris its greatest incarnation.
Trying to stay sane at Leavenworth, I’d studied what I could get of French history, architecture, language, writers and wine. The medieval language of troubadours, the majesty of so many great minds like Villon, Montaigne, Hugo, and Zola to Giono, Camus, St. Exupéry, Malraux, and Némirovsky. It was they, throughout those long cold months, who’d kept my soul alive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author of eight best-selling, critically-acclaimed novels,
an award-winning poet, ecologist, and war and human rights journalist,
Mike Bond has worked and lived
in many dangerous and war-torn regions of the world.
Based on his own experiences,
his novels portray the innate hunger of the human heart for good,
the intense joys of love, the terror and fury of battle,
the sinister conspiracies of dictators, corporations and politicians,
and the beauty of the vanishing natural world.
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Visit each blogger on the tour:
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[just follow the directions on the entry-form]
Global giveaway open to all residents
10 winners
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My Review
Goodbye Paris is the third installment from Mike Bond's Pono Hawkins series. I have not read the first two books from the series and feel as though this one can be read as a stand alone. It is my first experience with Mr Bond's writing and it will not be the last.
Goodbye Paris is about Pono Hawkins, a Special Forces agent veteran. He finds out a once thought to be dead terrorist, Mustafa, is alive. Mustafa is planning to destroy Paris. Pono teams up with other agents to catch Mustafa and his fellow terrorist friends before it is too late.
I enjoyed Goodbye Paris. This thriller took me on quite a "hang on to my seat" ride. It is so packed with action, twists and turns. My head was spinning with how fast paced the plot was. It is definitely a five star read. I would love to see what had happened prior in the series. Great read!
so glad you liked it. Definitely lots of action!!
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