Nickie's Views and Interviews: Article 15

Please welcome author M. T. Bass today. He is doing a virtual book tour for her mystery novel, Article 15. This novel is available as of October 22nd from Electron Alley Publications and the tour will run from October 21st to November 15th.

M.T. Bass will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes&Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Please use the following link to place your comments:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3165/

Blurb

“She was one in a million…and the day I met her I should have bought a lottery ticket instead.”

***~~~***

Griffith Crowe, the "fixer" for a Chicago law firm, falls for his current assignment, Helena Nicholson, the beautiful heir of a Tech Sector venture capitalist who perished in a helicopter crash leaving her half a billion dollars, a Learjet 31, and unsavory suspicions about her father's death. As he investigates, the ex-Navy SEAL crosses swords with Helena’s step-brother, the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, and an All-Star bad guy somebody has hired to stop him. When Griff finds himself on the wrong side of an arrest warrant he wonders: Is he a player or being played? 

Lawyers and Lovers and Guns…Oh, my!

Excerpt

The low, almost husky yet honey smooth female voice poured seductively over Griff and blanked his mind as he turned into the pilot’s lounge. Though dimly lit, as they all were to facilitate napping, her red dress glowed like a hearth, yet she still wore her sunglasses as she studied her iPhone’s screen, slouching and sitting askew in one of the La-Z-Boy recliners with her legs crossed. Griff’s eye was drawn to the slow but rhythmic bounce of her stiletto heel. Predator had become prey. She took off her Jackie Ohhs, looked Griff up and down, then took a deep breath.

“Mmmm…tall, dark and dangerous…just the way I like them.”

Griff locked onto her blue-gray eyes and surrendered. He leaned against the door jam. His inside voice taunted, No plan survives contact with the enemy.

“I couldn’t help but notice Lance’s Escalade on the ramp. He is a conniving bastard, isn’t he? Of course, he is a lawyer, but he does excel at it. Not to mention the unseemly delight he takes in it.”

“Always has,” Griff said. “As long as I’ve known him.”

“Then, you really shouldn’t be surprised.”

Griff smiled, realizing it wasn’t Mayor Daley’s fault that he was still on the ground in Chicago. “Name’s Griff.”

“Yes. I know.”

He waited, his face an implacable facade, one molded and hammered into place on the Coronado Beach while enduring BUD/S training. “You got a name? Or will you answer to minx or vixen?”

“Hmmm…you like the ‘X’ words. I prefer Helena.”

“So…how long will we be playing Three Card Monte with modern art…Helena?

Author bio and links

M.T. Bass is a scribbler of fiction who holds fast to the notion that while victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. He lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, USA.

Born in Athens, Ohio, M.T. Bass grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, majoring in English and Philosophy, then worked in the private sector (where they expect “results”) mainly in the Aerospace & Defense manufacturing market. During those years, Bass continued to write fiction. He is the author of eight novels: My Brother’s Keeper, Crossroads, In the Black, Somethin’ for Nothin’, Murder by Munchausen, The Darknet (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #2), The Invisible Mind (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #3) and Article 15. His writing spans various genres, including Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Black Comedy and TechnoThrillers. A Commercial Pilot and Certified Flight Instructor, airplanes and pilots are featured in many of his stories. Bass currently lives on the shores of Lake Erie near Lorain, Ohio.

I asked M.T. Bass how he came to be a writer? Here's what he answered:

A girl. Come on, we did everything for girls back then. In high school. What with hormones stampeding up and down the valleys of our hollow little souls like wild mustangs and all. But this time it was different. It was true love.

You look back sometimes and just shake your head how things come to happen. Like how we even met. Her father was a Physics professor and I distinctly remember her reading Herman Hesse when we first got together. I was turning electricity into noise with my Les Paul and Marshall stack at gymnasium dances and local clubs. I fictionalized my age.

I think I actually did read Siddartha, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me—not as much as Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and Huckleberry Finn, I read in high school English classes. Although I was racing down the rails chasing the musical muse, I took some “creative” writing courses along the way.

I got as far as the Conservatory front door at Baldwin-Wallace College, but I just didn’t have the classical chops to make it in. So, I started haunting the English Department there. She got into Ohio Wesleyan University just a hundred miles or so south down I71. It was probably all those Greyhound bus rides, more than anything else, that convinced me to transfer there. Besides, they had a real, live novelist and poet, Robert Flanagan, teaching their writing courses, which was the academic detour I had decided to follow.

But, alas, true love doesn’t always stay true. She broke up with me halfway through our sophomore year. She dropped out and lived as a “townie” for a while, then drifted off and away. I think she ended up in Maine, eventually, but I don’t know for sure.

Anyway, I stuck it out at OWU with Mr. Flanagan and had some successes with verse, winning a few English Department awards along the way. After graduation, I bounced around making more noise in Route 42 roadhouses and Cleveland area bars until I hit a wall and escaped to a more (air quotes) “normal” life in Colorado.

I don’t know how or why, but there—first at home, late at night when everyone else was asleep, then trapped between here and there at Flight Level 350 in airline fuselages—I started scribbling out my first novel. Then another…and another…and another. And here I am.

So it goes…