RonLealosBooks.com: Thrillers

Don’t Mean Nuthin’ tells the story of Frank Morgan, a young college grad raised on Army discipline, who starts his career as a Phoenix Program assassin in Vietnam believing in his country. The book begins with Morgan on the Freedom Bird to ‘Nam in 1969, sitting next to a grizzled grunt. It’s Morgan’s first realization of what may be in store. With less than a month to go on his tour, Morgan leads a squad of South Vietnamese special forces in a bloody massacre and then mistakenly kills a beautiful innocent woman, Liem, in an old French plantation outside Can Tho. The attempted murder of Morgan by his CIA chief, a swashbuckling midget cowboy named Comer, who wears silver spurs on his boots, begins Morgan’s metamorphosis into an avenging assassin, not for hire by the US war machine. Morgan teams

with a Montagnard scout, Luong, and they visit an old comrade who has adopted a young Vietnamese boy.During their stay, the vil is attacked, leaving Morgan and Luong as the only guardians. While moving through the bush with the child and Luong, or at night watching the Southern Cross, one of Morgan’s pastimes is to write letters he never mails to his parents and draft fictional articles for Stars and Stripes. Don’t Mean Nuthin’ is filled with stories in the style of Tim O’Brien and Michael Herr. The book captures the setting of a country melting in napalm ooze and anecdotes grunts used to survive the insanity.

Pashtun is a modern day version of the Phoenix Program where a soldier is recruited by the CIA to assassinate suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. The real targets become blurred and the hero of this work discovers it's oil and heroin driving many of the missions he's sent to carry out. His new found knowledge takes him and his two comrades to Germany and throughout Afghanistan. One of his sidekicks is an indestructible lyrical Irishman with a cutting sense of humor and a glass of whiskey never far from his hand. The second teammate is a giant who quotes poetry and rap songs while he both administers torture and lives through his own agonizing trials. On the way, the trio rescue a veiled woman and barely escape the vengeance of their bosses at the CIA. Pashtun is filled with challenges of military special operations in a rock filled landscape and told with a compassion for those asked to fight the battles.

Thirty years of nightmares and Frank Morgan is given the chance to end the horrors in No Merci. Every glance brought Morgan a memory of a green-eyed Vietnamese beauty, dead from a bullet between the eyes shot from Morgan’s silenced .22 Hush Puppy. She was innocent, and even a cup of tea reminded Morgan of the dirty water next to the blood from her skull. Now, in a London casino three decades later, Morgan meets another stunning green-eyed Asian woman in trouble and he uses his skills as a CIA trained assassin to rescue her. They end up traveling to Hong Kong to meet up with a Chinese Triad leader who directs them to Ho Chi Minh City for a clash with an old enemy thought long dead. From there, the two take R & R in a small island off the Greek coast, nurturing the budding relationship. The book finally concludes with a trip down ancient tunnels in Jerusalem. At the beginning, Morgan is obsessed with wrongs he committed in Vietnam, As the story progresses, he begins to see clearly for the first time in many years, all a result of his growing love for Hatati, the ex-beauty queen from Malaysia. The story is filled with action, adventure, intrigue, love, and the redemption of a tortured soul. While the locales change around the globe, so does Morgan as he opens his heart to something other than guilt.

Captain Chyang Fang, the half-breed Chinese-Vietnamese head of the city’s

Homicide Division, and main character in The Sixth Man, is hated by nearly everyone in Saigon. Now, he has been assigned to find out who is killing high-ranking Vietnamese government officials and leaving toy cobras on their dead bodies. Fang must rely on the dim-witted Sergeant Phan to drive him around and carry a pistol, since Fang’s bloodline makes him untrustworthy. But Phan is more interested in finding Larry the Lobster in the SpongeBob Squarepants game on his Smartphone. More ably, Dr. Ngo, Saigon’s hunchback play-do faced coroner, uses all the skills he’s acquired in forensics by watching imported CSI shows to assist Fang in his investigation. Fang uses his sharp wit and cynicism as the only weapon he has to battle bigotry and prejudice, while he spends his off time in the dream world of the Ma Jing’s opium den. The mystery heightens as more ex-Viet Cong officers die and Fang’s search leads him to an old Montagnard acquaintance and Frank Morgan, a Phoenix program assassin now retired from killing for the CIA along with his gorgeous Malaysian girlfriend. The Sixth Man is set in modern Saigon and is a story rich in Vietnamese culture and history, while portraying some of the horrors of the past.